House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., highlighted the challenges of codifying President Donald Trump's executive orders and actions, telling Newsmax on Tuesday he's contending with an "interesting phenomenon" in the lower chamber.
Johnson joined "The Record With Greta Van Susteren" hours ahead of Trump's joint address of Congress. Johnson said much of what Trump will outline in his speech is what House Republicans are working to get done and make permanent.
"We're going to be working to codify as many of those executive orders as is possible. And then we'll be putting into law all the other provisions and the changes that we're making," Johnson said.
That's where the "interesting phenomenon" comes into play, he said.
"We have probably one of the most aggressive legislative agendas in the modern era, maybe in decades, very important legislation we've got to get done; we have a short window of time in which to do it; and we have the smallest margin imaginable. How about a one-vote margin for much of the first 100 days of the Congress? So it's a lot, it takes a lot of work," Johnson said.
He added, "And I've got to find the equilibrium point to deliver every single one of those votes."
One such example are the cuts being identified by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency and enacted by the Trump administration.
"You know, [Trump and Musk] are working around the clock, I mean, literally. And [Musk] was telling me some of the most exciting things, that he genuinely believes that he can find us $1 trillion in savings from fraud, waste, and abuse alone this year," Johnson said. "That will change the way we do the budgeting process. It will restore the founders' original envision of a smaller federal government that's more closely overseen by Congress, because now his algorithms are inside the belly of the beast of the bureaucracies, and they're finding things that we could never have found on our own. So it's very exciting.
"But I told him, I said, Elon, what I've got to do is a three-step process. I have to qualify what you're doing and then quantify it, give it real numbers and then codify it," Johnson added. "And so we're beginning to work together to make that process streamlined so we can get this done and make it permanent, as you said, so that it can't be changed by the next administration."
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