Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday gave his most candid assessment yet of billionaire Elon Musk’s influence in Congress and the potential threat he poses to legislative dealmaking: “He can blow the whole thing up.”

Johnson, during a fireside chat at Georgetown University’s Psaros Center, described his work as speaker as managing a “giant control panel” with dials for his GOP members, one for President Donald Trump and one for Musk.

“Elon has the largest platform in the world, literally,” Johnson said of the X owner and head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. “And if he goes on and says something that’s misunderstood or misinterpreted about something we’re doing, he can blow the whole thing up.”

“So I spend a lot of time working with all these dials and all these folks, and I just run around all day and make sure everybody’s happy,” he added.

Johnson knows the depths of Musk’s influence from personal experience. In December, Musk helped tank a bipartisan government funding bill that the speaker negotiated, triggering chaos on Capitol Hill just before the holidays.

Musk, who is leading efforts to slash the federal bureaucracy under Trump, has stayed out of Johnson’s latest push to pass a stopgap plan to keep the government open through September. Speaking just after the House passed the bill Tuesday, Johnson called it “a feat” that Republicans were able to do so without needing help from Democrats.

With the funding bill heading to the Senate, Johnson said it would be up to “one man alone” — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — to avert a shutdown Saturday.

Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune met on Tuesday and discussed the sweeping domestic policy legislation at the top of their 2025 agenda.

The closed-door conversation came as the House and Senate struggle to quickly get on the same page as they try to pass President Donald Trump’s tax, energy and border priorities into law. Thune separately convened a meeting of GOP senators Tuesday to discuss the legislation.

“Both of us understand we’ve got to get this done. We’re trying to figure out the best way to do that,” Thune said after the meeting with Johnson, part of a regular series of meetings between the two leaders. “This is just a long, arduous process, but we’ll get there.”

House Republicans are negotiating a bill that aligns with their budget resolution, which teed up a single sprawling package containing all of Trump’s party-line priorities. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are warning that they are weeks away from being ready move as they discuss specifics of tax and spending cuts.

That’s led to House Republicans increasingly kvetching that they believe the Senate is moving too slowly. After a member of the Senate Finance Committee floated this week that the real deadline for getting the bill done is August, Johnson told reporters that “August is far too late.”

Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.

House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan has a strategy for how to give President Donald Trump’s top ally, Elon Musk, the changes to high-skilled visa rules the tech billionaire so desperately wants.

In interviews this week, the Ohio Republican said he is eyeing his party’s flagship immigration bill as the legislative vehicle for overhauling existing laws to increase the flow of immigrants into the United States with expertise in science, technology and engineering.

But Jordan made clear he wouldn’t be the driving force behind making those changes to so-called H-1B visas, which let tech companies hire foreign-born experts. The high-tech visas have support among some Republicans but far from the majority of GOP lawmakers.

Rather, Jordan said, he would expect the H-1B overhaul to come up as one of any number of concessions Republicans might make to sway Democrats in the Senate, who will be needed to clear any legislation for the president’s signature.

“I think we got to come back and pass [the bill] and send that to the Senate,” Jordan explained, at which point both chambers could “then start that debate on what happens with various visa programs we have — whether it’s the high-skilled one, whether it’s [agricultural] workers, whether it’s what happens to Dreamers.”

He added that a House-Senate conference committee on that immigration bill would also allow the White House to “weigh in” on high-skilled immigration.

“I think that’s the best play for it all to work, and to have the full debate on everything that impacts immigration policy,” Jordan said.

Still, Jordan’s openness to allowing some sort of visa reform to come to fruition in a final immigration bill suggests that top House Republicans are now willing to negotiate with the tech lobby, Democrats and some Senate Republicans who see workforce benefits to allowing more specialists into the country.

It’s also the first time Jordan has articulated his long-range vision for overhauling immigration policy, including in an arena that’s important to Musk, with whom the committee chair enjoys a longtime rapport. Musk has framed the push for high-skilled immigrants as a top priority for the Trump administration.

Trump has backed Musk in his fight with immigration restrictionists over increases to skilled visas or green card exemptions for high-tech workers. Jordan said Tuesday that he has yet to talk to Musk about high-skilled immigration, but “I’m sure we will.”

A lot has to happen before tackling the issue on Capitol Hill, however — notwithstanding that a new version of the Secure Our Borders Act, which passed the House in the last Congress and is commonly referred to as H.R. 2, has yet to be reintroduced.

First, Jordan said, congressional Republicans must pass broader legislation through the filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation process, which he sees as necessary for the GOP to enact broad swaths of Trump’s domestic policy agenda — including beefed up border security enforcement.

“There’s a sequence to this,” Jordan said, explaining his plans. The House Judiciary chair said it was necessary to “demonstrate to the country we’ve fully secured the border, and then you can look at the visa issues in the context of H.R. 2.”