President-elect Donald Trump will issue “a blizzard of executive orders” as soon as he inaugurated Jan. 20, Sen. John Barrasso predicted Sunday.

Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” the Wyoming Republican said: “When President Trump takes office next Monday, there is going to be shock and awe with executive orders. A blizzard of executive orders on the economy, as well as on the border.”

Executive orders, for better or worse, allow a president to bypass Congress. But Barrasso, the new Senate majority whip, said that he expects Trump to also rely on the narrow Republican majority in the Senate and even more slender one in the House to get his agenda enacted.

“When we met with President Trump earlier this past week,” he told host Margaret Brennan, “what President Trump said the No. 1 goal for the Senate needs to be to get his team in place. I’ve met with just about all of them. I support every one of these nominees. As the whip, my job is to make sure they get across the finish line. Get on the job, and President Trump deserves a team early.”

Barrasso also said it doesn’t matter to Trump how many pieces of legislation are required to enact his agenda as long as legislation is passed.

“President Trump says he doesn’t care if it’s one bill, two bills, three bills. He wants the results,” Barrasso said.

President-elect Donald Trump announced more hires Friday for his new administration, including tapping his business’ longtime environmental consultant for an adviser role.

Ed Russo, who served as an environmental consultant to the Trump Organization and in 2016 wrote the book “Donald J. Trump: An Environmental Hero,” will lead Trump’s Environmental Advisory Task Force.

Trump said in a statement that Russo will advise on “initiatives to create great jobs and protect our natural resources, by following my policy of CLEAN AIR and CLEAN WATER.”

“Together, we will achieve American Energy DOMINANCE, rebuild our Economy, and DRILL, BABY, DRILL,” Trump wrote.

While Russo served as CEO of WaterGen USA, the company received an EPA research contract in 2018, during Trump’s first term. Russo is now listed as CEO of the North Miami Beach-based RussKap Water.

Trump on Friday also announced that Bill Briggs will serve as deputy administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration — an agency that provides loans after disasters, including the California wildfires.

Briggs, who worked in the agency’s Office of Capital Access during Trump’s first term, would work under former Georgia GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who Trump has nominated to serve as administrator of the SBA and who is awaiting confirmation hearings.

The price of extending Republicans’ tax cuts will surge by hundreds of billions of dollars if lawmakers dawdle, new government figures show.

The Treasury Department released numbers Friday showing that rolling over all of the soon-to-lapse provisions, as well as undoing other reductions in business benefits that were triggered by the 2017 law, would cost $5.5 trillion — substantially more than the $4 trillion the Congressional Budget Office has projected.

There’s a number of reasons why Treasury’s price tag is much higher but a big one is that its analysis begins in 2026, not 2025, like CBO’s.

That may not sound like a big deal, but when budget analysts estimate the price of legislation, they look at the anticipated expenses over a decade, and it makes a huge difference when the cost-counting clock starts.

Right now, the government is in its 2025 fiscal year, and so analysts look at years 2025 through 2034 — and expenses in 2025 are minimal because Republicans’ tax cuts are still on the books. About 40 provisions are due to expire at the end of the year.

But when the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1, analysts will begin tallying up costs between 2026 and 2035, as Treasury happened to do in its in analysis. That means the very cheap year of 2025 will fall out of the picture, and the very expensive year of 2035 — when costs are expected to run $600 billion — will suddenly be included.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has said he wants to get a bill including the tax provisions on President-elect Donald Trump’s desk by the end of April — an ambitious timeline given the size of the package and Congress’ tendency to dawdle. Some tax vets now expect lawmakers to take until their August recess to wrap up their plans, if not longer.

Republicans are off to a slow start, with lawmakers bogged down in an extended and so far unresolved debate over whether to tackle immigration first and put off taxes until later or combine them into a single bill.

The House and Senate intend to go their own ways, with competing approaches, which amounts to postponing critical decisions, like how much to spend on a tax bill, that have to be resolved before they can use the “reconciliation” procedure they’re depending on to get their plans through the balky Senate.

Treasury wasn’t trying to warn Republicans of the cost of delay; it was examining the cost and the biggest winners of renewing the provisions. Not surprisingly, the analysis says the super-rich would see the biggest benefits, with the top 0.1 percent reaping a 4.2 percent increase in their after-tax incomes compared to the roughly 1.2 percent increase for those in the middle of the income spectrum.

CBO is expected to release next week its own revised estimates of the cost of extending the provisions.

Last year, it put the price at $4 trillion or $4.6 trillion, including increased debt service.

It’s not like Congress to work far ahead of schedule, but had lawmakers taken up the extension of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2023, the price would have been easier to swallow. CBO pegged the cost then at a comparatively paltry $3 trillion, or $3.45 trillion including interest expense — because its estimate then included not just one but two cheap years, 2024 and 2025.