House Speaker Mike Johnson is staring down a brutal pre-recess session as he tries to cram three high-stakes votes through a fractured conference.

• "Next week is going to be hell week," Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) told reporters.

Why it matters: Johnson has built a reputation for pulling off the improbable. But his rank-and-file have shown a new willingness to buck President Trump, whom the speaker relies on to close tough votes.

• The House will take up three contentious measures next week: A long-term extension of Section 702 FISA, the farm bill and the Senate-passed budget reconciliation resolution to fund ICE and Border Patrol.

🚔 Johnson's biggest headache may be the Senate-passed budget resolution to fund parts of the Department of Homeland Security.

• 🥊 House Republicans don't buy that the Senate will do a third reconciliation bill, and they're demanding to make reconciliation 2.0 as ambitious as possible.
• "We don't trust the two-step process. I just will be honest with you, because the two-step process has the separation in it. That's a sticking point," Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) told us.
• "We're not there yet," House Budget chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) told The Hill about getting members on board with a package that's just ICE and Border Patrol.

💰 Between the lines: DHS is running low on funds to pay its employees.

• For GOP leaders, it may not be tenable to wait a couple of weeks for the reconciliation process to wrap up before passing the rest of the DHS funding.

🥀 Johnson also faces a thorny path on a three-year extension of FISA that doesn't include warrant requirements, a key demand from conservatives.

• "If you're not going to have warrants, I'm not going to play ball," Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told us.
• There's also a push to attach unrelated measures: "I believe that the votes are not there unless FISA includes" a ban on central bank digital currency, Self said.
• The program is set to lapse next Thursday night without an extension, and some members say another short-term patch may be needed.

What's next: Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told us that a meeting last night "resolved a lot of the issues" members had, but several conservatives expressed reservations as of this morning.

— Kate Santaliz

Remember when we told you on Tuesday about the GOP backlash over reports that a new crypto super PAC was spending $1.75 million on behalf of Ken Paxton?

Senior Republican officials called Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Tuesday and appealed to him to help reverse what they viewed as a silly political blunder, three people familiar with the matter tell us.

Why it matters: GOP leaders were alarmed that Fellowship PAC, the new crypto super PAC seeded by his former firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, was wading into a contentious primary runoff in Texas.

• Trump has famously dithered about taking a side between Paxton and Sen. John Cornyn.
• Lutnick's sons now run Cantor Fitzgerald, from which he divested last year.
• It was unclear to people familiar with the matter if Lutnick followed up on the GOP phone calls.

What we're hearing: The PAC never placed the ad buy that showed up on its FEC report, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

• By midday yesterday, Republican leaders were assuaged that the new PAC had not aired any pro-Paxton advertisements and was not preparing to do so, according to three people familiar with the discussions.
• That account is backed up by media trackers: Neither Fellowship PAC nor Nxum — the advertising firm it is working with — has aired political ads this cycle, according to AdImpact.
• Jesse Spiro, the chair of Fellowship PAC, as well as Tether's head of government affairs, did not respond to a request for a comment on the record.

Zoom out: Fellowship PAC, which is associated with Tether, said in January it planned to raise $100 million for the 2026 cycle.

• By mid-April, it had reported raising $11 million, including $10 million from Cantor Fitzgerald and $1 million from Anchor Labs Inc., a crypto infrastructure firm that works with Cantor.

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— Hans Nichols