By Sarah Ferris, Lauren Fox and Annie Grayer, CNN

(CNN) — Speaker Mike Johnson pulled off a stunning turnaround Tuesday night to rescue a critical vote to advance President Donald Trump’s agenda that had seemed doomed just moments earlier.

Surprising even some of his critics, Johnson and his leadership team capped hours of drama in the Capitol by successfully flipping multiple Republican holdouts to pass a budget blueprint that will mark the first step toward moving Trump’s ambitious agenda forward. With help from last-minute phone calls from Trump, GOP leaders spent all of Tuesday in a furious pressure campaign to win backing for their plan.

“The world didn’t end today. But I do see the edge,” Rep. Pat Fallon, a Texas Republican, said of the whiplash in the House.

Republicans had punted the vote Tuesday night only to turn around minutes later to call fleeing members back to the floor to muscle through the plan.

In the end, Johnson lost just a single vote — fiscal hawk Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky — which was all he could afford. The Democrats’ whip team scrambled to get near-full attendance on their side: Rep. Brittany Pettersen flew with her 4-week-old baby to make it in time for the vote and Rep. Kevin Mullin, who is recovering from complications from knee surgery, flew with an IV from California.

But the drama won’t end there: Johnson and his allies acknowledge that what comes next will be much more difficult. Tuesday night’s vote itself was procedural and GOP leaders from the House and Senate will need to agree on how exactly to move ahead with Trump’s sprawling legislative package now that they have adopted divergent plans. The days-long saga over the House budget blueprint laid bare bitter divisions among Republicans that will make it extraordinarily difficult to pass that package in both chambers.

Still, the win comes at a critical time for Trump and Johnson as their party faces crushing deadlines ahead, including avoiding a government shutdown next month and the threat of an economic default later this spring. As with Tuesday night’s vote, navigating those political landmines will require near total unity from the GOP.

GOP leaders will now get to work on exactly what will make it into Trump’s first legislative package. The newly passed House GOP plan calls for sweeping tax cuts, steep spending cuts and a two-year debt limit hike, as well as new money for border security and energy production. The Senate’s plan, however, contains only national security and energy money, while punting on the more contentious items for later.

The stakes are high for GOP leaders: Trump is eager to pass his agenda as quickly as possible, even as party leaders must comply with the extremely strict constraints of the budget powers that allow their party to pass a package without Democratic votes. And Republicans will need to tread carefully on reforms to popular programs like Medicaid, food assistance and Pell grants — concerns that nearly sunk the budget plan this week.

The successful vote capped a dramatic 12 hours for Johnson. In the morning, he held a tense meeting with House Republicans to convince his members to back the budget blueprint or risk forgoing key parts of Trump’s agenda.

But by the afternoon, House GOP leaders were still struggling to lock down the votes, and even the relentlessly upbeat Johnson acknowledged he may need to pull it.

The votes weren’t there around 7:30 p.m., when the speaker moved to scrap plans to hold the vote at all. But then his leadership team — with help from a Trump call to Rep. Victoria Spartz — was able to win over the last holdouts. So, just moments after dismissing members, Johnson called them back to vote and passed the GOP’s budget blueprint.

Rep. Warren Davidson, an Ohio Republican, said he decided to change his vote after he received “assurances” of a future plan that could survive the Senate to trim discretionary spending, though he offered no specifics.

And Spartz added that she spoke with Trump on health care issues, saying, “He’s on board to get some great things done on health care. … I trust his word.”

“I think the last few weeks are showing us how difficult it is to move any package through the House,” Rep. Dusty Johnson, a leadership ally, acknowledged earlier Tuesday. “This is a motley crew.”

Hours before the scheduled vote, hardline conservatives insisted there weren’t enough spending cuts in the plan, even as centrist-leaning Republicans remained uneasy about the size of those cuts and whether they could impact popular programs like Medicaid. And Johnson’s efforts to win support even backfired in some corners. Massie said he left a meeting Tuesday morning even more dug in against the budget than before.

“They convinced me in there, I’m a no,” the Kentucky Republican said, holding up a thick packet of leadership talking points and railing against their plans line by line. By the time of the vote, Massie remained the only GOP “no.”

Johnson and his whip team had spent the last several days trying to win over their more moderate members, many of whom had raised concerns that the budget plan could ultimately lead to cuts to the low-income health program Medicaid.

Ahead of the vote, Republicans from northeastern states were particularly wary of plans to cut $880 billion over a decade from federal health and energy programs, which they fear cannot be achieved without cutting Medicaid, the hugely expensive health program, since Trump has vowed not to touch Medicare.

GOP leaders have strongly pushed back against the idea that benefits would be cut, noting that the budget plan is only a framework and not specific policy. They argue there are ways to cut hundreds of billions in wasted money on federal health programs without slashing Medicaid benefits, though it remains unclear where those cuts would come from.

“This is a procedural vote. You tell me what the cuts are,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer told CNN when asked about swing seat lawmakers’ concerns about Medicaid cuts.

In the end, Johnson only recorded a single Republican defection.

“We will get there, as we always do,” the speaker predicted earlier in the day, when he was still lacking at least a half-dozen votes.

This headline and story have been updated with additional developments.

CNN’s Manu Raju, Alison Main, Morgan Rimmer, Veronica Stracqualursi and Aileen Graef contributed to this report.

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