As soon as is possible; at one's earliest convenience; at the earliest possible time.
1838, Sir John Ross, Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I[1]:
The Admiral, very apprehensive of her falling into the hands of the enemy, sent me with discretional orders to Captain Hood, that, should he not be able to get her off the shoal, he might put his men into the Thames, and burn the Venerable, making the signal at the same time for the Thames to close with the Venerable as soon as possible.
1851, J. Bradford Sax, The Organic Laws; Or, the Laws which Govern the Human Organism:
These depraved lustings after flesh, grease, narcotics, etc., are a disgrace to human nature; you ought to be ashamed of them, and eradicate and destroy them as soon as possible.
1943, H. Lorna Bingham, The Lost Tribe, Sydney: Winn and Co., page 13, column 2:
Then he put a trunk line phone call through to the nearest township and asked the Police to send someone out as soon as possible.
2021 April 7, “Open Access: Free charging points at station car parks”, in RAIL, number 928, page 38:
Where I do agree with Tim is that we need 'non-fossil fuel power to be the default for the railways as soon as possible.
This is not an idiom. It is a particularly common instance of the general construction: "as X as Y", where both X and Y have a large range of possibilities. X can be an adjectival, an adverbial, or a quantifier determiner (much, little, many, few) and Y can be a clause or an ellipsis of a clause. The full clause for which "possible" is an ellipsis depends on the preceding verb. "He left as soon as possible" is an ellipsis for "He left as soon as it was possible for him to leave." When Y is a noun ("He left as soon as John."), the ellipsis is still for a clause ("He left as soon as John left."). So if one was going to do something as soon as possible, then one would perform said action as soon as any impeding activity was no longer an obstacle.
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