Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Thursday that GOP leaders want to make sure Republicans in both chambers are aligned as they move ahead with a party-line plan for immigration enforcement funding.

The South Dakota Republican told reporters he hopes the Senate will adopt a budget framework “by middle-to-the-end of next week,” the first step to unlocking the filibuster-skirting power to clear a package of up to $75 billion for ICE and Border Patrol.

Then ideally the House would adopt the Senate budget measure without changes, Thune said, allowing Republicans to move on to passage votes on a final bill to fund the immigration enforcement agencies.

“We’re communicating as much as we can, making sure that we’re syncing this up and doing it in the way that meets the requirements that both bodies have,” Thune said Thursday, following a meeting Wednesday with Speaker Mike Johnson for a routine check-in.

The attempt at GOP unity comes after House Republicans hotly rejected the Senate’s proposal last month to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security, where funding lapsed more than two months ago. Now several House GOP lawmakers are also insisting Republicans fund all of the department through the party-line budget reconciliation process — not just the immigration agencies Democrats won’t support without new rules on the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics.

Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters Thursday afternoon that he hopes to release text of the budget framework in short order.

“We’re working on all that. Hopefully we’ll find consensus here soon. But I think we’re getting close,” he said.

“I hope we can get moving on it as early as next week,” Graham added.

Senate Republicans have started talking to their chamber’s parliamentarian as they seek to enact the party-line package — one piece of their two-part plan to end the DHS shutdown that began in mid-February.

Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to strike an agreement to make changes to an extension of a key spy authority ahead of a planned vote Thursday afternoon, as House GOP hard-liners continue to oppose a clean, 18-month reauthorization of the expiring program.

One option under consideration is shortening the length of the current, clean bill to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to one year — down from the 18 months favored by leadership and the White House — according to four people granted anonymity to share details of private conversations.

Those people also said there’s talk of potentially adding some new language into the rule teeing up consideration of the extension measure that would crack down on FISA abuses. It’s unclear if that portion can be agreed to.

Republicans involved in the talks have been floating a short-term extension for several days — as Blue Light News first reported — if House GOP holdouts and the White House are unable to strike a deal on a longer extension ahead of the Monday deadline.

Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) said in an interview he was fairly confident his group could secure an agreement with the Trump administration “a longer extension” by the end of Thursday. His members have been discussing an extension longer than 18 months with White House officials and GOP leaders, which ultraconservatives would consent to in exchange for Section 702 reforms.

After huddling Thursday, the Freedom Caucus prepared to pitch GOP leaders on a plan for a three-year FISA extension with “significant reforms,” according to four people.

Before this, Freedom Caucus members and other Republicans were floating a 60-day extension in the event a deal fell through. But GOP leaders have been deeply resistant to that idea, preferring a longer option that will get them through the November elections at the very least.

Asked if he would support a yearlong extension, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) said he “probably” would, but would need to see the details of any agreement. Other conservatives are firmly uninterested in that one-year timeline.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise acknowledged to reporters Thursday that leaders are now pursuing an extension that would be “modified” after insisting for weeks they would ram through a clean reauthorization.

Johnson, Scalise and GOP hold-outs discussed a raft of options on the House floor earlier Thursday, following a huddle on whether to pursue a short-term, emergency extension to buy time for continued negotiations past the April 20 deadline — as Blue Light News first reported.

A vote on a standalone amendment that would place guardrails on the use of warrantless surveillance tactics, for which ultraconservatives are agitating, would likely not survive in the Senate and tank the entire package, Republican leaders have privately warned.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sounded less enthusiastic about cutting his department’s budget during the first of several hearings Thursday than he did a year ago.

Then, Kennedy told lawmakers a proposed 25 percent cut to the Department of Health and Human Services was needed to rein in a bloated bureaucracy plagued with reckless spending, telling House appropriators a year ago: “We intend to do more, a lot more with less.”

Congress rejected the cuts and increased the HHS budget in a February spending bill. In front of the Ways and Means Committee on Thursday, Kennedy struck a different tone about President Donald Trump’s latest budget plan, saying administration officials had reluctantly proposed a 12 percent cut to cope with the federal debt.

He said that $2 billion in cuts to substance use and mental health grants his department issued and quickly reversed earlier this year, before the White House released its fiscal 2027 budget plan, had been a “mistake.”

And he said he’d sought again, as he did last year, to protect funding for the government’s nutrition and education program for low-income toddlers, Head Start. “It’s getting no cuts,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy did note several times that certain departments and functions at HHS are duplicative but said efforts to consolidate functions should not be seen as cost-cutting. “There was tremendous duplication of departments, we have 42 different maternal services in our department,” he said.

Addressing cuts proposed to a government nutrition assistance program for low-income people — the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children — which falls under the Agriculture Department, Kennedy told Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), he was “not happy about the cuts” and that he wasn’t the only administration official to feel that way.

The White House’s proposal calls for a $1.4 billion cut to the program.

“Nobody wants to make the cuts,” Kennedy said. “Russ Vought doesn’t want to make the cuts, President Trump doesn’t, but there’s a $39 trillion debt.”