Senate Republicans took their first procedural vote Monday night on the budget plan they hope to use to swiftly enact a border security, energy and defense spending bill — and deliver President Donald Trump a major legislative victory during his first months in office.

The 50-47 vote will allow GOP senators to forge ahead later this week with floor debate on that fiscal blueprint, followed by a so-called vote-a-rama — an overnight barrage of amendment votes that precedes adoption of the budget resolution. But the power of that measure to allow lawmakers to skirt Senate filibuster rules to draft and pass a partisan bill won’t be unlocked until GOP leaders in the House and Senate get on the same page about the scope of their party-line package.

Eventually the House and Senate will need to adopt identical budget resolutions to officially jump-start the budget reconciliation process, and House and Senate leaders continue to advance differing plans. House Republicans cling to their dream of “one big, beautiful bill” that includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts, while Senate Republicans are hoping to pass a second reconciliation measure addressing tax policy later in the year.

House Republicans are continuing to shore up the votes for their budget plan, which they hope to adopt on their chamber floor next week. But they’re running up against opposition from various factions of their conference.

Kash Patel, the controversial nominee to lead the FBI, cleared another key procedural hurdle Tuesday.

The Senate voted 48-45 to move forward with Patel’s nomination, setting up his confirmation vote in the coming days to helm the agency for a 10-year term.

Patel, if confirmed, is set to be a central figure in President Donald Trump’s efforts to leverage his powers against perceived enemies. A former House staffer who worked to discredit the congressional inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Patel has promised to go after Trump’s adversaries and shut down the FBI’s Washington headquarters on Day 1 of his tenure to create “a museum” of the “deep state.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats have argued that Patel would put fealty to the president ahead of his duties as FBI director and accused the nominee of helping from outside the federal government to orchestrate the agency’s recent leadership shakeup. They asked for a second hearingto question Patel on that matter and others — a request swiftly denied by Chair Chuck Grassley, who argued the request amounted to an attempt to undermine the 2024 election results giving Trump the prerogative to staff his own administration.

In his first, and only, confirmation hearing, Patel distanced himself from his work with the “J6 prison choir,” formed by a group of people incarcerated for participating in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. He failed to provide a definitive answer on whether Trump lost the 2020 election and declined to provide details on his testimony as part of the investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents.

Trump announced Patel’s nomination in December, moving to oust then-FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom Trump selected in his first administration before souring on him. In departing his post last month, Wray — who Trump accused of weaponizing the agency — said in a parting message to colleagues they should remain independent and stay away from politics.

The House Ways and Means Committee is looking at limiting corporate state and local tax deductions as one way to offset the costs of a large party-line tax bill, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

The panel, which oversees all tax policy, is considering the limit among other potential offsets for the bill, according to the people, who were granted anonymity to share private deliberations. Companies currently can deduct an unlimited amount of state income, property and sales taxes from their federal tax bill.

The discussions signal that a proposal to limit corporate SALT, as the deduction is called, may have enough support among Republicans to make it into a party-line tax bill. The far-right House Freedom Caucus had previously raised the idea of putting a cap on the deduction to pay for raising the current cap on the amount of state and local taxes that individuals can deduct, but it was unclear how much buy-in the proposal had with the rest of the conference.

The discussions come as tax writers scramble to find ways to contain and offset the costs of both extending expiring tax cuts and enacting President Donald Trump’s tax priorities. House Republicans adopted a budget plan last week that set the upper limit on the size of tax cuts at $4.5 trillion, which leaves very little wiggle room for the conference to enact all of their ideas.

Extending the expiring provisions of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for ten years would cost roughly $4 trillion without interest, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Republicans have also committed to restoring business write-offs like bonus depreciation, which would cost $378 billion over a ten-year window, according to CBO.

Those policies alone would leave little room for some of Trump’s campaign promises to eliminate income taxes on tips and overtime work, which could add hundreds of billions more in red ink.

The Ways and Means Committee has also been considering other ways to cut down the impact of a tax bill on the federal deficit. Those include strengthening work requirements for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and repealing a nursing home staffing mandate implemented under the Biden administration.

According to a joint analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Tax Foundation, repealing corporate deductions for state income taxes could raise around $192 billion in revenue.