The meeting was preliminary and left open-ended exactly what will make it into the bill, but the decision breathes new life into passing a version of the SAVE America Act alongside funding for the Department of Homeland Security. Republicans have also discussed using reconciliation to fund the war in Iran.

“We’re going to move,” Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said on Tuesday, telling reporters that Senate Republicans would make a “down payment” on Trump’s election bill, which requires voter ID at the polls and proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

“It won’t be the Big Beautiful Bill — it’s going to be focused on protecting our homeland and helping our troops at home and abroad,” Graham said.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) left some wiggle room for Senate Republicans, telling the Washington Examiner that he would need to make sure there are enough votes “if” they decide to move ahead.

But he acknowledged “discussions are picking up” and that if Graham drafts a blueprint for the legislation, it would “be with a lot of input from members of the conference, and something that I think we would be confident we could support on the floor.”

Thune made the comments after meeting with Graham, who is responsible for orchestrating the first steps of reconciliation as committee chairman. Thune was previously noncommittal about using the process, given the complexity of ushering it across the floor, but floated the option to Trump on Sunday to win his support for DHS funding.

“This is one of those things you’ve got to have a board and a map out if you decide to do it,” Thune said.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the Senate’s top appropriator, expressed reservations about pursuing the SAVE America Act through reconciliation on Tuesday, as did conservative members of the conference. But Republicans have come to believe the budget process is the only way to untangle a weekslong impasse over DHS. 

“Susan’s a team player. We’re going to convince her,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), a member of the Senate Budget Committee, said of Collins.

“We have to make sure that we have the requisite number of votes to succeed, so there will be plenty of conversations around this subject in the coming days,” Thune said.

Under an emerging plan, Democrats would agree to fund all of DHS except for the enforcement operations that led to the death of two protesters in Minneapolis. That portion of the agency could then be funded at a later date with only GOP votes under reconciliation.

In terms of the SAVE America Act, Trump refused to pass DHS funding without the legislation attached, a nonstarter among Democrats, but Senate Republicans managed to convince Trump to drop his opposition by committing to pass elements of the bill through reconciliation.

Republicans are limited in what they can pass using a process that requires all language to have a budgetary impact. But they believe they can cobble together the spirit of the bill by attaching strings to the dollars the federal government doles out to states.

“There are certain voter integrity things we can do that would be budget-related, things like grants conditioned on actually doing things to clean up your voter rolls, to provide IDs,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), another member of the Senate Budget Committee.

Johnson, a fiscal hawk, also proposed language addressing fraud in government welfare programs as a way to pay for the bill.

There will be the temptation to turn the legislation into a “megabill” akin to the tax law Republicans passed last year through reconciliation, or oversell how much of the SAVE America Act can be accomplished without Democratic help.

But Thune and Graham both attempted to temper expectations in discussing its possible scope on Tuesday.

“We’re just trying to make sure we keep everybody’s expectations realistic,” Thune said.

SENATE REPUBLICANS BALK AT USING RECONCILIATION TO PASS SAVE AMERICA ACT

He would not put a time frame on getting a reconciliation bill done, but Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee suggested the legislation could come together quickly and that Graham plans to move as fast as possible.

“Full speed ahead,” Johnson said.