By Sarah Ferris, Lauren Fox and Manu Raju, CNN

(CNN) — Senate Republicans are signaling they’re ready to take a buzzsaw to the House’s plans for President Donald Trump’s first major legislative package in a high-stakes clash that is likely just the start of the obstacles Hill Republicans will face this spring.

Just hours after Speaker Mike Johnson and the House GOP passed a hard-fought blueprint that allows lawmakers to start drafting Trump’s sweeping agenda, key Senate Republicans, including Majority Leader John Thune, signaled they won’t simply accept that same plan.

“Last night was a first step in what will be a long process and certainly not an easy one,” Thune told reporters in the Capitol of the House plan, which looks vastly different than what the Senate passed on its own last week. Unlike the Senate’s national security and energy focused blueprint, the House plan also includes temporary tax cuts, deep spending cuts and a two-year debt limit hike.

Other GOP senators were more blunt about the House’s starkly different approach. Asked whether the Senate should simply adopt the House plan, Sen. John Kennedy told CNN: “Short answer is likely no. Long answer is hell no.”

Kennedy added: “That’s not a denigration of the good work that the House has done. It’s just that senators have thoughts of their own.”

But some House Republicans are just as forceful that they won’t fold on their blueprint. Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina said there is a “group of us” willing to vote against any plan that removes the $1.5 trillion in cuts in the House plan, which he called “non-negotiable,” referring to their proposal as “the bare minimum.”

“I think our job now is to relay to [the Senate], if they want to get this thing passed, they’re going to pretty well go with what we had,” Norman said. “The House controls the purse strings, not the Senate.”

The urgent — and politically fraught — discussions on how to settle those differences have already begun. And Thune and Johnson met with Trump Wednesday afternoon, after the two Hill GOP leaders huddled earlier in the morning.

Both chambers need to adopt identical blueprints to unlock the procedural powers that would allow Republicans to pass their priorities without Democratic votes.

“My admonition to the Senate is keep it as close as possible to the House version,” Johnson told CNN. “We demonstrated last night how delicate the balance here is, and if you change too many of the terms, it’s gonna be very difficult to pass in the House side.”

If the two chambers fail to pass identical blueprints, Republicans fear that key pieces of Trump’s agenda will be stalled for good. The House GOP’s chief tax-writer, Rep. Jason Smith, has warned that if the Senate scuttles the House plans for taxes, they’ll be forced to work on a package with Democrats, which would scale back their ambitions. The same problem would await Trump on the debt limit if Senate Republicans choose not to pass it in their own bill.

“I don’t love that idea but depending on what else is in there, potentially,” Sen. Mike Lee said when asked if he’d back a debt ceiling increase as part of the final bill.

But both the Senate and House GOP conferences have small majorities with a wide span of ideologies: Thune must satisfy members from Sens. Susan Collins of Maine to Rand Paul of Kentucky, while Johnson must appease both swing-district moderates and hardliners in the Freedom Caucus.

One of the greatest challenges for Republicans is that the Senate and House-passed budget bills aren’t even close to similar.

The Senate bill did not include a roadmap to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts nor did it raise the debt ceiling, an item that some conservatives may be resistant to include in the Senate’s package. Senators are also looking to make tax cuts permanent, a move that could balloon the price tag of the potential package and dwarf the savings targets House Republicans sought.

Another huge hurdle will be getting Senate Republicans to agree to the trillions of dollars in spending cuts that Johnson was forced to add by House hardliners.

The House GOP plan calls for at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts — and if it doesn’t hit $2 trillion, it forces tax-writers to downsize some of their plans. Almost $1 trillion of that will come from savings in the Energy and Commerce committee, which even some Republicans fear could mean steep cuts to the popular health program Medicaid.

That’s yet another nonstarter for some Senate Republicans, particularly those from states where Medicaid enrollment accelerated after local leaders accepted more federal cash under the Affordable Care Act.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of the states that expanded Medicaid under the health care law, said any possibility of cuts to the program was a nonstarter for him.

Hawley told CNN he’s “glad” the House advanced a package to accelerate the process, but said he’s “not going to vote for Medicaid cuts,” adding that 21% of the residents in his home state receive Medicaid or similar benefits.

“Anything that slashes into benefits for people who are working, I’m not going to be for, and I think that’s probably going to be true for a lot of my colleagues,” he said.

“It’s just a framework, but it’ll need to be changed,” Hawley continued, explaining that GOP senators want “a bunch of changes” including making the 2017 tax cuts permanent.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said that she plans to sound the alarm to colleagues over potential Medicaid cuts, warning that could be “devastating” to her home state.

“So we’re getting an update to all of our numbers, but I have shared with colleagues over here that our assessment of it is that the impact, once again, to Alaska, if we see the kinds of cuts that are being floated over on the House right now, could be devastating to Alaska,” she said.

Sen. Thom Tillis, who is up for reelection next year in North Carolina, which also expanded Medicaid, offered a word of caution about the House’s plans for health care cuts.

Asked about Medicaid cuts, Tillis pointed to his experience in the state legislature where he contended they made cuts to programs in an “orderly fashion.”

“If you just do it cold turkey, there’s going to be a lot of unintended consequences that our members need to think through, whether it’s a red state or blue state,” Tillis said.

Many Senate Republicans, including Thune, said they are mindful that the House GOP was forced to include specific provisions, like those big spending cuts, to appease their hard-right flank.

Asked whether Johnson gave up too much on spending to get the budget deal across the finish line, Thune said: “I think they did what they needed to do to pass the bill. They got it done so congratulations to them but it’s step number one in a multi-step process.”

Johnson and his leadership team, Kennedy said, did a “phenomenal job” in advancing their blueprint with essentially no room for error.

“It was a big step, and now we’re going to step two and we’ll take step three and step four and we’ll have some days we’ll take two steps forward and three backwards, but we’re going to get this done,” the Louisiana Republican said, adding that he’s “very, very, very encouraged.”

“We’ll hug and have a cup of hot cocoa and start the real work,” Kennedy quipped about the process ahead.

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

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