Republicans hope to unveil infrastructure counterproposal Thursday -Wicker

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Senator Roger Wicker said that Republicans hope to unveil their counterproposal to Democratic President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan on Thursday.

"We would hope to unfurl a very viable plan tomorrow," Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, told reporters on Wednesday.

Republicans have been tepid so far on the Biden administration's sprawling infrastructure plan, which is expected to cost more than $2.3 trillion. Wicker has said their initial offer "might be somewhere south of $600 billion."

Some senators have proposed the idea of passing two infrastructure bills, a smaller bipartisan one that Republicans could support and a larger one via the procedural tool known as reconciliation, which could pass the Senate without Republican support if all Democrats backed it.

(Reporting by Makini Brice and David Morgan, Editing by Franklin Paul and Cynthia Osterman)