Legislation to overhaul electronic surveillance laws is headed toward Senate passage early next week, after senators worked out procedural disputes Thursday.

But with a temporary spy law (PL 110-55) set to expire Feb. 16, the House and Senate will have little time to work out a final compromise on their competing bills (S 2248, HR 3773) that would rewrite the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA, PL 95-511).

“There will be little, if any, time for conference,” said House Majority Leader ­Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md.

In anticipation of Senate passage of the legislation, House and Senate Intelligence Committee staff began negotiating Thursday over how much spying authority to give the administration, said the House panel’s chairman, Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas.

However, the talks did not address the biggest dispute between the chambers: whether to grant retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies being sued for their alleged role in Bush’s warrantless surveillance program.

The Senate bill, which the White House favors, would provide retroactive immunity; the House bill would not.

The Senate legislation would authorize warrantless surveillance of the communications of foreign targets, even when the target is communicating with someone in the United States. The House-passed bill would place more restrictions on the administration’s surveillance authority, which has drawn a veto threat.

Reyes said that because his panel only recently received access to legal documents that House Democrats said were necessary for considering retroactive immunity, there had been no bicameral discussions on the topic so far. Hoyer said the documents were only made available to him Thursday.

“It’s disappointing that we’re not going to get a bill from the Senate until Tuesday,” Reyes said.

The White House contends that its spying powers will be dangerously curtailed if the temporary law expires. But Democrats insist that other laws, and aspects of the temporary law that would remain in force after its expiration, will leave the administration with adequate surveillance tools.

An agreement announced on the Senate floor sets up a vote Feb. 12 on passage of the spying bill, after votes on several amendments earlier that day. The bill is likely to pass.

Republicans had resisted Democratic attempts to advance the FISA legislation until a deal was reached on an economic stimulus package (HR 5140).

After the vote on the stimulus package, the Senate began work on the surveillance bill. Senators on Thursday rejected two amendments by Russ Feingold, D-Wis. The first, designed to give the secret FISA court the option of preventing the government from using information collected on a U.S. person if the procedures for that collection are later deemed illegal, failed, 39-56. The second, intended to definitively block the practice of “reverse targeting” — where the government hypothetically might deem a foreign subject the surveillance target but its true intention is to listen to a U.S. citizen on the other end of the communication — failed, 38-57.

Votes on amendments related to retroactive legal immunity are expected next week.

Some House Democrats were prepared to support immunity, regardless. In a Jan. 28 letter, 21 Democrats in the conservative Blue Dog Coalition sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., supporting immunity and listing other provisions that they believed were needed in a FISA bill.

They wrote that the Senate bill “contains satisfactory language addressing all these issues, and we would fully support that measure should it reach the House floor without substantial change.”

Kathleen Hunter contributed to this story.