Maybe that wall won’t be quite so big after all.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly suggested as much this week in testimony before a Senate committee.

“It’s unlikely that we will build a wall or physical barrier from sea to shining sea,” Kelly told the Homeland Security Committee. “We’re not going to build a wall where it doesn’t make sense, but we’ll do something across the southwest border.”

That news might come as a shock to a lot of the folks who voted for Kelly’s boss, President Donald J. Trump. During the campaign, the president promised a “big, beautiful wall” extending the full length of the nearly 2,000-mile border.

According to a report by Todd Gillman of the Dallas Morning News, Kelly assured committee members he would have the president’s support for the scaled-back barrier.

“The president has told me, ‘Kelly, go do it,’ …” he said. “I have a lot of elbow room. The president knows that I am looking at every variation on the theme.”

Kelly told the committee his less ambitious approach also had the support of the nation’s Customs and Border Protection officers.

He said those officers had told him, “Boss, if you could give me 27 more miles here, 16 miles here, I don’t really care about the other 140 miles I’m responsible for.”

Contractors faced a deadline of this week to submit bids for several prototypes to be built on government land near San Diego. Each prototype would be 30 feet long and range in height from 18 to 30 feet. The Associated Press quoted government sources in suggesting four to 10 companies would be chosen to build prototypes costing between $200,000 and $500,000 each.

How would the wall look? Kelly said he couldn’t yet describe it, but he said it would not be uniform from one end to the other. In some areas, the wall might be made of concrete, he said, but in others, it might be invisible, relying instead on sensors and other technology.

Kelly cited a number of reasons the larger wall wouldn’t make sense. He mentioned Big Bend National Park where the Santa Elena canyon rises 1,500 feet above the Rio Grande.

He also mentioned a 75-mile stretch of border controlled by Native Americans in Arizona and other locations where private property owners might stand in the way of such a project.

And even though the president’s budget calls for hiring 20 lawyers to work on land acquisition, Kelly assured senators his team wouldn’t pick unnecessary fights.

“We’ll try to do as much as we can without those kinds of issues coming to a head,” he said.

Kelly’s approach seemed to resonate with committee members.

Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, the committee’s ranking minority member, said she was embarrassed by the president’s repeated insistence that he would build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Mexico isn’t going to do that, she said, and Congress will never approve funding for a 1,900-mile wall.

“It’s not going to happen,” she said. “Everybody in Congress knows it’s not going to happen. … The sooner the president gets some credibility on this the better.”

Will Congress provide funding for a 1,000-mile wall? That’s an open question.

The president has estimated the cost at no more than $12 billion, but other projections total more than twice that.

The good news is that Kelly seems to be taking a common-sense approach. He says he plans to beef up security where it’s needed and to leave well enough alone where it’s not.

That’s a step in the right direction.

Kelly Hawes is a columnist for CNHI’s Indiana news service. He can be reached at kelly.hawes@indianamediagroup.com.