WASHINGTON (By John O'Neil, NYTimes) February 6, 2006 — President Bush submitted a $2.77 trillion budget plan to Congress today that calls for cutting Medicare and putting tight limits on most spending not related to national security.

Mr. Bush also repeated his call for Congress to make tax cuts passed in 2001 permanent. They are scheduled to expire in 2010.

The plan calls for eliminating or making deep cuts in 141 programs for a savings of almost $15 billion, but would provide more money for defense, homeland security, preparations for a possible outbreak of bird flu and promotion of the physical sciences.

The plan calls for $65 billion in reductions in projected entitlement spending over the next five years. In what may become the most contentious proposal, the growth of Medicare spending would be cut by $36 billion over the next five years.

The proposal covers the 2007 fiscal year, which will begin on Oct. 1. The total of $2.77 trillion in spending called for would be up by 2.3 percent from projected spending of $2.71 trillion this year.

The plan did not cover the cost of military operations in Iraq or Afghanistan or the cost of emergency aid in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The Bush administration said last week that it would submit requests for supplemental spending for $120 billion for the two wars and $18 billion more for the hurricane's aftermath.

In part because of those costs, the budget office said that the deficit for the current fiscal year would be $423 billion, a record high, up from its midyear estimate of $341 billion. The new budget projects the deficit to fall to $354 billion in the 2007 fiscal year, and to $183 billion in 2010.

In the new budget, the Pentagon would get a nearly 7 percent spending increase under the plan.

Over all, almost everything within the category known as discretionary non-security spending — things that don't involve security or entitlement programs, like Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid — faces cuts or tight constraints.

"My administration has focused the nation's resources on our highest priority: protecting our citizens and our homeland," Mr. Bush said in his budget message. "Working with Congress, we have given our men and women on the frontlines in the war on terror the funding they need to defeat the enemy and detect, disrupt, and dismantle terrorist plots and operations."

Democrats responded to the budget by questioning both its policy choices and its presentation of the true picture of the nation's fiscal health.

"The nation needed a new budget plan this year, a dramatic and bold acknowledgment from this administration that we need to put our fiscal house back in order," said Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota. "Instead, we got more of the same - more deficits, more debt, and more hiding of the truth from the American people."

Mr. Bush did not include any sweeping proposals for changes in Social Security after the failure last year of his plan for private accounts. Instead, he called for a commission to study the retirement plan along with Social Security.

Administration officials and the president himself had given strong hints in recent weeks about the contents of today's proposal, and members of both parties in Congress staked out positions in anticipation of the plan over the weekend.

On Sunday, the Senate's Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, criticized the prospect of cuts in Medicare, education and social programs.

"After driving the nation into a fiscal mess, the president is asking our seniors, our students and our families to clean it up while the wealthy special interests reap the rewards," Mr. Reid said in a statement.

Senator Judd Gregg, the Republican chairman of the Budget Committee, defended the need for reining in spending on health care entitlements. "It is good health care policy and good budget policy to try to do something about the growth of Medicare," he said on Sunday.

While presidents traditionally submit budget proposals, budget making is a Congressional prerogative, and even when the same party controls the White House and Capitol Hill, few presidential plans are ever adopted without major changes.

This year's budget negotiations are sure to be complicated by awareness of Congressional elections in the fall.

The Republican Party, in particular, has been caught in recent months between pressures from its different wings. Ever since the passage of billions in aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina, conservatives in the House of Representatives have been stepping up their calls for reining in spending as a way of bringing down the deficit. But Republican moderates have been nervous about cutting popular programs, and cuts far smaller than those proposed today by President Bush passed only by narrow margins late in the year.

A different perspective was offered on Sunday by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who was President Bush's top economic adviser before becoming head of the Congressional Budget Office from 2003 to 2005.

"The federal budget does not add up," Mr. Holtz-Eakin wrote in an op-ed article in The Washington Post.

Mr. Holtz-Eakin, now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the projections used in budget making overstate revenue prospects and understate the looming costs of entitlements for retiring Baby Boomers.

"I'd rather not raise taxes, but unless government remains at its traditional size, I don't see any way around it," he wrote. And any "serious approach" to budget making "should rethink the package of support for old-age medical care, long-term care services and retirement income."

"But most of all," he said, "a serious approach should make sure that the budget adds up."