WASHINGTON — Bucking budget trends that are constricting Navy shipbuilding, the Senate has approved a defense spending bill for next year that will keep Electric Boat on track to boost its production of Virginia-class submarines in 2011.

Combined with continued spending on an array of weapons and high-technology systems built by companies linked to the Navy establishment in Newport, the stable spending on submarines is a ray of light in an otherwise bleak regional economy.

By the reckoning of Sen. Jack Reed, Rhode Island’s 16,000 defense industry workers will benefit from the appropriation of $1.964 billion next year for the purchase of the 12th Virginia-class sub, $1.393 billion for the DDG-1000 destroyer, and a total of more than $80 million on other military contracts in the state — many of them associated with submarine warfare.

“It’s the result, I think, of years of work by EB and the Navy to deliver submarines on time and on budget,” Reed, who sits on both the Appropriations and the Armed Services Committees, said of the comparatively generous submarine account in the $633.3-billion Pentagon spending bill that cleared the Senate Tuesday night.

“There’s also a recognition by commanders in the field of how critical these submarines are,” he said. Reed was referring not only to the firepower that subs can provide in battle but also to the heavy and continual demand for the stealthy work on intelligence and special operations that the warships can do around the world.

Rep. James R. Langevin, a fellow Rhode Island Democrat who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said the Senate appropriation for the Virginia class is in line with what the House will provide in its companion legislation. In both chambers of Congress, the armed services panels draft the overall military policy and spending blueprint each year, known as the defense authorization. Then the appropriations committees decide how much cash to put into the various Pentagon programs.

“It’s important for national security,” Langevin said, that the line item for attack subs in next year’s spending bills will allow for EB and its partner on the Virginia-class sub, Northrup-Grumman’s shipyard in Newport News, Va., to begin two of the warships per year, starting in 2011. That’s an increase from the lean diet of one sub per year on which the two yards have subsisted since the inception of the Virginia class.

Langevin added that the doubling of the production at the shipyards should help them to perpetuate their recent track record for delivering submarines to the Navy within their deadlines and budgets. “It brings great efficiencies in the supply chain and the work force” because the added work permits the yards to purchase goods and do hiring projections for the long term, Langevin said.

Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, a House Appropriations Committee member who lobbied hard to prevent the Navy’s outright cancellation of the troubled DDG-1000 destroyer program last year, said he intends to hold hearings in another committee that will examine how the Navy can make the best use of the high-tech systems that Raytheon’s Portsmouth plant has created for surface warships. Because of budget problems, the Navy reduced its purchase of the DDG-1000 destroyer, which uses Raytheon technology.

Reed’s office offered a compilation of other programs to be financed in the military appropriation that passed the Senate Tuesday. Among the spending items:

•$9 million for the Pentagon’s Procurement Technical Assistance Program, which will help Rhode Island’s small businesses with technical assistance to market their products and services to the federal government.

•$6 million for work at EB’s Quonset Point plant on a modular submarine command and control system.

•$5.5 million for work on a new dry dock shelter at EB’s yards in Groton and Quonset Point.

•$4 million for L-3 Chesapeake Sciences Corporation in Ashaway to complete testing and begin development of a “towed array” system — sensors pulled through the water by warships to detect hostile submarines in battle spaces.

•$4 million for Rite Solutions in Middletown to continue the development of automation technology that will make the best use of crew while improving the work of the command and combat systems in the Virginia Class and a still-to-be-designed ballistic missile sub for the future.

•$3 million for Advanced Solutions for Tomorrow of Middletown to expand the futuristic submarine attack center at the nearby Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) into a full Submarine Environment for Evaluation and Development (SEED) for the testing of new submarine technologies.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com