WASHINGTON — President Bush’s $2.9-trillion budget request for 2008 will provoke battles with the Democratic-majority Congress over health-care programs and tax policy, if initial reaction from the Rhode Island delegation is an indicator. In addition, the president’s spending priorities for the war in Iraq and other defense accounts will be scrutinized as never before.

Sen. Jack Reed yesterday offered a glimpse of possible confrontations ahead as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended Mr. Bush’s $661-billion Pentagon budget in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Reed chided the military leaders for assigning part of the cost of expanding the Army and the Marine Corps — a step he called for several years ago — to an “emergency” war spending bill, rather than to a regular personnel account in the annual budget.

In an exchange with Pace, Reed then established that the budget blueprint makes an orthodox projection of war costs only once — in the $141.7-billion request for war funds for fiscal year 2008, which begins Oct. 1. For fiscal year 2009, the Bush administration’s projected war costs plummet to $50 billion. Pace acknowledged that even the Pentagon’s own internal planning calls for war costs to run to at least $84 billion that year.

Gates pledged to Reed that the real cost of the permanent expansion of the Army and the Marines would be reflected in future budgets. But the Rhode Island Democrat suggested that the accounting techniques were a deliberate effort to hide spending so that Mr. Bush could pursue his tax-cut agenda and portray his budget as headed for the black.

The plunge in the administration’s estimated war costs from 2008 to 2009 is “absolutely absurd,” Reed said in an interview, and will be “impossible to achieve.” He said the Pentagon budget techniques illustrate how Mr. Bush’s overall budget depends on “blatantly false assumptions” meant, at least in part, to protect tax cuts for “the wealthiest Americans.”

All four members of the Rhode Island congressional delegation foresaw a more vigorous “combing” of the defense budget, in Reed’s words, to determine whether Mr. Bush’s priorities are in order. “Extricating ourselves from Iraq is the best way to address the budget question that that war creates,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.

In that regard, Whitehouse said that the congressional power to withhold money “is one of our very important authorities.” Whitehouse said that he supports the increase in the size of the Army and the Marine Corps. The war in Iraq has underscored how the military can be stretched too thin, he said.

“We can count ourselves very lucky that nothing has gone seriously wrong” in another region of the world while U.S. forces have been fighting in Iraq, he said.

“We will give the budget a great deal of scrutiny,” said Rep. James R. Langevin, a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

“It’s certainly legitimate for us to attack” the budget priorities that Mr. Bush has set for Iraq, he said. But Langevin stressed that the troops must be given the tools they need to protect themselves and to perform their mission.

Langevin applauded one key local element of the defense budget: the Navy’s decision to stick with its plan to begin building Virginia-class submarines at a rate of two per year, starting in 2012. That would mean more work for Electric Boat and for its partner in building the sub, Northrup Grumman’s Newport News Shipbuilding. Langevin said he will seek to speed the expenditure of design work on those subs because EB has been forced by the lack of such work to begin extensive layoffs of design workers.

Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy and Langevin both predicted that the Democratic-controlled House and Senate will roll back some of Mr. Bush’s tax cuts for upper-income Americans and refuse to extend others as they expire. The two Democratic congressmen also said the Congress will reject much of Mr. Bush’s effort to curb spending on the mammoth federal health-care programs, Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor.

Whitehouse singled out one example of Mr. Bush’s plan to restrain the expansion of Medicare’s cost — a reduction in reimbursements to health-care providers — for special criticism. “The idea that the government is going to go into the Medicare system and chop doctors and hospitals for another 8 percent is not an intelligent way” to solve the problem of rising medical costs.

Whitehouse said the proper way to approach the problem is a comprehensive reform of the entire health-care system — which in his view would save a lot of money through efficiency.

Kennedy, Langevin and Reed all made a point of criticizing Mr. Bush’s plan to provide about $5 billion over the next five years on a state-federal initiative known as the Children’s Health Insurance Program. “We need at least $15 billion just to keep our heads above water, said Kennedy, noting that Rhode Island’s RIte Care program for lower-income families and children depends on this Medicaid-financed program.

Kennedy and Reed both took Mr. Bush to task for failing to provide in his budget for a permanent retooling of the alternative minimum tax. The levy was originally enacted to ensure that the rich pay some basic level of taxes even if they enjoy tax breaks that reduce their liability. But over the years inflation has gradually made this tax encroach onto the middle range of taxpayer — a development that Democrats pledged during last year’s elections to reverse.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com