Leaders Push for Budget Plan Votes : Deficit: A tough fight is expected in House as Foley reschedules vote. Bush and top congressional members scramble to sway lawmakers who oppose agreement.

WASHINGTON — The bipartisan budget agreement faced an uphill fight in the House Thursday night as President Bush and top congressional leaders scrambled to win the necessary votes to approve the pact in the face of mounting opposition to its tax increases and spending cuts.

House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) delayed a scheduled afternoon showdown vote to give White House officials and Democratic and Republican House leaders more time to try to persuade recalcitrant lawmakers to support the accord.

The White House also mounted a major effort to win votes for the plan, with top White House officials and key Cabinet officers joining an intensive lobbying campaign to telephone lawmakers of both parties.

Some members of Congress reported that they had telephone calls from two or three members of Bush’s Cabinet, including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, a former GOP member of the House from Wyoming. And Bush himself wrote lawmakers urging that they “do what is right for America.”

But by late Thursday evening, congressional leaders still said that neither Republicans nor Democrats had been able to muster the majority of each party required to put the deficit-reduction plan into effect.

Top Foley aides said that the Speaker had decided to go ahead with a vote late Thursday, despite the uncertainty over the outcome. Many lawmakers told party whips that they were “undecided” about just how they would vote.

Although a defeat of the agreement in initial voting Thursday would not in itself doom the pact, it would mark a serious setback for the bipartisan package, which Bush and key congressional leaders had hoped to push through with a solid majority.

If the House voted the package down Thursday, congressional leaders were expected to try to schedule another vote for today, when--they hoped--lawmakers would have had second thoughts about having rejected the agreement earlier.

The Senate also is scheduled to vote on the budget accord today and both houses are scheduled to consider a companion stopgap resolution designed to keep the government running for another two weeks while Congress continues to debate the new budget package.

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan has predicted that there would be trouble in the world’s financial markets if the plan were defeated. Both he and Bush have warned that defeat could throw the economy into a recession.

The agreement, worked out after four months of negotiations between the White House and congressional leaders, has run into criticism from two camps: Conservative Republicans have attacked its call for some increases in taxes. And liberal Democrats say that it would cut spending too far.

On Tuesday, House GOP Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and dozens of his followers broke with the President to oppose the pact, contending that it would destroy jobs and weaken the sagging economy.

Democrats have complained about the agreement’s proposed 12-cent increase in the gasoline tax and cutbacks in Medicare. They also want to increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

But Bush and his Democratic allies contend that there is no realistic alternative to the plan and warn that defeat of the budget resolution would set off some $85 billion in automatic spending cuts mandated by the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law.

Bush has said that he would veto any further attempts to delay the Gramm-Rudman cutbacks if Congress refuses to approve the agreement. That would effectively shut down government services and require furloughs for 1 million federal employees.

In a last-ditch effort to salvage the accord, Foley met with Bush at the White House to seek the President’s backing for allowing the lawmakers increased “flexibility” to alter specific budget cuts but won little more than a token nod in that direction.

Both Administration officials and many congressional leaders fear that allowing lawmakers to rejuggle the package on the House or Senate floor would jeopardize approval of the carefully worked-out agreement. Bush has held firm, insisting that there should be no major changes.

In addition to telephone calls, face-to-face meetings and his televised appeal for adoption of the budget package, the President sent a letter to House Republicans urging them to support it. “I am absolutely sure it is the right thing to do for America,” he said.

The President also spent about an hour Thursday morning with several dozen Republican members of Congress, seeking to win them to his side. And White House officials said that he made telephone calls to several more during the afternoon.

“We’re plugging away,” one senior White House official said, referring to Bush’s efforts to persuade individual lawmakers to support the plan. “We’re trying to peel them away, one at a time.”

Bush was said to be taking the same approach in his private meetings as he did during his brief television address to the nation Tuesday, telling lawmakers that the agreement “isn’t perfect, but it’s all we’ve got. It really is ultimately going to help.”

And Foley insisted Thursday that congressional committees still would have some leeway in deciding how to meet the new spending targets.

He said that House members “have to understand” that in voting for the compromise package as a whole “they are not necessarily voting for every single ‘i’ and ‘t’ in the budget summit agreement.”

But White House officials conceded that many lawmakers still see themselves as unable to vote for the pact because of complaints from interest groups that believe they may be hurt if it is approved.

“They want to support the President, but it’s the auto workers, the old people, the smokers, the beer drinkers,” the official said.