Washington ? President Bush has a lengthy to-do list for lawmakers when they return this week from their Thanksgiving vacation, including spending bills, intelligence legislation and tax law changes.

“Members are coming back to a lot of unfinished business,” Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address. “The clock will be ticking because they have only a few weeks to get their work done before leaving again for Christmas.”

Among the unfinished priorities for the president are approval of money to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and agreement on new rules for government eavesdropping.

He urged Congress to complete the annual government spending bills – but not in “one monstrous piece of legislation” filled with money for special interests.

Since the end of the summer, Bush has focused at least 17 events or remarks on budget-related disputes with Congress. At the Pentagon on Thursday, Bush pressed Democrats to approve money to fund the Iraq war “without strings and without delay” before leaving for the Christmas holidays.

After more failed attempts to pass legislation ordering troops home from Iraq, Democrats have said they plan to sit on Bush’s $196 billion request for war spending until next year.

The House has passed a $50 billion bill that would keep war operations afloat for several more months, but set a goal of bringing most troops home by December 2008. After Bush threatened to veto the measure, Senate Republicans blocked the measure. In turn, Democratic leaders said they will not send Bush a war spending bill this year at all.

Pentagon officials said that if the money is not approved soon, the military will have to take cost-cutting measures. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered the Army and Marine Corps to begin planning for a series of expected cutbacks, including civilian layoffs, termination of contracts and reduced operations at bases.

Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., who returned Saturday from a trip to Iraq, called the threat of layoffs “gamesmanship” on the part of the Defense Department.

“Nobody is going to get hurt by having this debate go on for another month or so,” said Webb, Navy secretary in the Reagan administration, in a conference call with reporters.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the Bush administration is not placing enough pressure on the Iraqi government to secure the nation and provide necessary services to its residents.

“In January, the president announced the so-called troop ‘surge’ to give Iraq’s government the ‘breathing space’ to achieve political reconciliation,” Pelosi said in a statement released Friday. “Eleven months later, Iraqi politicians have failed by every measure to make the necessary political progress.”

On the intelligence legislation, Bush wants Congress to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Lawmakers changed the law to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the U.S. without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.