Washington ? President Bush will send Congress a $2.9 trillion spending request today that seeks billions of dollars more to fight the Iraq war and tries to restrain the spiraling cost of the government’s big health care programs.

Responding to the new political realities of a Democratic-controlled Congress, Bush will propose balancing the budget in five years, matching a goal put forward by Democratic leaders. But Bush would achieve that feat while protecting his cherished first-term tax cuts.

The arrival of the massive four-volume set of green budget books, which will cover the budget year that begins Oct. 1, will be followed by months of debate in Congress. Democrats charged that Bush wants to make painful cuts across a wide swath of government programs while protecting tax cuts that will make the deficit worse after 2012.

“This budget is plunging us toward a cliff that will take us right into a chasm of debt,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said in an interview Sunday.

“In real terms, Bush’s plan is going to have very substantial cuts by the fifth year of this budget in all of the domestic priorities from education and health care to law enforcement and veterans,” Conrad said. “With Democrats in control, we will have different priorities.”

The federal deficit hit an all-time high under Bush of $413 billion in 2004. It has been declining since that time and the 2008 budget projects it will continue to decline and show a surplus in 2012, three years after Bush leaves office.

To accomplish those reductions, Bush would allow only modest growth in the government programs outside of defense and homeland security. He is proposing eliminations or sharp reductions in 141 government programs, for a savings over five years of $12 billion, although Congress has rejected many of the same proposals over the past two years.

Bush also will seek to trim spending on farm subsidies by $18 billion over five years, mainly by reducing payments to wealthier farmers, an effort certain to spark resistance among farm state lawmakers.

Bush’s budget would achieve nearly $100 billion in savings over five years by trimming increases in Medicare, the health insurance program for 43 million retirees and disabled, and Medicaid, which provides health care to the poor.

The restraints in Medicare spending would total $66 billion over five years while the savings in Medicaid would total $12.7 billion. Most of the Medicare savings would come in slowing the growth of payments to hospitals and other health care providers. But $11.5 billion in savings would come from boosting insurance premiums paid by the wealthiest Medicare recipients, those making more than $80,000 annually for individuals and $160,000 for married couples.

More people would be forced to pay the higher monthly premiums because the administration would stop indexing the income levels for inflation. Bush also wants to make high-income Medicare recipients pay more for their drug coverage as well as the higher premium they are now paying on the insurance for doctors’ visits.

For the first time, Bush will spell out details of the spending requests for Iraq and Afghanistan in the budget books. Previously, he has lumped that spending into supplemental requests with less detail.

Bush said he would ask for an additional $100 billion for Iraq and the global war on terrorism this year, on top of $70 billion already sought.

As in past years, the Pentagon is scheduled to get a hefty increase in spending authority of 11 percent, pushing its 2008 budget to $481.4 billion.

Bush’s budget also includes an initiative to expand health care coverage to the uninsured through a complex proposal that would make health coverage supplied by employers taxable for the first time but give all families a $15,000 deduction in hopes it would encourage those who don’t get health care through their job to sign up for coverage. Democrats have been highly critical of the plan.