A presidential spokesman said he would express his condolences to relatives.

The meeting comes as BP shares in the UK fell to their lowest level since 1997 amid fears the US will impose huge penalties on the firm.

Mr Obama has come under mounting political pressure over his handling of the crisis.

Oil has been leaking into the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April and sank off the coast of the US state of Louisiana, killing the 11 workers.

‘Anti-British rhetoric’

President Obama will express his “heartfelt condolences” to their families during the private meeting at the White House, his spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

“And I think he’s eager to discuss with them what their family was telling them about safety conditions and what type of changes can and must be made in the regulatory framework to ensure that deepwater drilling that goes forward is done in a way that is safe and not life-threatening,” Mr Gibbs added.

Amid growing public anger in the US, President Barack Obama is keen to show he is on top of the situation and will make his fourth visit to the region on Monday.

His administration has been steadily applying more pressure on BP, and the US justice department is considering legal action to make sure BP has enough funds to cover the damage and compensate those affected by the slick.

BP says a containment cap system placed on the blown-out well last week collected 15,800 barrels of oil on Wednesday – slightly up on the 15,010 barrels collected in the previous 24-hour period.

The company has come under increasingly sharp attack by some US politicians for its handling of the spill, described as the worst environmental disaster the US has faced.

Shares in the British oil giant have nearly halved over the last couple of months.

The UK government on Thursday sought to play down fears expressed by some senior figures of “anti-British rhetoric” in the US.

Prime Minister David Cameron, who will discuss BP with President Obama this week, said he understood the US government’s “frustration”.

“We have re-engaged the United Nations,” Mr. Obama said, to cheers from world leaders and delegates in the cavernous hall of the General Assembly. “We have paid our bills” — a direct reference to the former administration, which often tied paying its United Nations dues to demands for reforms of the institution.

President Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday.

An array of world leaders sat in the hall for Mr. Obama’s speech, which was often interrupted by applause and the flashbulbs of cameras going off, including some from delegates in the room.

But even as Mr. Obama sought to signal a changed tone in America’s dealings with the world, much of his speech centered on old and intractable issues, including Iran’s nuclear ambitions and a Middle East peace process. And while his choice of words was different and more conciliatory, the backbone of American policy he expressed remained similar to the Bush administration’s in many areas.

Just as Mr. Bush once did, Mr. Obama singled out Iran and North Korea for their pursuit of nuclear weapons. “In their actions to date, the governments of North Korea and Iran threaten to take us down this dangerous slope,” Mr. Obama said. “We respect their rights as members of the community of nations. I am committed to diplomacy that opens a path to greater prosperity and a more secure peace for both nations if they live up to their obligations.”

But, he added, “if the governments of Iran and North Korea choose to ignore international standards; if they put the pursuit of nuclear weapons ahead of regional stability and the security and opportunity of their own people; if they are oblivious to the dangers of escalating nuclear arms races in both East Asia and the Middle East — then they must be held accountable. The world must stand together to demonstrate that international law is not an empty promise, and that treaties will be enforced. We must insist that the future not belong to fear.”

As he spoke, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sat in the fifth row, displaying no visible reaction. Iran maintains that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.

Mr. Obama’s address to the General Assembly is the headline event in a day of many headlines. Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, listened to Mr. Obama from the hall and then took the podium for a diatribe notable as much for its length — about 90 minutes — as for its range of topics, from the functioning of the United Nations to the H1N1 virus. Later this afternoon, Mr. Ahmadinejad is to speak.

Mr. Obama said he planned to work toward a comprehensive peace deal between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and indicated again that he was impatient with the slow pace of work on interim measures like a settlement freeze and was now swinging for the harder, more entrenched final status issues that have bedeviled peace negotiators since 1979.

“The time has come to relaunch negotiations — without preconditions — that address the permanent-status issues: security for Israelis and Palestinians; borders, refugees and Jerusalem,” Mr. Obama said. “The goal is clear: two states living side by side in peace and security — a Jewish state of Israel, with true security for all Israelis; and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967, and realizes the potential of the Palestinian people.

“As we pursue this goal, we will also pursue peace between Israel and Lebanon, Israel and Syria, and a broader peace between Israel and its many neighbors. In pursuit of that goal, we will develop regional initiatives with multilateral participation, alongside bilateral negotiations.”

At the end of his speech, much of the hall — but not the Iranian delegation — applauded.

Mr. Obama left the hall shortly before Colonel Qaddafi began speaking.

At 11, a ‘Speechless’ Boy but a Confident Preacher

Five years later, Terry is an ordained minister who preaches almost every Sunday at True Gospel Deliverance Ministry, a 20-seat nondenominational storefront church that his grandmother founded in 2000.

“They say, ‘How can you be a preacher when you’re so young?’ ” said Terry, now 11. “But when they listen to me, they’re shocked.”

“God just put his Spirit upon me,” said Terry, who wore a baby blue suit with matching snakeskin shoes, the kind of outfit he usually wears on Sundays. “He said, ‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.’ But he didn’t say how old you had to be or anything like that.”

During the week, Terry attends fifth grade at Liberty Elementary School, plays Uno with his friends and attends choir practice. Terry, who said he earns A’s and B’s in school, reads the Bible every day in addition to studying theology through classes offered by an online university.

But Terry said he was happiest when preaching.

“When I’m in the pulpit, it’s like something turns over me,” he said, “and I just turn into a man of God. And when I’m out of the pulpit, I just turn into a speechless kid.”

Terry sat in a living room decorated with three posters of him in his Sunday clothes and bearing the words “Little Man of God.” Sitting on a large red and gold couch, he tapped his shoes against the floor and explained how he prepared for his sermons.

He does not write anything down, he said. He simply reads the Bible the day before the service and waits for the Spirit to move him. “I don’t plan to say those things,” he said, “but when God gives them to me, I say them right away to be obedient.”

Turning the pulpit over to a youthful minister like Terry is not unusual in black churches not overseen by a central body, said Prof. Christine Gudorf, chairwoman of the religion department at Florida International University.

In these churches, she said, age is not an issue, and seminary training is not necessary.

“It’s God who chooses the minister, and the Holy Spirit gives charismatic gifts, especially gifts of preaching,” Professor Gudorf said. “The community recognizes that gift and confirms the person in a ministerial role.”

Terry and his twin brother, Todd, who plays drums in the choir, were born prematurely on Nov. 19, 1997; their grandmother, Sharon Monroe, recalled that as a newborn Terry had to be connected to a heart monitor. After their parents broke up, the boys were raised by their father and grandmother.

Ms. Monroe said that when Terry was a baby, she would sometimes give sermons while carrying him in her arms. One day, when he was older, she recalled, Terry climbed into her seat on the pulpit and chanted, “Go, Grandma, go!”

After Ms. Monroe heard Terry preaching in her bathroom, he told her he wanted to be a minister. She decided to give him the chance. He gave a test sermon at her church, and then she ordained him.

Ms. Monroe said she had had a vision in which a child joined her at the pulpit. “I never thought it would be Terry because he was so sickly,” she said. “But Terry has a certain thing about him.”

Cynthia Spokes, a Bible studies teacher at Terry’s church, said she had been instructing him for two years and was impressed with his questions and his insistence on taking adult classes.

“It’s just amazing to watch this child give a sermon,” Ms. Spokes said. “He moves me. He just lifts me up.”

The most powerful experience Terry has had as a minister came during a sermon when, he said, he healed a young man who had an injured foot. As he prayed for him to be healed, the man stood up and walked without the aid of his crutches.

“That was the first time I healed someone, and from then on I asked God to give me the power to heal people,” Terry said, adding that laying hands on worshipers with ailments was something he did regularly.

Terry has traveled beyond Florida to deliver sermons, including twice at Tiaise Temple Ministry in Allentown, Pa. The pastor there, Donna Morgan, said Terry appealed to adults because he inspired them to transcend their perceived limitations.

“People listen to him and say, ‘My God, look at what the Lord can do when we are willing to be used by God to speak his message,’ ” Ms. Morgan said.

The proposed emergency expenditures on nearly every realm of education, including school renovation, special education, Head Start and grants to needy college students, would amount to the largest increase in federal aid since Washington began to spend significantly on education after World War II.

Critics and supporters alike said that by its sheer scope, the measure could profoundly change the federal government’s role in education, which has traditionally been the responsibility of state and local government.

Responding in part to a plea from Democratic governors earlier this month, Congress allocated $79 billion to help states facing large fiscal shortfalls maintain government services, and especially to avoid cuts to education programs, from pre-kindergarten through higher education.

Obama administration officials, teachers unions and associations representing school boards, colleges and other institutions in American education said the aid would bring crucial financial relief to the nation’s 15,000 school districts and to thousands of campuses otherwise threatened with severe cutbacks.

“This is going to avert literally hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Tuesday.

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the House education committee, said, “We cannot let education collapse; we have to provide this level of support to schools.”

But Republicans strongly criticized some of the proposals as wasteful spending and an ill-considered expansion of the federal government’s role, traditionally centered on aid to needy students, into new realms like local school construction.

And they were joined by some education experts from across the political spectrum in wondering how school districts could spend so many new billions so fast, whether such an outpouring of dollars would lead to higher student achievement, and what might happen in two years when the stimulus money ends.

Analysts were also turning up surprises in the fine print.

One provision, which was sought by the student lending industry and went unmentioned in early Congressional summaries of the stimulus package, would temporarily increase subsidies to banks in the guaranteed student loan program by tying them to a new index, partly because recent federal intervention in the credit markets has invalidated the previous index. A spokesman for Sallie Mae, one of the largest student lenders, said the change was needed to keep student loan markets fluid. Critics said it represented a potential new windfall for lenders.

“This just continues the well-established tradition of welfare for the student loan industry,” said Barmak Nassirian, an expert in student lending.

The formulas by which the stimulus money for public schools would be allocated to states and local districts are complex, but take into consideration numbers of school-age children in poor families. The level received per student would vary considerably by state, according to an analysis by the New America Foundation, a research group that monitors education spending. New York would be among the biggest beneficiaries, at $760 per student, while New Jersey and Connecticut would fall near the bottom, with $427 and $409 per student, respectively. The District of Columbia would get the most per student, $1,289, according to the foundation’s analysis.

The foundation contends, however, that the formula does not effectively allocate the most money to states with the greatest need.

In recent years the federal government has contributed 9 percent of the nation’s total spending on public schools, with states and local districts financing the rest. Washington has contributed 19 percent of spending on higher education. The stimulus package would raise those federal proportions significantly.

The Department of Education’s discretionary budget for the 2008 fiscal year was about $60 billion. The stimulus bill would raise that to about $135 billion this year, and to about $146 billion in 2010. Other federal agencies would administer about $20 billion in additional education-related spending.

“This really marks a new era in federal education spending,” said Edward Kealy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a coalition of 90 education groups.

The bill would increase 2009 fiscal year spending on Title I, a program of specialized classroom efforts to help educate poor children, to $20 billion from about $14.5 billion, and raise spending on education for disabled children to $17 billion from $11 billion.

Those increases respond to longtime demands by teachers unions, school boards and others that Washington fully finance the mandates laid out for states and districts in the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law, and in the main federal law regulating special education.

“We’ve been arguing that the federal government hasn’t been living up to its commitments, but these increases go a substantial way toward meeting them,” said Joel Packer, a lobbyist for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.

Frederick Hess, an education policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, criticized the bill as failing to include mechanisms to encourage districts to bring school budgets in line with property tax revenues, which have plunged with the bursting of the real estate bubble.

“It’s like an alcoholic at the end of the night when the bars close, and the solution is to open the bar for another hour,” Mr. Hess said.

The bill would, for the first time, involve the federal government in a significant fashion in the building and renovation of schools, which has been the responsibility of states and districts. It includes $20 billion for school renovation and modernization, with $14 billion for elementary and secondary schools and $6 billion for higher education. It also includes tax provisions under which the federal government would pay the interest on construction bonds issued by school districts.

Mr. Duncan said the bill’s school renovation provisions would create a “huge number of construction jobs,” because so many school buildings need repairs.

But Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California and the ranking minority member of the House education committee, said, “By putting the federal government in the business of building schools, Democrats may be irrevocably changing the federal government’s role in education in this country.”

In higher education, the bill would increase spending on Pell Grants, the most important federal student aid program, to $27 billion from about $19 billion this year.

“It’s a very good idea to increase Pell Grants in the stimulus,” said Terry Hartle, a senior vice president for public affairs at the American Council on Education, which represents colleges and universities.

But Mr. Hartle said that even he was having difficulty tracking all the new spending.

GETTING TO KNOW YOU Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, with Jedi Scott, 10 months, of Brooklyn on Monday in Washington.

Cara Fuller, a shelter worker, asked if he was sweating.

“Nah, I don’t sweat,” he told her. “You ever see me sweat?”

Not yet. But then again, it is still early.

Mr. Obama arrives at the presidency Tuesday after a transition that betrayed little if any perspiration and no hint of nervousness. Throughout the 77 days since his election, he has been a font of cool confidence, never too hot, never too cold, seemingly undaunted by the magnitude of troubles awaiting him and unbothered by the few setbacks that have tripped him up.

He remains hard to read or label — centrist in his appointments and bipartisan in his style, yet also pushing the broadest expansion of government in generations. He has reached across old boundaries to build the foundation of an administration that will be charged with hauling the country out of crisis, but for all the outreach he has made it clear he is centralizing policy making in the White House.

He will eventually have to choose between competing advice and priorities, risking the disappointment or anger of constituencies that for the moment can still see in him what they hope to see.

What the country has seen of his leadership style so far evokes the discipline of George W. Bush and the curiosity of Bill Clinton. Mr. Obama is not shy about making decisions and making them expeditiously — he assembled his team in record time — but he has also sought to tap into the nation’s intellectual dialogue at a time of great ferment.

He has set out ideas for governance even before taking office, but he has also adapted the details as conditions changed.

More than any president since he was an infant, Mr. Obama has taken a place in society that extends beyond political leadership. He is as much symbol as substance, an icon for the young and a sign of deliverance for an older generation that never believed a man with his skin color would ascend those steps to vow to preserve, protect and defend a Constitution that originally counted a black man as three-fifths of a person.

He is a celebrity president in a celebrity culture, cooed over for his shirtless physique on the beach and splashed on the cover of every magazine from Foreign Policy to People. What his political opponents sought to portray in the campaign as arrogance is now presented by his aides as comfort with power and the responsibilities that go along with it.

“He sort of lives in a grudge-free zone,” said John D. Podesta, a co-chairman of his transition team. “He’s capable of taking on board a lot of information and making good decisions. He knows he’s going to make mistakes. But he also knows that you’ve got to do the best you can, make tough decisions and move on.”

Some of those mistakes may owe in part to that signature confidence. Mr. Obama knew and liked Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, initially overlooking an investigation into state contracts that later sank his nomination for commerce secretary. Likewise, Mr. Obama forged a personal connection with Timothy F. Geithner and picked him for Treasury secretary, choosing to disregard Mr. Geithner’s past failure to pay some of his taxes.

Little has emerged about the process behind those episodes, but aides described Mr. Obama’s decision making as crisp and efficient. When he sits down for meetings, they said, he starts by framing questions he wants answered, then gives each person a chance to talk, while also engaging them. At the end, he typically sums up what he has learned and where he is leaning. A late-night person, he often follows up with calls to aides at 10 p.m. or later, after he has put his daughters to bed.

Mr. Podesta would not describe how the decision had been made to pull Mr. Richardson’s nomination but said it had played out over just nine hours rather than days, which limited the damage. “We saw the problem, understood it, Bill understood it wasn’t viable, and we stopped it,” Mr. Podesta said.

That contrasts with Mr. Clinton, who liked free-ranging discussion and took time making decisions. Mr. Podesta, Mr. Clinton’s last White House chief of staff, described the former president as brilliant at “thinking laterally” across subject areas. “One thing that seemed not to have taken on Bill Clinton is law school,” he said. “I tend to think of the president-elect as approaching a problem in a more logical, more drill-down sort of way.” Mr. Obama opted not to play it safe during the transition. He brought his Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, into the cabinet, and angered gay and liberal supporters by inviting the Rev. Rick Warren, an opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage, to give the inaugural invocation. Although Mr. Obama deferred foreign affairs with his “one president at a time” rule, that did not apply to domestic policy, where he lobbied Congress to release $350 billion in financial bailout money and set about negotiating roughly $800 billion in spending programs and tax breaks.

“He’s got the political courage to look at things and be bold,” said Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, a supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s who has spent time with Mr. Obama since the election. “The political wisdom is go slow, take the easy way first and build up some victories.”

Mr. Rendell said Mr. Obama did not mind taking risks. “He’s goal-oriented, not process-oriented,” he said. “If he does some things that are unorthodox or tick off his friends to achieve a goal, he’ll do that.”

But Mr. Obama made a point of engaging adversaries, dining with conservative columnists and talking with Republican congressmen. “He and his transition team have reached out to the Hill more than any transition team I’ve seen,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader. “So far, so good. But running a campaign and running a transition are going to be different than governing, because governing is about making choices.”

Mr. Boehner noted that Mr. Obama had originally reserved 40 percent of his economic package for tax cuts but now seemed to be heeding Democrats pushing for more spending. “At some point he’s going to have to tell people what he’s for,” Mr. Boehner said, “and then we’ll see whether he really wants to govern from the middle or cave into the liberals in his party.”

Mr. Obama’s outreach to Republicans has paid dividends. He wooed enough Republican senators to release the bailout money. Even some he did not convince muted their opposition. For instance, he called Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, who opposed more bailout money without a commitment that it be used only for the financial sector, not other industries.

“They didn’t want to shut the door, and if I were them maybe I wouldn’t either,” Mr. Coburn said. “But I wanted the door shut.” After Mr. Obama’s call, he said, “I was quiet as I voted against it.”

Mr. Obama has built a broader base of public support than many incoming presidents. Representative Artur Davis, Democrat of Alabama, said 53 percent of white voters in his conservative state now had favorable views of Mr. Obama, compared with 17 percent before the election. “He has been pragmatic,” Mr. Davis said, “and even many voters who voted against him see him as prepared to govern in a pragmatic, nonideological way.”

But Mr. Obama has been harder to peg than that, and the next few months should flesh out his governing philosophy.

“I don’t think it maps into traditional right-left, but nor is it Bill Clinton-like triangulation,” said Robert B. Reich, Mr. Clinton’s labor secretary and an economic adviser to Mr. Obama. “My sense is he genuinely believes that people can come to a rough consensus about big problems and work together effectively. I don’t really get a sense of ideological position. He’s obviously a man of strong convictions, but they don’t fall into the standard boxes.”

President-elect Barack Obama and John McCain at a dinner honoring the Arizona senator.

In an unusual effort to create political opportunity out of what is usually a dead period in the days leading up to an inauguration, Mr. Obama reached across the aisle and across the battle lines of the last election, calling his former opponent a man who sought common ground and attaching superlatives to Mr. Powell.

He did not mention that Mr. McCain evinced little of his bipartisan side during the presidential campaign. 

“There are few Americans who understand this need for common purpose and common effort better than John McCain,” Mr. Obama said at the dinner he held for Mr. McCain at the Washington Hilton. “It is what he has strived for and achieved throughout his life. It is built into the very content of his character.”

Mr. Obama then hurried by motorcade to the National Building Museum to honor Mr. Powell, who backed Mr. Obama in October in one of the most effusive, full-throated endorsements he received from a member of the opposing party.

“It’s easy to slip into superlatives when you talk about Colin Powell,” Mr. Obama said, going on to speak of Mr. Powell’s “quiet, remarkably consistent loyalty to a set of principles: truth, loyalty and determination.” He added: “The lesson he’s learned from his own rise is not his own greatness but his nation’s greatness.” The speech was over in seven minutes.

Mr. Obama also held a third dinner Monday night, for his vice presidential running mate, Joseph R. Biden Jr. But it was the fetes for Republicans that set Washington abuzz.

At the McCain dinner, Mr. Obama praised his former opponent, a Republican senator from Arizona, for working with Democrats on issues like campaign finance and immigration, which Mr. Obama said Mr. McCain did for “the good of his country.”

Mr. McCain’s motivation, Mr. Obama said, was “a pure and deeply felt love of his country that comes from the painful knowledge of what life is like without it.”

Mr. McCain was introduced at the dinner by a fellow Republican, his close friend and wingman during the campaign, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. And his other wingman, Senator Joseph Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut who earned much enmity from Democrats by appearing at the Republican convention, also attended.

Not invited was Mr. McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

President-elect Barack Obama on Friday in Washington. Mr. Obama’s stimulus package is being shaped by political as well as economic imperatives.

With the Federal Reserve having just about reached the limit of how much it can help the economy with cuts in the interest rate, Washington’s ability to end or at least limit the recession depends in large part on the effectiveness of the big package of additional spending and tax cuts that Mr. Obama has made the centerpiece of his agenda.

And with the economy facing what now seems sure to be the sharpest downturn since the 1930s, the financial system balky and the government facing towering budget deficits, economists and policy makers acknowledge that there is no playbook.

“We have very few good examples to guide us,” said William G. Gale, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the liberal-leaning research organization. “I don’t know of any convincing evidence that what has been proposed is going to be enough.”

In part because Mr. Obama wants and needs bipartisan support, the package is being shaped by political as well as economic imperatives, complicating the process by putting competing ideological approaches into the mix.

It includes $300 billion in temporary tax cuts for individuals and businesses, in part to attract Republican support. It includes a big expansion of safety-net programs like unemployment insurance, which Democrats say makes both economic and social sense. It includes more money for highways, schools and other public infrastructure; more money for “green” energy projects; and more money to help state governments pay for health care and education.

Republicans, as always, are advocating for more and broader tax cuts. But the evidence is ambiguous about whether tax cuts will really spur economic activity at a time when consumers and businesses alike are frozen in fear and reluctant to let go of their money.

The risk is that Mr. Obama and the Congress will weigh down their effort with measures that cost many billions of dollars but may not have much impact on economic activity.

Tax breaks, for example, usually produce less than $1 of stimulus for every dollar they cost, economists say. Spending on public construction projects, like highways and bridges, produces the most economic activity — but there is a limit to how many projects are “shovel-ready,” and even those take time to generate jobs and ripple through the economy.

Christina Romer, whom Mr. Obama has designated to be his chief economist, concluded in research she helped write in 1994 that interest-rate policy is the most powerful force in economic recoveries and that fiscal stimulus generally acts too slowly to be of much help in pulling the economy out of recessions, though associates said she now supports a big stimulus package if policy makers roll it out early enough in the recession.

The goal behind all those ideas is to jump-start economic activity by getting as much money as possible as quickly as possible into the hands of consumers and businesses, trying to make up for the falling demand in the private sector that is leading to higher unemployment. And although the package includes a big dose of tax cuts, it represents a big departure from President Bush’s playbook by relying heavily on direct government spending.

“This is not an intellectual exercise, and there’s no pride of authorship,” Mr. Obama told a news conference in Washington on Friday. “If members of Congress have good ideas, if they can identify a project for me that will create jobs in an efficient way — that does not hamper our ability to, over the long term, get control of our deficit; that is good for the economy — then I’m going to accept it.”

Mr. Obama’s aides said he did not intend to unveil a detailed formal proposal but rather to allow Congress to fill in the outline that he has proposed.

Given the recent scale of the downturn — the nation lost 1.5 million jobs in the last three months of 2008, and economic output during those months shrank by 6 percent compared with same period in 2007 — economists were highly uncertain about whether the economic plan would provide enough firepower. Adam Posen, the deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said Mr. Obama’s plan could provide just the right boost — if it was carried out properly.

But as the Federal Reserve has been learning for months now, the biggest obstacle to economic activity right now is not a shortage of money. The real obstacle is pervasive fear, which has made banks reluctant to lend and companies reluctant to invest in expansion.

Alan J. Auerbach, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, said the overall scale of the program looked “reasonable” at $800 billion over two years.

“It’s much bigger than anything that’s been tried in my lifetime, but this is scarier than anything we’ve seen in my lifetime,” Professor Auerbach said.

Left to their own devices, many Congressional Democrats would prefer to focus almost entirely on spending projects and avoid tax incentives.

“One thing we learned from the Depression is marginal, incentive changes don’t work very well when the economy is falling away from you very rapidly,” said Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. “And that’s what’s occurring here.”

But Republicans have been adamant about the need for tax breaks, and Mr. Obama has made it clear he would like to bring as many members on board as possible.

Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, said in an interview, “I really do believe that if you combine the evidence of history along with the psychological concerns about making investments in the economy today, the better bang for your buck is lower taxes that are certain and permanent and lasting.”

The Democratic plan would direct much of the stimulus money to low-income and middle-income families. That reflects both traditional Democratic concerns about helping lower-income households, as well as the view of economists who say that people with lower incomes are more likely to spend rather than save any money they receive from the government.

Mark M. Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, a forecasting firm, told a forum of House Democrats this week that the “bang for the buck” — the additional economic activity generated by each dollar of fiscal stimulus — was highest for increases in food and unemployment benefits. Each dollar of additional money for food stamps yields $1.73 in additional economic activity, Mr. Zandi estimated, and each extra dollar in unemployment benefits yields about $1.63.

By contrast, Mr. Zandi estimated, most tax cuts produce less than a dollar for each dollar of stimulus, especially if the tax cuts are temporary, because people save at least some of their extra money.

One of the few tax cuts that economists say can generate a positive bang for the buck is a reduction in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare.

Mr. Obama wants to offer a tax credit of $500 for individuals, and up to $1,000 for families, which they would receive through a temporary reduction in payroll tax withholdings. The idea, known as the Making Work Pay credit, was part of Mr. Obama’s economic platform during the presidential campaign. As originally envisioned, it would have been available to households with annual incomes as high as $200,000.

But economists said the tax credit could have drawbacks as an economic stimulus measure, mainly because people usually save part of the money or use it to pay down debt. That makes good sense from an individual’s standpoint but does nothing to increase economic activity.

Joel Slemrod, a professor of tax policy at the University of Michigan, said, “The research I’ve done on the 2001 and 2008 tax rebates suggests that the proportion of the rebates that went to spending was rather small, about one-third.”

After Congress approved Mr. Bush’s tax rebate to individuals and families last spring, economic activity jumped fleetingly during the summer, and then stalled out again in the fall.

Some Democratic officials were also skeptical.

“It’s not that rebates don’t work under normal conditions,” said one senior Democratic aide in the Senate. “It’s that current conditions are not normal and are not favorable to rebates or broad tax relief.”

President-elect Barack Obama, top, at George Mason University and his financial advisers, above from the left, Christina D. Romer, Timothy F. Geithner and Lawrence H. Summers.

Senate Democrats complained that major components of his plan were not bold enough and urged more focus on creating jobs and rebuilding the nation’s energy infrastructure rather than cutting taxes.

Just hours earlier, Mr. Obama called for speedy passage of the stimulus measure, warning that the recession “could linger for years” if Congress did not pass his plan within weeks.

Further complicating the picture, Democratic senators said Thursday that they would try to attach legislation to the package that would allow bankruptcy courts to modify home loans, a move Republicans have opposed.

Parallel to its work on the stimulus plan, the Obama team has also been considering how to use the second $350 billion of the bailout program approved by Congress. A transition team official said Thursday night that the new approach would give government officials broader range to provide relief on consumer loans for homes, automobiles and education, while also doing more to address foreclosures and the problems of municipalities and small businesses.

For his recovery plan, meanwhile, Mr. Obama has been assembling a package worth as much as $775 billion over two years to revive the sagging economy, using the plan to define his presidency even before it begins and to foreshadow his broader approach to governing.

While relying on traditionally liberal notions of using government spending to spur growth, he has also tried to adapt it for a new era with investment in clean energy and technology. And he is trying to balance all of that with tax breaks that appeal to Republicans.

But the broad support he has enjoyed so far for the basic concept is now being tested as the specifics become clearer. While conservatives criticize the high spending, and moderate Democrats express concern about the swelling deficit, liberals are pushing for even more money devoted to social programs, alternative-energy development and road, bridge and school construction.

David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, said the president-elect’s team was not concerned by the emerging pockets of criticism of his plan.

“Obviously, it’s a big answer to a big problem and there are a lot of component parts to it,” Mr. Axelrod said in an interview after meeting with balky Senate Democrats. “These folks are not potted plants. They’re elected officials, and they’re doing their jobs.”

He added, “It’s a collective process, and we’re willing to listen to people’s ideas.”

Asked if they were willing to adopt people’s ideas, Mr. Axelrod said: “We’ll see. It depends on the idea.”

Mr. Axelrod’s comments came after a spirited meeting at the Capitol where he and two other Obama aides, Lawrence H. Summers, the incoming national economic adviser, and Philip Schiliro, tapped to be the chief White House lobbyist, heard lots of frustration from Democratic senators.

“There is only one thing we have got to do in the stimulus, and that is how can we create jobs,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, as he left the meeting. “I am a little concerned by the way that Mr. Summers and others are going at this in that, to me, it still looks like a little more of this trickle-down, if we just put it in at the top, it’s going to trickle down. A number of people in there said, ‘Look, we have got to have programs that actually create jobs and put people to work.’ ”

Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Budget Committee, said lawmakers and the incoming administration had differences over how to focus the huge federal spending in a recovery bill. “Investment, investment, investment has got to be the central focus: energy, roads, bridges, waterways, housing,” he said. “Job creation is Job One.”

Mr. Conrad, who described the meeting as extremely positive, said Mr. Summers ended it by telling the senators, “Message received, loud and clear.”

Several Democrats on the Finance Committee earlier in the day questioned the proposal to give tax credits worth $500 to individuals and $1,000 to married couples. Several senators said that initiative would provide a token sum of money, which taxpayers were likely to save, not spend.

Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and others also criticized a proposal to give businesses a $3,000 tax credit for each new employee they hire, saying it was unlikely to influence business decisions. After meeting with Mr. Summers, Mr. Kerry said he expected adjustments to be made. “We are in a good dialogue,” he said. “I am very confident about some adjustments being made.”

The Democratic demands clash with those of Republicans who want more tax cuts and express doubts that heavy infrastructure spending would be the best way to stimulate the economy. “It’s very important as we go ahead that we find the right balance,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader. “Yes, our economy needs help. But at the end of the day, how much debt are we going to pile on future generations?”

With the cascade of conflicting opinions, Mr. Obama’s allies pushed for quick passage. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House speaker, said she would cancel the President’s Day recess in mid-February if lawmakers had not passed an economic plan by then. “If we don’t have a bill before the president’s recess, there will be no president’s recess,” she told reporters.

Mr. Obama reinforced that urgency in a speech at George Mason University in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. “For every day we wait or point fingers or drag our feet,” he said, “more Americans will lose their jobs, more families will lose their savings, more dreams will be deferred, and our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”

The speech was his first since the election and indicated how fully he is stepping into the role of president when it comes to domestic issues even before his inauguration. His advisers have calculated that he cannot wait to begin a campaign to build public support and have mapped out a series of events to explain his economic approach, including booking him on the ABC program “This Week” on Sunday.

For the moment, the public remains strongly in Mr. Obama’s corner. The latest Gallup tracking poll this week showed that 65 percent express confidence in his leadership.

But Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic political strategist, said the Obama plan’s price tag is “an awfully big number that follows a financial bailout that’s strikingly unpopular with the public. Both of these things create a challenge to overcome, some nervousness on the Hill and among the public.”

Mr. Obama addressed that nervousness in his speech. “I understand that some might be skeptical of this plan,” he said. “Our government has already spent a good deal of money but we haven’t yet seen that translate into more jobs or higher incomes or renewed confidence in our economy.” But he said his plan “won’t just throw money at our problems. We’ll invest in what works.”

Known on the campaign trail for inspirational addresses, Mr. Obama on Thursday was sober and ominous, summoning the nation to meet a daunting task.

“Now, I don’t believe it’s too late to change course,” he said, “but it will be if we don’t take dramatic action as soon as possible. If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years.”

Some Democrats said they were not sure that Congress and the Obama administration would ultimately see eye to eye. Mr. Harkin pointed to Mr. Obama’s speech earlier in the day to promote the economic recovery package and said the rhetoric did not match the dollars in the plan.

“Obama said today that he wanted to double renewable energy in three years, well we can do it,” Mr. Harkin said, but he added that spending to jump-start that initiative would have to be included in the stimulus.

“I just want to thank the president for hosting us,” the president-elect said, flanked by former President George H.W. Bush on one side and his son on the other.

Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, both smiling broadly, stood with them. “All the gentlemen here understand both the pressures and possibilities of this office,” Obama said. “For me to have the opportunity to get advice, good counsel and fellowship with these individuals is extraordinary.”

In a swift photo opportunity, the current president wished Obama well before all five men headed to a private lunch that lasted about 90 minutes.

“I want to thank the president-elect for joining the ex-presidents for lunch,” Bush said, even though he’s not quite a member of that club yet.

“One message that I have and I think we all share is that we want you to succeed. Whether we’re Democrat or Republican we care deeply about this country,” Bush said. “All of us who have served in this office understand that the office itself transcends the individual.”

He added: “We wish you all the very best, and so does the country.”

Bush and Obama also met privately for roughly 30 minutes. That one-on-one meeting, coming just 13 days before Obama’s inauguration, likely focused on grim current events, with war in the Gaza Strip and the economy in a recession.

It had been an entire generation since the nation last saw the tableau of every U.S. president together at the White House. The presidents have gathered at other locations over the years, most recently for the funeral of President Gerald Ford in Washington.

Obama suggested holding the gathering when he met Bush at the White House in November.

All parties seemed determined to keep details of what was discussed confidential.

Describing the lunch only in broad terms after it ended, Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs said: “The president and the former presidents had helpful advice on managing the office, as well as thoughts on the critical issues facing the country right now. The president-elect is anxious to stay in touch with all of them in the coming years.”

Obama has sought to strike a balance as the power curve bends his way. Before taking office, he is publicly rallying Congress behind a massive economic stimulus plan. But he remains deferential to Bush on foreign affairs and will not comment on Israel’s deadly conflict with Hamas on grounds that doing so would be dangerous for the United States.

“You can’t have two administrations running foreign policy at the same time,” Obama said at a news conference earlier in the day.

Vice President-elect Joe Biden also held a private meeting with former President Bush at the White House on Wednesday.

‘We’ll just share war stories’
Considering the bond they hold in history, U.S. presidents get together infrequently, particularly at the White House. And when they are in the same room, it is usually for a milestone or somber moment — a funeral of a world leader, an opening of a presidential library, a commemoration of history.

Not this time.

“It’s going to be an interesting lunch,” Bush told an interviewer recently. When asked what the five men would talk about, Bush said: “I don’t know. I’m sure (Obama’s) going to ask us all questions, I would guess. If not, we’ll just share war stories.”

They have plenty of those, political and otherwise. Their paths to power have long been entwined.

Carter lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan, whose running mate was George H.W. Bush. Bush later won election but lost after one term to Clinton. Then Bush’s son, the current president, defeated Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore. And this year Obama won after long linking his opponent, John McCain, to Bush.

Campaign rivalries
Those campaign rivalries tend to soften over time as presidents leave the White House and try to adopt the role of statesmen — although Carter, even as an ex-president, has had some critical public words for the current president’s foreign policy.

All five men were to pose for a group photo in the Rose Garden, but a January rainstorm scrapped that plan. So the noontime photo opportunity — the media’s only glimpse of them — was moved indoors to the Oval Office.

The presidents and Obama were having lunch in a private dining room off the Oval Office, where no one else was expected to join them.

“All of us would love to be flies on the wall and listening to that conversation,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said.  The rare presidential joint appearance also offered Bush, who ends his two terms deeply unpopular, to again show he is rising above the fray.

The last White House event to draw the former presidents was a November 2000 celebration in honor of the White House’s 200th anniversary. But one of the former presidents, Ronald Reagan, who was afflicted with Alzheimer’s, was unable to attend.

All the presidents were last at the White House in 1981: Richard Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan, who was president then. The three former presidents were there before leaving as part of the U.S. delegation to the funeral of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, who had been assassinated.

After an afternoon protest of a shooting by transit police, a group of protesters broke windows on police cruisers.

After an afternoon of peaceful demonstrations and a memorial service, protests turned chaotic after dark as a small clutch of protesters set trash cans and cars afire and busted windows on police cruisers and storefronts. Police in riot gear responded with tear gas and billy clubs and at least 14 arrests were made, according to local television reports. Several major downtown streets were closed, and helicopter footage showed small groups of protesters roaming through the city’s deserted center. There were no immediate reports of injuries, but sirens continued to echo into the late evening.

Mayor Ron Dellums pleaded for calm as anger continued to build in the city’s black community over the shooting of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old butcher’s apprentice who was shot in the back while lying on the platform at the Fruitvale station of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

“We’ve got to have a real investigation that people can have confidence in,” said Mr. Dellums on Wednesday night. “And my sense of it is that part of this reaction is that people have lost confidence.”

Mr. Grant, who had been involved in a scuffle aboard a train after leaving a New Year’s Eve celebration in San Francisco, died at a local hospital several hours after being shot. The bullet, which had passed through his lower back, ricocheted into his lung. The officer, Johannes Mehserle, resigned on Wednesday, but investigators said efforts to interview him about the circumstances of the shooting had been rebuffed by his lawyers and police union leaders, according to Linton Johnson, spokesperson for the transit district

The incident was captured by at least four cellphone cameras held by passengers on a train idling next to the platform. The videos, which have been widely broadcast and streamed online, show Mr. Grant lying face down when Mr. Mehserle, 27, pulls his gun and fires a single shot. Mr. Mehserle looks stunned for a moment, and then handcuffs Mr. Grant with the assistance of another officer.

John Burris, a lawyer for Mr. Grant’s mother and his live-in girlfriend, said he had asked Tom Orloff, the Alameda County District Attorney, to consider filing criminal charges against Mr. Mehserle.

“If you can’t file charges in a case like this,” said Mr. Burris, “I don’t know what kind of case you can file in.”

Mr. Orloff said he was still investigating the case, as was the BART police department. Federal law enforcement were also reported to be looking into whether Mr. Grant’s civil rights were violated in his killing.

Left, coal ash slurry near the Kingston Fossil Plant in Harriman. Federal studies have long shown coal ash to contain significant quantities of heavy metals like arsenic, lead and selenium, which can be a threat to water supplies and human health.

Like the one in Tennessee, most of these dumps, which reach up to 1,500 acres, contain heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium, which are considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a threat to water supplies and human health. Yet they are not subject to any federal regulation, which experts say could have prevented the spill, and there is little monitoring of their effects on the surrounding environment.

In fact, coal ash is used throughout the country for construction fill, mine reclamation and other “beneficial uses.” In 2007, according to a coal industry estimate, 50 tons of fly ash even went to agricultural uses, like improving soil’s ability to hold water, despite a 1999 E.P.A. warning about high levels of arsenic. The industry has promoted the reuse of coal combustion products because of the growing amount of them being produced each year — 131 million tons in 2007, up from less than 90 million tons in 1990.

The amount of coal ash has ballooned in part because of increased demand for electricity, but more because air pollution controls have improved. Contaminants and waste products that once spewed through the coal plants’ smokestacks are increasingly captured in the form of solid waste, held in huge piles in 46 states, near cities like Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Tampa, Fla., and on the shores of Lake Erie, Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.

Numerous studies have shown that the ash can leach toxic substances that can cause cancer, birth defects and other health problems in humans, and can decimate fish, bird and frog populations in and around ash dumps, causing developmental problems like tadpoles born without teeth, or fish with severe spinal deformities.

“Your household garbage is managed much more consistently” than coal combustion waste, said Dr. Thomas A. Burke, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who testified on the health effects of coal ash before a Congressional subcommittee last year. “It’s such a large volume of waste, and it’s so essential to the country’s energy supply; it’s basically been a loophole in the country’s waste management strategy.”

As the E.P.A. has studied whether to regulate coal ash waste, the cases of drinking wells and surface water contaminated by leaching from the dumps or the use of the ash has swelled. In 2007, an E.P.A. report identified 63 sites in 26 states where the water was contaminated by heavy metals from such dumps, including three other Tennessee Valley Authority dumps. Environmental advocacy groups have submitted at least 17 additional cases that they say should be added to that list.

Just last week, a judge approved a $54 million class-action settlement against Constellation Power Generation after it had dumped coal ash for more than a decade in a sand and gravel pit near Gambrills, Md., about 20 miles south of Baltimore, contaminating wells. And Town of Pines, Ind., a hamlet about 40 miles east of Chicago, was declared a Superfund site after wells there were found to be contaminated by ash dumped in a landfill and used to make roads starting in 1983.

Contamination can be swift. In Chesapeake, Va., high levels of lead, arsenic and other contaminants were found last year in the groundwater beneath a golf course sculptured with 1.5 million tons of fly ash, the same type of coal ash involved in the Tennessee spill. The golf course opened in 2007.

State requirements for the handling of coal ash vary widely. Some states, like Alabama, do not regulate it at all, except by means of federally required water discharge permits. In Texas, the vast majority of coal ash is not considered a solid waste, according to a review of state regulations by environmental groups. There are no groundwater monitoring or engineering requirements for utilities that dump the ash on site, as most utilities do, the analysis says.

The lack of uniform regulation stems from the E.P.A.’s inaction on the issue, which it has been studying for 28 years. In 2000, the agency came close to designating coal ash a hazardous waste, but backpedaled in the face of an industry campaign that argued that tighter controls would cost it $5 billion a year. (In 2007, the Department of Energy estimated that it would cost $11 billion a year.) At the time, the E.P.A. said it would issue national regulations governing the disposal of coal ash as a nonhazardous waste, but it has not done so.

“We’re still working on coming up with those standards,” said Matthew Hale, director of the office of solid waste at the E.P.A. “We don’t have a schedule at this point.”

Last year, the agency invited public comment on new data on coal combustion wastes, including a finding that the concentrations of arsenic to which people might be exposed through drinking water contaminated by fly ash could increase cancer risks several hundredfold.

If such regulations were issued, the agency could require that utilities dispose of dry ash in lined landfills, considered the most environmentally sound method of disposal, but also the most expensive. A 2006 federal report found that at least 45 percent of relatively new disposal sites did not use composite liners, the only kind that the E.P.A. says diminishes the leaching of cancer-causing metals to acceptable risk levels. The vast majority of older disposal sites are unlined.

Most coal ash is stored wet in ponds, like the one in Tennessee, almost always located on waterways because they need to take in and release water. But scientists say that the key to the safe disposal of coal ash is to keep it away from water, by putting dry ash into landfills with caps, linings and collection systems for contaminated water.

Environmentalists, scientists and other experts say that regulations could have prevented the Tennessee spill. Andrew Wittner, an economist who was working in the E.P.A.’s office of solid waste in 2000 when the issue of whether to designate coal ash as hazardous was being debated, said the agency came close to prohibiting ash ponds like the one at Kingston. “We were going to suggest that these materials not be wet-handled, and that existing surface impoundments should be drained,” Mr. Wittner said.

If storing coal ash were more expensive, environmental advocates say, utilities might be pushed to find more ways to recycle it safely. Experts say that some “beneficial uses” of coal ash can be just that, like substituting ash for cement in concrete, which binds the heavy metals and prevents them from leaching, or as a base for roads, where the ash is covered by an impermeable material. But using the ash as backfill or to level abandoned mines requires intensive study and monitoring, which environmentalists say is rarely done right.

The industry takes the position that states can regulate the disposal of coal ash on their own, and it has come up with a voluntary plan to close some gaps, like in the monitoring of older disposal sites.

“There probably isn’t a need for a comprehensive regulatory approach to coal ash in light of what the states have and our action plan,” said Jim Roewer, the executive director of the Utility Solid Wastes Activity Group.

Mr. Roewer said there was a trend toward dry ash disposal in lined landfills, though that trend was not identified in the 2006 federal report on disposal methods.

Environmentalists are skeptical of the industry’s voluntary self-policing plan and the states’ ability to tighten controls.

“The states have proven that they can’t regulate this waste adequately, and that’s seen in the damage that is occurring all over the United States,” said Lisa Evans, a former E.P.A. lawyer who now works on hazardous-waste issues for the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice. “If the states could regulate the industry appropriately, they would have done so by now.”

Utility companies are often aware of problems with their disposal system, Ms. Evans said, but they put off improvements because of the cost.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, which owns the Kingston Fossil Plant, where the Tennessee spill occurred, tried for decades to fix leaks at its ash pond. In 2003, it considered switching to dry disposal, but balked at the estimated cost of $25 million, according to a report in The Knoxville News Sentinel. That is less than the cost of cleaning up an ash spill in Pennsylvania in 2005 that was a 10th of the size of the one in Tennessee.

President-elect Barack Obama met with his top economic advisers for a second straight day in Washington.

Mr. Obama sought to distinguish between the need to run what is likely to be record-setting deficits for several years and the necessity to begin bringing them down markedly in subsequent years. Even as he prepares a stimulus plan that is expected to total nearly $800 billion in new spending and tax cuts over the next two years, he said he would make sure the money was wisely spent, and he pledged to work with Congress to enact spending controls and efficiency measures throughout the federal budget.

“We’re not going to be able to expect the American people to support this critical effort unless we take extraordinary steps to ensure that the investments are made wisely and managed well,” Mr. Obama said, speaking about the dire fiscal outlook after meeting with his economic team for a second straight day.

In his most explicit language on the subject since winning the election, Mr. Obama sought to reassure lawmakers and the financial markets that he was aware of the long-term dangers of running huge deficits and would take steps to limit and eventually reduce them.

Big deficits force the government to borrow more money, saddling future generations with large financial burdens and leaving the nation reliant on foreign governments and other big investors to lend cash. The problem is even more acute now because credit markets, which in recent months have made it much harder and more expensive for businesses and individuals to borrow, could be further strained by financing a huge government deficit.

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama plans to name a chief performance officer with the task of finding government efficiencies. He has chosen Nancy Killefer, who is director of McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm, and was an assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration. The Congressional Budget Office will also release its latest budget estimates, providing the first official predictions of the shortfalls tied to the economic slowdown and the fallen financial markets.

Mr. Obama has made the economy virtually the sole public focus of his first full week in Washington since winning the election. He called on Tuesday for the creation of an economic recovery oversight board that would include outside advisers to monitor spending — and find abuses — of the economic stimulus plan. He also said earmarks for lawmakers’ special projects would be banned from the bill.

“When the American people spoke last November, they were demanding change — change in policies that helped deliver the worst economic crisis that we’ve see since the Great Depression,” Mr. Obama told reporters at his transition offices. He added, “They were demanding that we restore a sense of responsibility and prudence to how we run our government.”

But Republicans and some fiscally conservative Democrats have expressed concern that the need for a substantial economic stimulus plan could sweep away for years any serious effort to bring government spending into line with its revenues.

While economists almost universally support running large deficits to combat the kind of steep recession the country is grappling with now, they are increasingly expressing alarm at the prospect of sustained fiscal imbalances heading into a period in which the aging of the population will create huge budgetary strains because of the growing costs of the Medicare and Social Security programs.

Still, the deficit now seems likely to be so large that it will inevitably constrain Mr. Obama’s administration to some degree. At a minimum, it seems sure to force him to walk a line between maintaining the confidence of the financial markets, which could drive interest rates up sharply if they doubt his will or ability to improve the government’s financial condition in the long run, and various constituencies that will be pressing him to make good on his campaign promises.

Mr. Obama has so far not backed away from any of the big initiatives he ran on, including his plan to expand health insurance. On that issue, as on others, he has begun making a case that the economically prudent course is to invest now in addressing the nation’s big challenges rather than avoiding them in the name of saving money in the short run.

Mr. Obama was not specific about the size of the deficit he expects, beyond his reference to “a trillion-dollar deficit or close to a trillion-dollar deficit” for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. Aides said later that the estimate — in line with what economists have been anticipating given the economy’s rapid deterioration — did not include the costs of the proposed stimulus package, which could add hundreds of billions of dollars more to the red ink.

At $1 trillion, the deficit would not only shatter the largest previous shortfall in dollar terms — $455 billion last year — but it could also exceed the post-World War II-era record by the measure more meaningful in economic terms, the deficit as a percentage of total economic activity.

Diane Rogers, chief economist at the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan organization that supports fiscal discipline, estimated that the deficit this year would hit 7 percent of the gross domestic product. The largest previous record in those terms was in 1983, when it hit 6 percent. Mr. Obama declined to say on Tuesday whether the budget that his administration submits to Congress in February would be larger than the $3.1 trillion budget that President Bush submitted for the current fiscal year. He also did not offer any specific examples of how spending could be controlled, saying only that his advisers had been scouring the budget looking for programs that could be eliminated.

“I’m going to be willing to make some very difficult choices in how we get a handle on his deficit,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s what the American people are looking for and, you know, what we intended to do this year.”

But the short-term budget shortfalls are big enough to pose serious headaches in themselves, especially if bond investors start demanding higher interest rates.

In just the first three months of the 2009 fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1, the government spent $408 billion more than it took in. About one-third of that shortfall stemmed from the Treasury Department’s rescue program of injecting capital into banks, which the government will book as an “investment” rather than “spending.”

The recession itself will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit. Even before Congress adds any new stimulus measures, higher outlays will climb for existing unemployment benefits, food stamps and other social programs. Tax revenues will fall because of rising unemployment, falling corporate profits and huge investment losses in the stock and bond markets. Mr. Obama’s stimulus program could add another $400 billion in each of the next two years.

“One thing investors have to be thinking is, what’s the exit strategy? How do we unwind this stuff?” said Robert Bixby, director of the Concord Coalition. “I would analogize it to what the government is doing with the auto companies. Congress said, we’ll give you the money but you have to show us a plan for sustainability.”

Mr. Bixby added, “Now the government is in the same position of the auto companies, but they haven’t come up with any plan for sustainability.”

As the latest budget estimates are released on Wednesday, the good news, at least for the moment, is that the Treasury’s borrowing costs are as almost as low as they have ever been. Short-term Treasury rates are hovering just above zero, but the rates on 10-year Treasury bonds are about 2.5 percent.

The job was the last unfilled major post for Mr. Obama, who has criticized the agency for using interrogation methods he characterized as torture. Democratic officials said Mr. Obama had selected Mr. Panetta for his managerial skills, his bipartisan standing, and the foreign policy and budget experience he gained under President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Panetta has himself been a sharp critic of the agency’s interrogation practices. Some Democrats expressed strong support for the choice, with Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, describing him as “one of the finest public servants I have ever served with and dealt with since he left the White House.”

But Mr. Panetta, 70, was also widely described as a surprising and unusual choice to head the C.I.A., an agency that has been notoriously unwelcoming to previous directors perceived as outsiders.

News of the decision was disclosed by Democratic officials who insisted on anonymity, and neither Mr. Obama nor his transition office has commented publicly about it.

Among the lawmakers who expressed skepticism about the choice was Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and the new chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Ms. Feinstein, who would oversee any confirmation hearing for Mr. Panetta, issued a statement that signaled clear disapproval and said she had not been notified about the choice.

“My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time,” she said.

A second top Democrat, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the departing chairman of the Intelligence Committee, shares Ms. Feinstein’s concerns, Democratic Congressional aides said.

Ms. Feinstein’s Republican counterpart on the Intelligence Committee, Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, said he would be “looking hard at Panetta’s intelligence expertise and qualifications.”

It was not clear whether the skepticism would become an obstacle to the nomination of Mr. Panetta, who would succeed Michael V. Hayden, a retired Air Force general with decades of intelligence experience.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who is a member of the intelligence committee, called Mr. Panetta a “strong choice” who “has the skills to usher in a new era of accountability at the nation’s premier intelligence agency.”

The choice of Mr. Panetta comes nearly two weeks after Mr. Obama had otherwise wrapped up his major personnel moves. It appears to reflect the difficulty Mr. Obama has encountered in finding a candidate who is capable of taking charge of the troubled agency but not tainted by links to the interrogation and detention program run by the C.I.A. under President Bush.

Aides have said that Mr. Obama had originally hoped to select a C.I.A. head with extensive field experience, especially in combating terrorist networks. But his first choice for the job, John O. Brennan, had to withdraw his name amid criticism over his alleged role in the formation of the agency’s detention and interrogation program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

As President Clinton’s chief of staff for two and a half years, Mr. Panetta regularly attended daily intelligence briefings in the Oval Office, and he has a reputation in Washington as a skilled manager and power broker with a strong background in budget issues. But he has little direct intelligence experience, and did not serve on the House Intelligence Committee during his 16 years in Congress.

In disclosing the selection, Democratic officials said that Mr. Panetta’s gravitas and ties to Mr. Obama would give the C.I.A. a powerful voice within the administration, particularly in bureaucratic jockeying with the Pentagon, which has a much bigger budget and more bureaucratic clout.

If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Panetta would take control of the agency most directly responsible for hunting senior leaders of Al Qaeda around the word. He would also become the oldest director in the agency’s history, as well as the second politician and former lawmaker in recent years to take it over. Porter J. Goss, the former Florida congressman, ran the C.I.A between 2004 and 2006, though Mr. Goss was himself a former C.I.A. operative and the longtime chairman of the House intelligence committee.

Among the outsiders who ran into trouble in the past after being installed as C.I.A. director were Stansfield M. Turner, a retired Navy admiral selected by President Jimmy Carter, and John M. Deutch, a physicist and former deputy defense secretary who was chosen by Mr. Clinton.

Mr. Deutch, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said there would have been good reasons for Mr. Obama to select a C.I.A. veteran to lead the agency. But Mr. Deutch also cited the examples of John McCone in the Kennedy administration and George Bush in the Nixon administration as cases in which outsiders became “two of the agency’s most successful directors.”

Mr. Deutch said that Mr. Panetta and Dennis Blair, a retired admiral who has been selected by Mr. Obama to become director of national intelligence, were an “absolutely brilliant team.” He called Mr. Panetta a “talented and experienced manager of government and a widely respected person with Congress.”

An early test in Mr. Panetta’s tenure at the C.I.A. would be to determine the future of the agency’s detention and interrogation program.

“Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values,” he wrote in The Washington Monthly earlier this year. “But that is a false compromise.” He also wrote: “We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.”  Some human rights groups praised the choice. Elisa Massimino, executive director of Human Rights First, said it was important that the new C.I.A. director be someone “who recognizes that torture is illegal, immoral, dangerous and counterproductive.”

But some intelligence experts called the selection underwhelming, given the important role the C.I.A. plays in disrupting terrorist attacks against the United States.

“It’s a puzzling choice and a high-risk choice,” said Amy Zegart, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written extensively on intelligence matters.

“The best way to change intelligence policies from the Bush administration responsibly is to pick someone intimately familiar with them,” Ms. Zegart said. “This is intelligence, not tax or transportation policy. You can’t hit the ground running by reading briefing books and asking smart questions.”

As C.I.A. director, Mr. Panetta would report to Mr. Blair. Neither choice has yet been publicly announced.

The C.I.A. has settled down from years of turmoil after the Sept. 11 attacks and fallout from flawed intelligence assessments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs. But the agency’s role among the constellation of spy agencies operating under the director of national intelligence remains ill-defined.

Mr. Panetta, a native of Monterey, Calif., served eight terms in the House before becoming the chief budget adviser to Mr. Clinton in 1993 and taking over as Mr. Clinton’s chief of staff from July 1994 to January 1997.

Lee H. Hamilton, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, of which Mr. Panetta was a member, said Mr. Panetta’s good relationship with Mr. Obama could translate into influence within the broader intelligence community.

Mr. Hamilton said Mr. Panetta could make up for a lack of direct intelligence experience by picking a strong group of aides at the agency.

“You have to look at the team,” he said. “You clearly will want intelligence professionals at the highest levels of the C.I.A.”

The new administration’s brief, which is due Feb. 20, has the potential to hearten or infuriate Mr. Obama’s supporters, many of whom are looking to him for stark disavowals of the Bush administration’s legal positions on the detention and interrogation of so-called enemy combatants held at Navy facilities on the American mainland or at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama made broad statements criticizing the Bush administration’s assertions of executive power. But now he must address a specific case, that of Ali al-Marri, a Qatari student who was arrested in Peoria, Ill., in December 2001. The Bush administration says Mr. Marri is a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda, and it is holding him without charges at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. He is the only person currently held as an enemy combatant on the mainland, but the legal principles established in his case are likely to affect the roughly 250 prisoners at Guantánamo.

Many legal experts say that all of the new administration’s options in Mr. Marri’s case are perilous. Intelligence officials say he is exceptionally dangerous, making deportation problematic.

Trying him on criminal charges could be difficult, too, in part because some of the evidence against him may have been obtained through torture and would not be admissible.

And staying the course in the Marri case would outrage civil libertarians.

“If they adopt the Bush administration position, or some version of it,” said Brandt Goldstein, a professor at New York Law School, “it is going to be a moment of profound disappointment for everyone in the legal community and Americans generally who believe that the Bush administration has tried to turn the presidency into a monarchy.”

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mr. Obama, Brooke Anderson, said he “will make decisions about how to handle detainees as president when his full national security and legal teams are in place.”

There are other significant cases on the Supreme Court’s docket — including ones concerning indecency on the airwaves, religious displays, voting rights and the possible pre-emption of state injury suits by federal law — but specialists say a midcourse correction is most likely in the enemy combatant case, Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli, No. 08-368.

Charles Fried, who was solicitor general in the Reagan administration, said such changes should be undertaken “reluctantly and rarely” and only “for sufficient reason in a sufficiently urgent case.”

From the new administration’s perspective, Mr. Marri’s case may meet that standard.

A year ago, Mr. Obama answered a detailed questionnaire concerning his views on presidential power from The Boston Globe. “I reject the Bush administration’s claim,” Mr. Obama said, “that the president has plenary authority under the Constitution to detain U.S. citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants.”

That sounds vigorous and categorical. But applying this view to Mr. Marri’s case is not that simple. Although he was in the United States legally, he was not an American citizen. In addition, a 2001 Congressional authorization to use military force arguably gave the president the authority that Mr. Obama has said is not conferred by the Constitution alone.

Still, Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who has generally supported the Bush administration’s approach to fighting terrorism, said Mr. Obama’s hands are tied. He cannot, Mr. McCarthy said, continue to maintain that Mr. Marri’s detention is lawful.

“I don’t think politically for him that’s a viable option,” Mr. McCarthy said. “Legally, it’s perfectly viable.”

There is precedent for reversing course between campaign and courthouse. When Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, he was vehement in his opposition to the first Bush administration’s policy of intercepting Haitian refugees at sea and returning them without asylum hearings.

By the time he took office, though, Mr. Clinton had changed his mind, instructing the Justice Department to defend the policy in the Supreme Court, which upheld it in 1993.

Mr. Obama’s supporters are hoping for a different approach, one that will ensure that the precedents set during the Bush administration do not take root.

“The agenda for the Obama administration in dealing with the Bush administration’s assault on the rule of law,” said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University and a member of the Marri legal team, “should be to plow the site with both intellectual and political salt.”

In 1993, Mr. Clinton said that practical reality trumped legal theory. In the Marri case, too, the practical alternatives to military detention may strike the Obama administration as unpalatable.

One possibility is to deport Mr. Marri to Qatar, but Bush administration officials say that would be an enormous mistake.

“Al-Marri must be detained,” Jeffrey N. Rapp, a defense intelligence official wrote in a court filing in 2004, “to prevent him from aiding Al Qaeda in its efforts to attack the United States, its armed forces, other governmental personnel, or citizens.”

Mr. Marri’s lawyers would be delighted to see their client freed, but they are also eager to vacate a decision of the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., in July upholding the president’s authority to detain Mr. Marri subject to a court hearing on whether he was properly designated an enemy combatant.

Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who represents Mr. Marri, emphasized both points.

“If, as President-elect Obama has pledged, the rule of law in America is to be restored,” Mr. Hafetz said, “then Mr. al-Marri’s military detention must cease and the lower court’s ruling upholding the president’s power to order the military to seize legal residents and American citizens from their homes and imprison them without charge, must be overturned.”

Another alternative for the new administration is to prosecute Mr. Marri as a criminal. But it is not clear that there is admissible evidence against him.

When Mr. Marri was arrested, in December 2001, he was charged with garden-variety crimes: credit card fraud and, later, lying to federal agents and financial institutions, and identity theft. But when Mr. Bush moved Mr. Marri from the criminal system to military detention in June 2003, the government agreed to dismiss those charges with prejudice, meaning they cannot be refiled.

The more serious accusations recounted in Mr. Rapp’s statement are attributed partly to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is believed to be the chief architect of the Sept. 11 attacks and who was captured in early 2003. The Central Intelligence Agency has said Mr. Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding, and information obtained from him may therefore not be admissible in court. Mr. McCarthy, the former prosecutor, said he hoped the new administration is sifting through its options with exceptional care.

“If they can’t try him in federal court and assuming he poses the severe risk the Bush administration suggests he poses, is there some room to detain him under the immigration system?” Mr. McCarthy asked. “If there is not a Plan B, we have a disaster that transcends al-Marri,” he added, referring to the larger question of what to do with the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

A second case concerning detainees is moving even faster than Mr. Marri’s. Last month, the Supreme Court ordered a federal appeals court to take a fresh look at a case brought by four former prisoners at Guantánamo Bay who say they were tortured. Acting fast, the appeals court initially ordered briefing to be completed by the Friday before Inauguration Day.

Depending on how you look at it, the appeals court was being exceptionally efficient, uninterested in the new administration’s views or doing it a favor by not forcing it to take an immediate position on whether provisions of the Bill of Rights and a federal law guaranteeing religious freedom apply to detainees held at Guantánamo Bay.

Eric L. Lewis, a lawyer for the former prisoners, asked the court to slow things down, a request the Bush Justice Department opposed. But the appeals court granted Mr. Lewis’s request on Friday, and the first filings are now due on Jan. 26 — the Monday after Inauguration Day.

Maj. Gen. Mark Graham has made mental health a focus in his command. One of his sons, an R.O.T.C. cadet, committed suicide.

FORT CARSON, Colo. — For the past several years, as this Army installation in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains became a busy way station for soldiers cycling in and out of Iraq, the number of servicemen implicated in violent crimes has raised alarm.

Nine current or former members of Fort Carson’s Fourth Brigade Combat Team have killed someone or were charged with killings in the last three years after returning from Iraq. Five of the slayings took place last year alone. In addition, charges of domestic violence, rape and sexual assault have risen sharply.

Prodded by Senator Ken Salazar, Democrat of Colorado, the base commander began an investigation of the soldiers accused of homicide. An Army task force is reviewing their recruitment, medical and service records, as well as their personal histories, to determine if the military could have done something to prevent the violence. The inquiry was recently expanded to include other serious violent crimes.

Now the secretary of the Army, Pete Geren, says he is considering conducting an Army-wide review of all soldiers “involved in violent crimes since returning” from Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a letter sent to Mr. Salazar in December. Mr. Geren wrote that the Fort Carson task force had yet to find a specific factor underlying the killings, but that the inquiry was continuing.

Focusing attention on soldiers charged with killings is a shift for the military, which since the start of the war in Iraq has largely deflected any suggestion that combat could be a factor in violent behavior among some returning service members.

Maj. Gen. Mark Graham, the Fort Carson commander, said, “If they had a good manner of performance before they deployed, then they get back and they get into trouble, instead of saying we will discipline you for trouble, the leadership has to say, Why did that occur, what happened, what is causing this difference in behavior?”

General Graham, whose oldest son, Jeff, was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq a year after another son, Kevin, committed suicide, has made mental health a focus since taking command of Fort Carson in 2007. “I feel like I have to speak out for the Kevins of the world,” he said.

The inquiry, the general added, is “looking for a trend, something that happened through their life cycle that might have contributed to this, something we could have seen coming.”

Last January, The New York Times published articles examining the cases of veterans of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan charged with homicide after their return. At the time, it counted at least 121 such cases. In many of them, combat trauma and the stress of deployment appeared to have set the stage for the crimes.

At Fort Carson, at least four of the accused killers from the Fourth Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division were grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder and several had been injured in battle.

One was John Needham, a 25-year-old private from a military family in California, whose downward spiral began when he sustained shrapnel wounds in Iraq and tried to commit suicide. This September, after being treated for stress disorder and receiving a medical discharge from the Army, Mr. Needham was charged with beating his girlfriend to death.

“Where is this aggression coming from?” asked Vivian H. Gembara, a former captain and Army prosecutor at Fort Carson until 2004, who wrote a book about the war crimes she prosecuted in Iraq. “Was it something in Iraq? Were they in a lot of heavy combat? If so, the command needs to pay more attention to that. You can’t just point all of them out as bad apples.”

The Fourth Combat Brigade, previously called the Second Combat Brigade, fought in Iraq’s fiercest cities at some of the toughest moments. Falluja and Ramadi, after insurgents dug into the rubble. Baghdad and its Sadr City district, as body counts soared. By 2007, after two tours, the brigade, which numbers 3,500, had lost 113 soldiers, with hundreds more wounded. It is now preparing for a tour in Afghanistan this spring.

Most Fort Carson soldiers have been to Iraq at least once; others have deployed two, three or four times.  Kaye Baron, a therapist in Colorado Springs who treats Fort Carson soldiers and families, said, “It got to the point I stopped asking if they have deployed, and started asking how many times they have deployed.”

Ms. Baron added, “There are some guys who say, ‘Why do I have to get treatment for P.T.S.D.? I just have to go back.’ ”

While most soldiers returning from war adjust with minor difficulties, military leaders acknowledges that multiple deployments strain soldiers and families, and can increase the likelihood of problems like excessive drinking, marital strife and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Domestic violence among Fort Carson soldiers has become more prevalent since the Iraq war began in 2003. In 2006, Fort Carson soldiers were charged in 57 cases of domestic violence, according to figures released by the base. As of mid-December, the number had grown to 145.

Rape and sexual assault cases against soldiers have also increased, from 10 in 2006 to 38 as of mid-December, the highest tally since the war began. Both domestic violence and rape are crimes that are traditionally underreported.

Fort Carson officials say the increased numbers do not necessarily indicate more violence. Karen Connelly, a Fort Carson spokeswoman, said the base, whose population fluctuates from 11,000 to 14,500 soldiers, is doing a better job of holding soldiers accountable for crimes, encouraging victims to come forward and keeping statistics.

Even so, Col. B. Shannon Davis, the base’s deputy commander, said the task force was examining these trends. “We are looking at crime as a whole,” he said.

The killings allegedly involving the nine current or former Fourth Brigade soldiers have caused the most consternation. The first occurred in 2005, when Stephen Sherwood, a musician who joined the Army for health benefits, returned from Iraq and fatally shot his wife and then himself.

Last year, three battlefield friends were charged with murder after two soldiers were found shot dead within four months of each other. Two of the accused suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and all three had been in disciplinary or criminal trouble in the military. One had a juvenile record and been injured in Iraq.

The latest killing was in October, when the police say Robert H. Marko, an infantryman, raped and killed Judilianna Lawrence, a developmentally disabled teenager he had met online. Specialist Marko believed that on his 21st birthday he would become the “Black Raptor” — half-man, half-dinosaur, a confidential Army document shows. The Army evaluated him three times for mental health problems but cleared him for combat each time.

Senator Salazar, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to be secretary of the interior, called for the Fort Carson inquiry, saying the killings raised questions about what role, if any, combat stress played.

“It’s a hard issue, but it’s a realistic issue,” he said.

Since arriving at Fort Carson, General Graham has spoken openly about mental health, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder, calling it an act of courage, not frailty, to ask for help.

His 21-year-old son, a top R.O.T.C. cadet, hanged himself in 2003 after battling depression. He had stopped taking his antidepressants because he did not want to disclose his illness, fearing such an admission would harm his chances for a career as an Army doctor, General Graham said.

“He was embarrassed,” the general said.

He added: “I feel it every day. We didn’t give him all the care we should have. He got some care, but not enough. I’ll never be convinced I did enough for my son.”

At Fort Carson, in cases of dishonorable discharge, General Graham asks whether the soldier might be struggling with combat stress disorder.

He has sometimes opted instead to grant medical discharges, which entitle veterans to benefits. All Fort Carson soldiers who seek medical attention are now asked about their mental health and, if necessary, referred for treatment.

Still, some sergeants view stress disorder skeptically and actively discourage treatment, some therapists and soldiers say.  Billie Gray, 71, who until recently worked at a base clinic helping soldiers with emotional problems, said “that was the biggest problem at Fort Carson today: harassment” and “the very fact they are harassed made their mental status worse.”

Ms. Gray said she believed she was fired in October for being an outspoken advocate for mental health treatment. Base officials declined to comment, citing privacy reasons.

Colonel Davis, the deputy commander, acknowledged that sergeants had been reprimanded for discouraging treatment. “We have had to take corrective action,” he said, “but fewer and fewer times.”

John Wylie Needham, one of the accused killers whose case is now being examined by the task force, was “cracking up” in Iraq, he told his father in an e-mail message. Yet, he felt he had to fight to get help, his father said in an interview.

In October 2006, during his first week in Iraq, Private Needham, a California surfer, watched a good friend die from a sniper bullet. Months later, he was blasted in the back by shrapnel from a grenade. To cope with his growing anxiety, he stole Valium and drank liquor. Caught twice, he was punished with a reduction in rank, a fine and extra work, a confidential Army document shows. Eventually, he was prescribed medication, but he wrote to his father, Mike Needham, that it did not help.

Private Needham became angry at the way other soldiers reacted to the fighting, and he did not hide it. “They seemed to revel in how many people they had killed,” said a friend in his unit who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In September 2007, Private Needham tried to kill himself with a gun, the Army document states, but another soldier intervened. Mike Needham, a veteran, said that rather than treating his son, the Army disciplined him for discharging a weapon and confined him to barracks. The Army declined to comment.

“I’m stressed to the point of completely losing it,” Private Needham wrote to his father in October 2007. “The squad leader brushed me off and said suck it up.”

He added, “They keep me locked up in this room and if I need food or water I have to have 2 guards with me.”

The Army evacuated Private Needham to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to treat his back and his post-traumatic stress disorder. But a month later, he was back at Fort Carson.

“The first words out of the Mental Health Authority was, ‘we are severely understaffed,’ ” Mr. Needham said in an e-mail message to an officer at Walter Reed. “If you’re suicidal we can see you twice a week, otherwise once a week.”

Fort Carson assured Mike Needham that his son was receiving proper care. But during his son’s visit home during the Thanksgiving break, Mr. Needham found him smearing camouflage-colored makeup on his face and frantically sharpening a stick with a kitchen knife.

“He was a total mess,” Mr. Needham said.

He was treated at a California naval hospital until last July when he received a medical discharge from the Army. While Private Needham was in the early stages of getting help from a Veterans Administration clinic, he spent his days depressed and often drinking at his father’s condominium.

Then last summer, Private Needham met Jacqwelyn Villagomez, a bubbly 19-year-old aspiring model who saw him as a kindred spirit, said Jennifer Johnson, who had helped raise her. Her mother had died of AIDS when she was 6 and her father had left the family. Ms. Villagomez, “who saw the good in everyone,” had recently kicked a heroin habit, Ms. Johnson said.

“She thought she could save him,” Ms. Johnson said. But a month later, the police say, Private Needham beat Ms. Villagomez to death in his father’s condominium.

Mr. Needham said the Army handled his son’s case poorly, but Ms. Johnson finds it hard to muster sympathy for him.

“I’m sure what happened to him was awful,” she said. “I’m sure he saw some horrible things that altered him. But this is a 200-pound guy who beat up this 95-pound little girl. It’s disgusting.”