President Bush will address the House and Senate tonight.

In what could be a pivotal early moment of his presidency, George W. Bush will go to Congress tonight and officially present his budget plan for the coming year. The nationally-televised event will signal the first legislative efforts between the new administration and leaders of the nearly-evenly divided House of Representatives and Senate.

In his address, Bush will outline his estimated $1.9 trillion budget request for fiscal 2002 he submits to Congress on Wednesday and attempt to build momentum for his 10-year, $1.6 trillion tax cut proposal.

Bush's budget will seek to reduce increases in government spending from its current 6 percent annual rate to about 4 percent. He has said he hopes to "hold the line" on spending.

The White House said earlier this month that apart from an extra $1 billion for a military pay raise in the next Pentagon budget, Bush has no current plans to raise defense spending in 2002 beyond the $310 billion proposed by former President Clinton this year.

Last week, Bush proposed increasing federal education funding by 11 percent next year, giving the Education Department the largest increase of any Cabinet agency but less than President Bill Clinton had sought. In a speech at an elementary school near Knoxville, Tennessee, Bush proposed raising federal education spending to $44.5 billion from $39.9 billion. The $4.6 billion increase for fiscal 2002 is less than half the $10 billion sought by congressional Democrats, who dismiss the Bush proposal as inadequate.

The Washington Post reports that Bush will pursue reform of the Social Security system by "assigning a high-level commission to try to forge consensus."

Bush administration officials believe that creating a commission will allow the administration to build support for the entitlement reforms, while simultaneously allowing time for Bush's tax and education proposals to take effect.

Most of the debate in the coming weeks is expected to center on the tax cut proposal. GOP senators James Jeffords of Vermont and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island have broken Republican ranks to oppose the plan. Some Democrats have suggested making future tax cuts conditional on the size of the surplus.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that President Bush was "not going to budge" in his opposition to this idea. During the campaign, Bush argued that the only way to keep the surplus from being spent is to keep the money from coming to Washington in the first place, a theme he is expected to echo tonight.

The Democrats' tax plan is about half the size of Bush's, and foresees an additional $1 trillion in government spending over the next ten years. The White House argues that the surplus, projected to be $5.6 trillion over the next decade, is large enough to permit the tax cut, reduce the national debt, and still leave money for Social Security reform.

"The Social Security reform is a major reform, and major reforms take time," Lawrence B. Lindsey, the president's chief economic adviser, told the Post. "Given the state of the economy, I just don't think we could afford to wait" to pass the president's proposed $1.6 trillion tax cut until Congress adopts fundamental Social Security reforms.

While tonight's televised address will resemble a formal "State of the Union" address, the Bush administration has chosen to call the speech a "budget address," timed to coincide with the submission of the president's budget for the next fiscal year. The Constitution does mandate that the president "shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient," but that provision has generally not applied to incoming presidents.

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