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WASHINGTON - Republican congressional leaders tentatively agreed to trim deficits by $42 billion and sought to unlock the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling Sunday in a frenzied year-end bid to enact the core of a conservative agenda.

Medicare, the student loan program and Medicaid, which provides health care for the poor, would all be tapped for savings under the emerging five-year deficit-cutting plan.

House Republican leaders said they would call for a vote within hours, and a post-midnight session seemed likely. Passage would clear the way for a Senate vote as early as Monday.

GOP leaders hoped the ANWR drilling legislation would be close behind. But it faced a rockier course — a threatened filibuster in the Senate that can only be broken with a 60-vote majority.

Democratic critics attacked the bill’s chief advocate, Sen. Ted Stevens (news, bio, voting record) of Alaska, for adding the oil provision to legislation providing $453 billion for the Pentagon. They also accused him of offering enticements to skeptical senators in the form of funds for hurricane relief and other programs.

“Isn’t that what the game really is here?” said Rep. David Obey (news, bio, voting record), D-Wis. He said Stevens was “trying to make Gulf Coast states an offer they can’t refuse.”

“That’s not the point,” replied the Alaska Republican, who said expanding domestic production of oil is a matter of national security.

Conservatives hailed the deficit-cutting measure as the first attempt in a decade to rein in the cost of federal benefit programs, which customarily expand from year to year based on the eligible population.

Preliminary figures put the savings from Medicare at $8.3 billion over the next five years, and planned spending on Medicaid was estimated to fall by nearly $5 billion.

The largest single savings in Medicare would reduce anticipated federal funding for the private HMOs established under 2003 Medicare legislation designed to give the program a free-market flavor.

Payments for home health care services would be curbed, as well.

According to a preliminary draft of the agreement, wealthier beneficiaries would be required to pay higher premiums under Part B, which covers doctor services.

Officials said the changes to Medicaid include an attempt to make it harder for the elderly to transfer their assets to children or others in order to qualify for federal nursing home benefits.

The largest savings from the student loan program would involve establishment of a fixed interest rate on loans.

Another provision of the legislation would raise the per-employee premium that companies pay into the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.

Pending release of final details, it was not clear how much of the savings were from changes in the programs, as opposed to raising funds by auctioning off access to a portion of the radio spectrum.

And there were provisions that pointed the way to higher spending in the future.

In one case, lawmakers bowed to the wishes of doctors and agreed to restore a scheduled 4.6 percent cut in physician payments under Medicare. The cost was $7.3 billion, and a decision to erase a similarly scheduled cut for 2007 will require additional spending a year from now.

Stevens and other supporters of opening ANWR to oil drilling have been trying for more than a decade to pass legislation, and President Bush has made it an element of his energy policy, as well.

Environmentalists, backed by most Democrats, have waged an equally determined battle to block it.

After gaining seats in 2004, Republicans resolved to make the most of their opportunity.

The decision to add the oil legislation to the defense bill was designed to make it harder for lawmakers to oppose the measure. So, too, the decision to add $29 billion in new federal aid for the victims of Hurricane Katrina and other storms that hit the United States earlier this year.

The legislation also includes $2 billion in additional funds for the low-income home heating assistance program — of particular concern in northeastern states represented by moderate Republicans and Democrats ordinarily unsympathetic to ANWR oil drilling.

While much of the attention focused on deficit reduction and ANWR, the fate of two other major bills remained unclear.

Republicans held back a second defense bill, hoping to add legislation that would place limits on the donations that independent political organizations can accept.

Democrats circulated a two-page list of provisions they said are jeopardized by the gambit. One would continue reimbursement private individuals and groups who purchase body armor for members of the armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Also pending was a spending bill for the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services. Democrats and moderate Republicans in the Senate said it shortchanges a wide swath of social programs, and Senate GOP leaders postponed votes last week for fear of defeat.

BAGHDAD, April 23 — Violence is escalating sharply in Iraq after a period of relative calm that followed the January elections. Bombings, ambushes and kidnappings targeting Iraqis and foreigners, both troops and civilians, have surged this month while the new Iraqi government is caught up in power struggles over cabinet positions.

Many attacks have gone unchallenged by Iraqi forces in large areas of the country dominated by insurgents, according to the U.S. military, Iraqi officials and civilians and visits by Washington Post correspondents. Hundreds of Iraqis and foreigners have either been killed or wounded in the last week.

“Definitely, violence is getting worse,” said a U.S. official in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “My strong sense is that a lot of the political momentum that was generated out of the successful election, which was sort of like a punch in the gut to the insurgents, has worn off.” The political stalemate “has given the insurgents new hope,” the official added, repeating a message Americans say they are increasingly giving Iraqi leaders.

This week, at a checkpoint bunker in Tarmiya where insurgents downed a helicopter, a teenager in sunglasses clutching an AK-47 marked the limits of the Iraqi army’s authority. “I wouldn’t advise going there,” the young Shiite Muslim recruit said, referring to Tarmiya, a Tigris River town a few hundred yards up the road that is dominated by Sunni Muslim landowners who were loyal to Saddam Hussein. “Those are some bad people there.”

Up the road, insurgents run relatively free, and last week they appeared to have used a hilltop outside of town to fire what they later said was a shoulder-launched, heat-seeking missile. The missile hit a chartered Russian-made helicopter Thursday, killing six Americans and five other foreigners, including a survivor executed by the guerrillas afterward.

Another U.S. soldier was killed on Saturday when a roadside bomb exploded near a military convoy west of Baghdad, the Reuters news agency reported.

The U.S. official said this week that overall attacks had increased since the end of March. Roadside bombings and attacks on military targets are up by as much as 40 percent in parts of the country over the same period, according to estimates from private security outfits.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi leadership remains in limbo.

The attacks, coming as officials continued to haggle over government posts, have eroded some of the hope that followed the elections. Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and secular leaders, most of whom are building the first democratically elected Iraqi government of their adult lives, have let power struggles fill nearly one-third of their government’s planned 11-month run.

At best, deal-making on some key posts appears stuck where it was two weeks ago, when Ibrahim Jafari, a formerly exiled Shiite leader, accepted the prime minister’s job and the task of forming a promised national-unity government.

There was increasing talk that dissenters within the governing coalition, led by Shiites and Kurds, are trying to prolong negotiations until Jafari misses an early May deadline to form a government. This could put the prime minister job into the hands of another Shiite candidate.

Soldiers and police across much of Iraq have fallen into inaction. The Defense and Interior ministries are run by interim chiefs slated for replacement. Initiatives by the Iraqi forces against the insurgents have all but ceased.

The insurgency has found new hideouts, gathering points and recruiting areas in western and central Iraq, and in eastern Iraq along the Tigris River, as well as in other locations.

“The government is useless! I have stopped depending on it,” Ali Hali, a 29-year-old Shiite, cried last week. He was among hundreds of wailing residents of the southern city of Najaf who gathered in anger after scores of bodies were found in the Tigris. How the people were killed is not known, but Shiites said they presumed them to be victims of Sunni extremists.