Towey called the Bush plan a "compassionate budget in a tight budgetary time," and officials noted that many of the traditional social service programs such as public housing vouchers remained mostly intact.
But advocates for the poor challenged the administration's reasoning.
"The administration wants to abandon commitments that the federal government has made to serve low-income families, and to replace those practical commitments with very small pots of money and lip service about the faith community," said Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, an alliance of social welfare agencies and labor unions.
The debate over the role of faith programs comes after Bush won reelection campaigning to increase government funding for religious charities that he maintained were often better at serving the needs of the poor than entrenched government bureaucracies.
Bush enjoyed broad support from conservative evangelicals drawn to his faith-driven views on moral issues.
The full scope of the proposed budget cuts was not clear Monday, and some advocacy groups cautioned that some faith-based organizations might suffer a net loss of federal dollars.
Still, in pronouncements by the administration Monday, faith-based programs were among the well-publicized winners.
The same division in the Department of Health and Human Services where the marriage and abstinence programs would be increased faces a $719-million cut overall.
"This budget signals a substantial increase in the redistribution of federal dollars to faith-based organizations dealing with topics like marriage and abstinence and away from secular organizations," said Paul C. Light, professor of public service at New York University.
Light sees the Bush budget as part of a slow but steady trend to fund conservative churches and organizations that have a clear social agenda, often at the expense of secular nonprofit organizations and traditional federal aid programs.
At HHS, the head of the Administration for Children and Families, Wade F. Horn, said that this year's budget showed a real commitment to topics such as marriage, child support, fatherhood and sexual abstinence for the unmarried.
"At the end of the day, those initiatives will be there for the benefit of kids," Horn said in an interview.
Horn said his agency had long provided funding to church-related organizations such as Catholic Charities that offered a range of social services.
"I think what's different now is that we try to remove as many barriers as possible" for smaller, independent faith-based organizations that have never participated in federal programs before, he said.
"Now what the president has done is put out the welcome mat for faith-based organizations," Horn said.
