Republicans in both chambers continued to rail against the bill, asserting that it would drive up the budget deficit without doing enough to stimulate the economy.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner , R-Ohio, wouldn’t speculate about how many GOP members would vote for the final stimulus version. Not a single House Republican voted for the initial version.

“I suspect many of our members will continue to stand on principle,” he said. “This bill will not work.”

The final measure would increase the ceiling on the national debt by $789 billion, to $12.104 billion.

Key Provisions

Conference negotiators restored some of the funding the Senate cut from its bill to gain the support of Collins, Snowe and Specter. The Senate-passed measure included $289.8 billion in discretionary funding, which is under jurisdiction of the Appropriations committees, while the House-passed measure included $361 billion.

The conference agreement would provide $311 billion in discretionary funding, including:

• $120 billion for infrastructure and science, of which $27.5 billion is for highways, $9.3 billion for rail transportation, $8.4 billion for public transportation, $7.2 billion to improve broadband access, $6 bllion for environmental cleanup at former weapons production sites and $6 billion for local clean water infrastructure.

• $14.2 billion for health investments, including $10 billion for National Institutes of Health biomedical research and facilities improvements. The NIH funding was a priority for Specter.

• $105.9 billion for education and training, including $53.6 billion for a state fiscal stabilization fund; $13 billion for Title I programs helping disadvantaged students, $12.2

• $37.5 billion for energy, including $11 billion formore than $30 billion in infrastructure.

• $24.7 billion to subsidize COBRA health insurance premiums — at a level of 65 percent, for nine months — for workers who have lost their jobs.

• $7.8 billion for law enforcement and oversight programs.

The final bill would continue through December the extended unemployment benefits program, which was scheduled to phase out at the end of March. The program provides up to 33 weeks of extended benefits to workers who exhaust their regular 26 weeks of benefits. It will help an estimated 3.5 million jobless workers.

The plan also would increase unemployment benefits for 20 million jobless workers by $25 per week., and would allocate an additional $19.9 billion for food stamps, only slightly less than the the $20.717 billion in the House bill. The Senate substitute had $8.231 billion for food stamps.

The deal provides a one-time payment of $250 to recipients of Social Security, Supplemental Security Income and veterans receiving disability compensation and pension benefits.

The final version bolsters support for several housing programs, providing $2 billion for a Neighborhood Stabilization Program to help communities purchase and rehabilitate foreclosed, vacant properties. That’s up from nothing in the Senate bill but only about half the $4.19 billion in the House bill.

The plan would extend trade adjustment assistance benefits for at least 160,000 new workers over the next two years, a provision that was in the Senate but not House bill.

Give and Take

To reduce the cost of the measure – the House version totalled $819 billion and the Senate version cost $838 billion – and make it more palatable to Senate moderates, negotiators scaled back several popular tax break proposals.

Obama’s signature “Making Work Pay” tax credit to offset payroll taxes was trimmed from $500 per person and $1,000 per married couple to $400 and $800, respectively.

Negotiators slightly increased, to $8,000, an existing $7,500 tax credit for first-time homebuyers, extended it through Dec. 31 and dropped a repayment requirement. They also agreed to allow a new tax deduction for state and local sales taxes on new car purchases. But both provisions are less generous than the Senate’s bill, which would have offered a $15,000 tax credit to all homebuyers and allowed deduction of interest payments on car loans, in additional to sales taxes.

As part of the compromise the final agreement includes $53.6 billion for a state stabilization fund, much of which is expected to go to education programs. The House bill would have provided $79 billion for the fund while the Senate bill included $39 billion.

The House measure, however, also included a separate pot of $14 billion for school construction programs. The Senate GOP moderates balked at this sum, arguing the federal government should not be funding school construction.

As part of the compromise, $8.8 billion of the $53.6 billion can go toward “modernization, renovation and repairs of public school facilities,” according to a release from the House and Senate Appropriations committees.

House negotiators were able to keep $1 billion for Community Development Block Grants in the final bill. The Senate measure had no funding for this program.

Democrats have been trumpeting the amount of funding in the bill for energy projects and research. For instance the final agreement include $11 billion for “modernizing” the electrical grid, $4.5 billion to make federal buildings more energy efficient and $5 billion for making low-income housing more energy efficient.

Asked about differences between House and Senate over school construction in the stimulus, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., said school construction “was one of our top priorities on the House side in terms of investments that will be made. It creates jobs immediately and improves education of our children.”

She said House Democrats were “very happy” with the final version. But Pelosi added that “until we could see the language of that agreement” she could not give final signoff.

— Bennett Roth, Bart Jansen, Catharine Richert and Ed Edward Epstein contributed to this story.