WASHINGTON — Acting on the Senate’s first budget since President Barack Obama took office, a Democratic-led panel is moving toward party-line approval of a fiscal blueprint that would trim the budget deficit while protecting safety net programs from slashing cuts proposed by Republicans.

The expected vote today in the Senate Budget Committee comes as the president heads to the Capitol for a third consecutive day, carrying his charm offensive with Congress to Senate Republicans and his Democratic allies in the House.

The Senate budget plan, drafted by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., blends about $1 trillion in modest cuts to health care providers, the Pentagon, domestic agencies and interest payments on the debt with an equal amount in new revenue claimed by ending some tax breaks.

But because Democrats want to restore $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts over the same period — cuts imposed by Washington’s failure to strike a broader budget pact — Murray’s blueprint increases spending slightly when compared with current policies.

In the House, Budget Committee Republicans approved a 2014 budget plan late Wednesday with an entirely opposite approach.

It whacks spending by $4.6 trillion over the coming decade and promises sweeping cuts to Medicaid and domestic agencies while setting a path to balancing the government’s books within 10 years. The party-line vote sent the measure to the full House for a vote next week.

Separately, debate continues in the Senate on a bipartisan spending measure wrapping up unfinished work on this year’s budget — the annual spending bills funding the day-to-day operating budgets of federal agencies. Leaders hope to finish that measure today. It is required to prevent a government shutdown at the end of the month.

Senate passage would send the measure, with numerous changes, back to the House, which initially approved it last week.

Even as Democrats controlling the Senate and the strongly conservative House moved in different directions, the president again decided to travel to the Capitol to open a dialogue with lawmakers. On Wednesday, he met behind closed doors with House Republicans, who welcomed the gesture even as they noted that deep divisions remained.

“We’ve got a big difference between us,” Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., said. “He supports higher tax revenues.”

But Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., said Obama told Republicans that he also supports a revised inflation adjustment called “chained CPI” that would curb cost-of-living increases in Social Security benefits and increase tax revenue through slower indexing of income tax brackets. He also supports “means testing” for Medicare benefits that would require higher-income beneficiaries to pay more for their health care.

The debate in the Senate Budget Committee is the first time since 2009 that Democrats in charge of the Senate have advanced a budget blueprint, which opened to predictably poor reviews from the panel’s Republicans, who said it was heavy on tax increases and light on cuts to rapidly growing benefit and safety-net programs.

At issue is the arcane and partisan congressional budget process, which calls for a unique, nonbinding measure called a budget resolution. When the process works as designed — which is rarely — budget resolutions have the potential to stake out parameters for follow-up legislation specifying spending and rewriting the complex U.S. tax code.