House and Senate appropriations committees have begun work on 12 annual spending bills, but House Republicans will set total spending in those bills at $967 billion, expecting the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration to continue. Senate Democrats are expected to use the spending cap of $1.058 trillion established in the first debt ceiling fight, in 2011. House Republican aides concede that a majority of House members might not be able to accept the cuts to domestic programs that would be needed to stay within the Republican limit.

The brewing standoff could be resolved with a comprehensive deficit reduction agreement, but so far House and Senate Republican leaders have refused to even convene a formal negotiating conference to resolve the vast differences between the budget blueprints passed by the Senate and the House.

“We should be talking about the budget in general and how we can get to conference and what we need to do to compromise,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and the chairwoman of the Senate Budget Committee. “They’re over there debating how we’re going to create the next crisis that this country is going to have to face down.”

With little real negotiations going on, Democrats accused House Republicans of preparing for disaster. Representative Dan Maffei, Democrat of New York, said the House “prioritization” bill “maps out not if but when the United States defaults for the first time in the nation’s history.”

Some Republicans were no more charitable.

Even if the Treasury could pull off the difficult task of managing incoming taxes and outgoing payments on a daily basis, about 25 percent of the government would have to shut down for lack of money. And Tony Fratto, a Treasury and White House spokesman in the Bush administration, said the task could not be done.

Daily tax receipts are “lumpy,” Mr. Fratto said. They do not arrive in any steady or predictable way. At the same time, government payments are “spiky” and fluctuate in ways that do not mesh with income tax receipts. The bill also hands Democrats a talking point that Republicans are willing to make foreign creditors like China a priority over veterans and the military.

Mr. Fratto called the bill “technically impossible and politically disastrous.”

But Republicans said they were merely being prudent and signaling to world financial markets that they would not let the United States government miss debt payments.

“This legislation credibly and permanently removes the threat of default on a U.S. debt payment and ensures that Social Security benefit payments are paid in full and on time,” said Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.