Warren B. Rudman, the sometimes combative centrist Republican senator from New Hampshire who waged a frustrating fight to balance the federal budget and helped lead a federal panel that warned of a terrorist strike against the United States only months before the 9/11 attacks, died on Monday night in Washington. He was 82.

The cause was complications of lymphoma, his former communications director, Bob Stevenson, said.

Mr. Rudman, a Korean War veteran and former amateur boxer, prided himself on his blunt-speaking adherence to centrist principles and his belief in bipartisan compromise as the underpinning of good government. He served two terms in the Senate, and decided out of exasperation not to seek re-election in 1992, saying that the federal government was “not functioning” and that it was impossible to get anything done in a Senate rife with posturing and partisanship.

Before he left office he extended his fight against the budget deficit by joining with former Senator Paul E. Tsongas, Democrat of Massachusetts, and former Commerce Secretary Peter G. Peterson in founding the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan advocacy group on fiscal issues.

As a private citizen he served as co-chairman of a federal commission on national security with former Senator Gary Hart of Colorado. In a report released on Feb. 15, 2001, seven months before planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, the panel warned that “attacks against American citizens on American soil, possibly causing heavy casualties, are likely over the next quarter-century.”