Though the new policy was on the drawing board for months, it has new urgency in light of the turmoil in the Arab world, because it will be part of a larger debate over how the United States weighs its alliances with entrenched leaders against support for the young people inspired by the events in Tunisia and Egypt.

Administration officials say the emphasis on a broad array of projects — hotly disputed by some technology experts and human rights activists — reflects their view that technology can be a force that leads to democratic change, but cannot by itself bring down repressive regimes.

“People have a view that technology will make us free,” said Michael H. Posner, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. “No, people will make us free.”

Critics say the administration has held back $30 million in Congressional financing that could have gone to circumvention technology, a proven method that allows Internet users to evade government firewalls by routing their traffic through proxy servers in other countries.

Some of these services have received modest financing from the government, but their backers say they need much more to install networks capable of handling millions of users in China, Iran and other countries.

A report by the Republican minority of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which was to be released Tuesday, said the State Department’s performance was so inadequate that the job of financing Internet freedom initiatives — at least those related to China — should be moved to another agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

There are other tensions in the State Department’s agenda: It champions the free flow of information, except when it is in secret departmental cables made public by WikiLeaks; it wants to help Chinese citizens circumvent their government’s Internet firewall, but is leery of one of the most popular services for doing so, which is sponsored by Falun Gong, a religious group outlawed by Beijing as an evil cult.