The president’s budget request includes $130 million for the consortium, White House officials said. In addition, they said, Mr. Obama will request $70 million for the National Cancer Institute, the largest unit of the National Institutes of Health, to investigate genes that may contribute to the risk of developing certain types of cancer, and then to use that knowledge to develop more effective treatments.

Mr. Obama also plans to seek $10 million for the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the technology used to analyze DNA. Such analysis can identify millions of genetic variants, providing information that would help diagnose or treat some diseases, officials said.

The budget request also includes $5 million for health information technology so researchers can safely exchange data.

“We’re going to make sure that protecting patient privacy is built into our efforts from Day 1,” Mr. Obama said. “And I’m proud we have so many patients-rights advocates with us here today. They’re not going to be on the sidelines. This is not going to be an afterthought. They’ll help us design this initiative from the ground up, making sure that we harness the new technologies and opportunities in a responsible way.”

Since the 1990s, researchers have been collecting and storing human tissue and other biological specimens in repositories known as biobanks.

Jo Handelsman, the associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said of the president’s plan: “We do not envision this as being a biobank, which would suggest a single repository for all the data or all the samples. There are existing cohorts around the country that have already been started and have rich sources of data. The challenge in this initiative is to link them together and fill in the gaps.”

Dr. Collins said the initiative was feasible because of advances in genetics and cell biology, the use of electronic medical records, significant increases in computing power and a sharp decline over the last 15 years in the cost of a laboratory technique known as DNA sequencing. The technique is used to investigate the functions of genes and to analyze the full set of a person’s genes — the genome.