Congressional officials said the budget talks were set back significantly in a meeting Tuesday when the participants feuded over what legislation should serve as the benchmark for the talks — the House-passed spending measure with $61 billion in cuts for this year or an interim budget bill approved by Congress in early March that maintained financing for most programs at their current levels.

Democrats, who believed they had an agreement to work off the stopgap plan, felt blindsided, officials said. Jacob J. Lew, the White House budget director and chief Democratic negotiator, angrily resisted the Republican push to use the House measure as the starting point. The meeting abruptly broke up, with talks resuming haltingly since then.

Ken Baer, a spokesman for Mr. Lew, said he would not “discuss details of meetings that were agreed by all to be confidential. But there are ongoing discussions at many levels.” He did say that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had consulted Thursday with both Mr. Boehner and Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader.

The heated meeting on Tuesday was the first with participation by representatives of the House Appropriations Committee, which drafted the House plan and saw that bill as providing the most legitimate framework for the budget talks. But Democrats argue that using the House measure, which the president has promised to veto, puts them at a disadvantage.

Failure to reach agreement without another stopgap measure could cause a number of federal operations to be halted after April 8. Both Senate and House officials said they believed it would be difficult to advance another short-term budget bill after numerous lawmakers said the temporary measure now in place would be the last one they would support before considering a plan to finance the government through Sept. 30.

The fight over spending levels for the current fiscal year — through Sept. 30 — will be followed by two others that could be even more contentious. Congress will be asked this spring to increase the federal debt limit, a measure that many conservatives say they will oppose unless President Obama is willing to accede to a package of deep spending cuts. The two parties will also be at odds over a budget for next year, with House Republicans intending to introduce into that fight proposals to rein in the long-term costs of entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.