The Senate voted Tuesday to restore $3 billion that was cut from the defense budget by the Senate Budget Committee and to reject a Bush administration plan to increase health care fees for veterans.

The votes came as the Senate worked on SConRes 83, the congressional budget resolution that sets broad federal spending and revenue guidelines. The House does not plan to write its version of the bill until the week of March 27 at the earliest.

By a 100-0 vote, the Senate approved an amendment offered by Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., that adds money to the Department of Veterans' Affairs health care budget to cover the money the Bush administration proposed to raise by increasing prescription drug co-payments and creating an enrollment fee for some veterans.

The amendment adds $795 million to the veterans' budget to cover the fees, plus $27 million for prosthetic limb research, which the Bush administration proposed cutting.

"These fees are not what we promised our military folks when they went off to war or when they stand ready to defend this country," Burns said.

"Our veterans deserve the best we can give them," Burns said in a statement after the vote. "I am pleased my amendment unanimously passed the Senate today, restoring the funding needed for our veterans and rejecting the proposed health care cost increases on veterans. I'll continue to fight for veterans in Montana and across the country to make sure they get the funding they need and the treatment and respect they deserve."

Passage came after Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee chairman who had supported the Bush fee plan, said he would back Burns.

"I continue to believe those proposals were eminently reasonable," Craig said. "However, I know that the majority of my colleagues do no find these proposals reasonable."

By a 54-46 vote, the Senate rejected an effort by Democrats to win an even bigger increase in the VA budget.

The $3 billion restoration to the defense budget was approved on a separate voice vote.

Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, ranking Democrat on the budget committee, warned that the $3 billion restored to the defense budget would be diverted from funding for other federal programs, including homeland security and veterans' programs,.

Sen. James Talent, R-Mo., the chief sponsor of the amendment to restore the defense funding, said he had planned to seek an increase in the administration's defense budget request until the Senate committee decided to cut it. Now, he said, he was simply looking to preserve the administration's plan, even though the White House's Office of Management and Budget had cut $10 billion from the defense budget over the last two years.

"It is not all we need … but it is a first step," Talent said.

"It is not optional to allow the military equipment that our men and women use to age and eventually to collapse," he said. "We are going to pay this bill. The longer we wait, the bigger the bill will be. That is one of the reasons why the increases that the president has proposed and Congress has provided in the last five years have not been enough to allow us to tread water. We have continued to slip backwards.

"The defense budget is already too small, and we need to commit as a nation to spending what is needed to sustain and modernize our armed forces," said Talent, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"We need to commit as a nation to spend what is needed to sustain and modernize our armed forces and properly equip our men and women in uniform," he said after the vote. "I'm pleased the Senate agreed that we should at least fund defense at the level the president requested, but I believe we can and should do more."