In a new advertisement for his re-election campaign, President Biden tries to take one of his greatest perceived liabilities as a candidate, his age, and turn it into an advantage.

“Look, I’m not a young guy. That’s no secret,” says a smiling Mr. Biden, talking directly to the camera. “But here’s the deal: I understand how to get things done for the American people.”

The president, 81, goes on to list the accomplishments of his first term, including his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, capping insulin prices for older consumers and passing infrastructure legislation — while contrasting his record with that of former President Donald J. Trump, the likely Republican nominee, whom he accuses of taking away “the freedom of women to choose” in reproductive matters.

With a fiery State of the Union address under his belt, Mr. Biden is entering full campaign mode. The new ad is the first in a $30 million blitz that will target key battleground states over the next six weeks. Mr. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and their spouses are crisscrossing the country to host political events. And on Saturday, three Democratic groups representing people of color — the AAPI Victory Fund, the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund — are endorsing Mr. Biden and pledging to spend another $30 million to turn their voters out.

Mr. Biden often jokes about his age in small settings. But Americans are more likely to be familiar with his angry remarks over a recent special counsel’s report, which referred to him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

The new ad, titled “For You,” represents a shift in tone. Its joking familiarity may appeal to younger voters, whose support Mr. Biden needs to shore up, and it will play on channels popular with a youthful demographic, including ESPN, Adult Swim and Comedy Central.

The spot even includes an outtake. After the standard announcement that Mr. Biden has approved the message, a voice off-camera asks him to do one more take.

“Look, I’m very young, energetic and handsome. What the hell am I doing this for?” Mr. Biden replies, flashing a mischievous grin before the screen goes black.

More than two decades ago, Wayne Jones traveled to Daytona Beach, then Florida’s spring break mecca, not to party but to study.

His bosses at the Miami Beach Police Department, where he was a young officer, wanted to know how Daytona managed its famously rowdy crowds. Maybe Miami Beach, which had its own unruly scene every year over Memorial Day weekend, could learn a thing or two.

Officer Jones is now Chief Jones of the Miami Beach Police. And Memorial Day is no longer the city’s main concern: His most urgent task is bringing order to the weeks in March when Miami Beach gets inundated with spring breakers, a monthlong slog that has become a thorn in the city’s side. Last year, the police made more than 500 arrests and confiscated more than 100 guns over the spring break period.

But Chief Jones has high expectations.

“This is going to be the best spring break ever,” he said in a recent interview at his South Beach office. “I can feel it in my bones.”

It was a bold declaration in a city where fretting over spring break has become a year-round affair, with each new wave of politicians and administrators vowing to be the ones who finally get the season under control.

That would mean avoiding shootings like the ones that killed two people over a single weekend last year. But how far to go to secure the city as huge numbers of visitors arrive there in March has long been a matter of debate, with some tactics drawing charges of racism and lawsuits over civil rights and over-policing.

Some 25 years ago, Miami Beach became a destination for young Black visitors over the Memorial Day weekend, as clubs held hip-hop events that collectively became known as Urban Beach Week. After several violent incidents over the years, including some involving an excessive use of force by the police, the city in 2017 brought in a more family-friendly annual March event, the Hyundai Air & Sea Show. That shifted some Black tourism to spring break.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, unwieldy crowds have flocked to the city for spring break. Miami Beach imposed emergency midnight curfews in 2023 and 2022, and an especially contentious 8 p.m. curfew in 2021.

A new mayor and commission elected to nonpartisan seats in November, after a campaign cycle dominated by public safety issues, took a more aggressive tack. Miami Beach is breaking up with spring break, the city announced in a social media ad this week: “This isn’t working anymore,” it begins. “And it’s not us. It’s you.”

“Our idea of a good time is relaxing on the beach, hitting up the spa or checking out a new restaurant,” people say in the ad from various spots in Miami Beach. “You just want to get drunk in public and ignore laws.”

This weekend and next — typically the peak times for crowds — Miami Beach visitors should prepare for extraordinary measures, including D.U.I. checkpoints, bag checks at beach entrances and potential curfews. Beach access will be restricted after 6 p.m., with no one allowed on after 10 p.m. Sidewalk tables and chairs will be banned from the many cafes along Ocean Drive.

Public parking garages on South Beach will be closed except for residents and permit holders. A garage on 42nd Street, north of the spring break hubbub, will charge a flat rate of $100. (Not a typo.)

“We’ve had enough,” Mayor Steven Meiner said at a news conference unveiling the city’s campaign.

In a change for liberal Miami Beach, whose past mayors have been outspoken critics of state leaders, Mr. Meiner, who leans more conservative than his predecessors, has sought support from Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican. Mr. DeSantis traveled to Miami Beach on Tuesday and, flanked by law enforcement officers, pledged to send state troopers to assist with the crackdown.

“We welcome people to come and have a good time,” Mr. DeSantis said. “What we don’t welcome is criminal activity. What we don’t welcome is mayhem.”

Mr. DeSantis said 140 troopers will be deployed across the state to help keep spring break season peaceful, including to Fort Lauderdale, Daytona Beach and Panama City Beach. Forty-five of them will help direct traffic, fly drones and use license plate readers on causeways in Miami Beach.

Many of the troublemakers in past years have been residents of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties who tend to drive onto the barrier island at night, Chief Jones said.

Keon Hardemon, a Miami-Dade County commissioner, said that Miami Beach is “doing it wrong” by imposing heavy-handed rules on events, such as a music festival with ticketed entry.

“What you’re telling people is, ‘You’re not welcome here,’ and that’s the antithesis to a community that’s built on tourism,” he said.

“The people who are coming during this time happen to be people who look like me,” added Mr. Hardemon, who is Black. He said that he would be equally upset if he felt other subsets of visitors were being targeted.

“To single out this sort of crowd during these times and say you’re welcoming them but putting these sort of heavy-handed measures in place,” he said, “I think it’s disingenuous.”

Joshua Wallack, the chief operating officer of Mango’s Tropical Cafe on Ocean Drive, said he was glad to see the city try something new, though he expects businesses to suffer. He was grateful that cars would still be allowed on Ocean Drive, since past closures had led to chaotic street parties.

“Stop turning the whole place into a schoolyard full of children that, at 3 o’clock in the morning, get into fistfights because they’re drunk and high,” he said.

Marilyn Freundlich, who lives in the Sunset Harbour neighborhood of South Beach, somewhat removed from the partying, called closing the garages “a great idea.”

“The last few years, it has become a chaos, a free-for-all,” she said.

In a divided vote last month, Miami Beach commissioners repealed a 2015 ordinance that gave police officers the discretion to issue civil citations for possession of up to 20 grams of marijuana instead of arresting people for it; Chief Jones said officers had rarely used the citation option. Commissioner Tanya K. Bhatt was one of several votes against the repeal, citing concerns about racial disparities.

“Statistically, Black and brown people get arrested and go to jail for weed, and white people with more money and more access to lawyers” do not, she said. None of the city’s commissioners are Black.

Chief Jones, the city’s first Black police chief, who began his career as a bicycle cop, said his officers “police conduct — bad behavior — not race or color.” He said he may even hop on a bike and do a little patrolling himself.

“I’m hypersensitive, being a Black man, to race and policing,” he said. “Arrest, for us, is not the first option.”

How does he think this year’s big law enforcement display will go over?

“It’s not a concern as long as people are safe,” Chief Jones said. “As long as we have no shootings, as long as we have no homicides, I think we’re OK. I’m OK being told, ‘You’re over-policing it.”

“If no one gets hurt and nobody dies,” he added, “that is a win.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

The promise of change has been a powerful force in presidential campaigns for decades, a reliable appeal to a fundamental yearning in the American electorate. It was central to the candidacies of John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump.

“Change vs. more of the same” read a hand-scrawled placard posted on a wall in the campaign war room for Bill Clinton when he captured the White House in 1992.

Yet this year, Americans, who by nearly every measure are hungering for a new direction, are confronted with the choice between a continuation or a restoration.

The contest between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump is the rare election without a major party candidate who can be presented as a fresh face and a new tomorrow. Neither man is poised to tap into all of the enthusiasm and excitement that comes with unknown possibilities. Instead, Americans are getting a rerun, a race between a president and a former president, both older than 90 percent of Americans — Mr. Biden is 81 and Mr. Trump is 77 — and viewed unfavorably by a majority of them.

Whoever better navigates a contest that is, in so many ways, a mismatch with the moment could well prove to have the upper hand over the next eight months.

“There are only two choices: stay the course or time for a change,” said Paul Begala, a senior strategist for Mr. Clinton’s presidential campaigns, describing the dominant dynamic in American politics. “We want change,” Mr. Begala said of the nation. “We are revolutionary. We are built for change.”

This dynamic is likely to be particularly challenging for Mr. Biden, notwithstanding the fact that the former president is one of the most well-known figures in American political history. Incumbent presidents are almost invariably forced to run on their records, a restraint Mr. Biden has accepted by promising to “finish the job” in a second term. But he has also tried to shift the focus. In his State of the Union speech on Thursday, Mr. Biden spoke nearly as much about Mr. Trump’s agenda as his own.

Promising a new chapter has been a recurrent, and often decisive, theme of American campaigns at least since a youthful Mr. Kennedy was elected to the White House in 1960. Jimmy Carter won election in the post-Watergate era by presenting himself as “a leader, for a change” in 1976. Four years later, Mr. Reagan ousted Mr. Carter amid a stagnating economy with a promise of “Let’s make America great again.”

Mr. Obama’s entire campaign — T-shirts, posters, hats and signature speeches — was built around the theme “Change we can believe in.” Mr. Trump used Mr. Reagan’s slogan and made it his own.

But this election is in many ways an anomaly. The last time a president and a former president were on the same ballot was in 1912, and the last rematch in a presidential race was in 1956.

At the same time, there has rarely been a presidential election with such an undercurrent of dissatisfaction — both with the country and the major party candidates seeking to lead it.

It has been 20 years, dating to the invasion of Iraq, since more Americans thought the nation was headed in the right direction than the wrong direction. The most recent NBC News poll found that 73 percent of voters thought the nation was on the wrong track — and displeasure over the nation’s direction has topped 70 percent almost continuously for the past three years. Never before in the poll’s history have so many voters been so unhappy for so long.

More than four times as many voters in the recent New York Times/Siena College poll said they were angry, scared, disappointed, resigned, apprehensive or disappointed about this election as said they were happy, excited or hopeful about it.

That so many Americans want the country to move in a different direction has stirred concern among many Democrats as they watch Mr. Biden in these early days of his re-election campaign.

“In this environment of dissatisfaction, which is two decades long, change is a powerful force,” said Douglas Sosnik, a former senior adviser to Mr. Clinton. “If the choice is, would you rather be stay-the-course or change, I would always take change in this world we are in.”

Pete Giangreco, a campaign adviser to Mr. Obama, agreed, noting that the American mood has turned even bleaker since the coronavirus pandemic. Appealing to restive Americans should be central to Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump as they plan the campaigns ahead, he said.

“When 30 percent or less think the country is headed in the right direction, then you better be the change agent,” he said. “You better lay out comparatively who’s going to be the better change, or you’re not going to get to 50 percent anywhere.”

Mr. Trump will have his own challenges when presenting himself as a change candidate. It has been less than four years since he served, and he has dominated American politics since. That can pose a challenge to Trump supporters trying to present him as a candidate of change.

“We have to go back to that future — 2017 to 2020,” Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, said on Fox News this week. “We want those four years one more time.”

Yet Mr. Trump has throughout his years in national politics presented himself as an outsider; his 2016 run for the White House is, along with Mr. Obama’s campaign, one of the best examples in modern history of a change candidate. His advisers and allies have made clear that he will again seek to claim the change mantle.

“He’s not an incumbent,” said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican consultant who was Mr. Trump’s campaign manager in 2016. “He’s an insurgent.”

Mr. Biden’s campaign is pushing back on that assertion, warning that the former president is the face, not of change, but of chaos.

“I think Trump is a change candidate,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, in an interview. “But a majority of people think it’s change for the worse.”

Ms. Conway argued that Americans have become more comfortable with Mr. Trump as they have grown to know him, and that they did not fear the kind of change that would come with a second Trump term.

“It’s change without that full X factor,” she said. “Americans love the concept and the idea of change and choice and revolutions and options — and yet they go to Chick-fil-A in their minivan three times a week.”

In the latest Times/Siena poll, 47 percent of respondents said they strongly disapproved of how Mr. Biden was handling his job. The president’s approval rating in the latest NBC poll is at 37 percent, by far the lowest for an incumbent president in four decades of polling. But the same poll suggested voters would make their decision as much on the challenger as on the incumbent. That is potentially good news for the Biden camp, which has signaled it intends to make the election a referendum on Mr. Trump.

There is precedent for what Mr. Biden is hoping to do. In 2012, when Mr. Obama was seeking a second term, his campaign reviewed polling data that showed voters unhappy with the state of the economy, and responded with economic policy proposals designed to address anxiety among the middle class. The new message helped turn the focus of the race to Mitt Romney, his rival, by presenting him as elite, wealthy and out of touch with the concerns of working Americans.

“If we had run that campaign as a referendum on the presidency,” Mr. Giangreco said, “we would have lost it.”

A helicopter carrying National Guard members and a Border Patrol agent crashed on Friday in southern Texas near the border with Mexico, killing three of its occupants and critically injuring the fourth, officials said.

The helicopter, which crashed at 2:50 p.m., was a UH-72 Lakota, Joint Task Force North said in a statement. Two of the dead were soldiers, and the third was a Border Patrol agent, it said.

The helicopter was patrolling the border and following people who were crossing into the United States illegally when it crashed in an open field, said Eloy Vera, the Starr County judge and the top local official in the county. He said he was notified of the crash about 7:30 p.m. by the county sheriff’s office, which later provided more details to him. There was no one on the ground where the helicopter crashed, Judge Vera said.

The sheriff’s office said in a statement that it was assisting with a helicopter crash in eastern Starr County that could involve four people.

Three of the people on board were men and one was a woman, Judge Vera said, adding that the Border Patrol agent had been stationed in Rio Grande City.

Joint Task Force North and Judge Vera said that they would not share the names of the victims because their families had not been notified.

The Department of Homeland Security, National Guard, Customs and Border Protection and Texas Department of Public Safety did not comment.

This is a developing story.

Emily Schmall contributed reporting.

Buried in President Biden’s fiery re-election pitch in his State of the Union address on Thursday night was a brief mention of an issue he has often been reluctant to embrace: marijuana.

It was the first time Mr. Biden had raised the subject in the annual address, a high-profile inclusion that could represent a shift toward promoting the efforts he has made to liberalize cannabis policy. And it renewed speculation that a president who has long been personally conservative on the issue might be ready to tiptoe more fully into positions that enjoy wide support not only in his party but in the broader public as he gears up for a difficult campaign.

Federal law puts marijuana in the same category as drugs like heroin and LSD, and Mr. Biden has shied away from calling for its legalization. But in his speech, he touched on the more limited steps he had been taking to sand off the hard edges of the law.

As he rattled off goals and initiatives on guns, police reform and domestic violence, he also included “directing my cabinet to review the federal classification of marijuana, and expunging thousands of convictions for the mere possession, because no one should be jailed for simply using.”

Decriminalizing cannabis and automatically expunging convictions for its use were among the president’s promises in his first campaign, and his administration has since moved toward that goal, proposing to downgrade marijuana’s classification away from the hardest drugs and issuing thousands of pardons and commutations for nonviolent drug offenses.

Any move toward relaxing marijuana policy could prove fertile political ground. Polling has shown steady increases over time in the number of Americans who support legalization.

According to Gallup’s tracking as of last year, a full 70 percent of Americans believed that use should be legal. Support was highest among the youngest adults, with nearly eight out of 10 18- to 34-year-olds supporting full legalization, an age group in which polls show the president has hemorrhaged support.

The Biden campaign has been looking to a draw sharper contrasts with his almost certain Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, whose own language on crime has grown more apocalyptic as the campaign has progressed. He has said that he admires the freedom that despots have to execute drug dealers.

Still, many of the steps the White House has taken to date have not decisively changed the legal uncertainty surrounding marijuana use.

The thousands of pardons and commutations Mr. Biden has issued do not equate to having those criminal records expunged, despite his lamentations over the consequences prior convictions can have for job seekers.

And whether the federal criminal penalties for marijuana will be downgraded remains uncertain. In 2022, Mr. Biden directed the Department of Health and Human Services to look into reclassifying it from a Schedule I drug, which is the most restrictive category and carries severe penalties under federal trafficking laws, to Schedule III, with an eye to making it more widely accepted for medical use.

The department recommended the change last August. But the recommendation has yet to clear review by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which could act this year.

From the skies over Gaza these days fall American bombs and American food pallets, delivering death and life at the same time and illustrating President Biden’s elusive effort to find balance in an unbalanced Middle East war.

The president’s decision to authorize airdrops and the construction of a temporary port to deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to Gaza has highlighted the tensions in his policy as he continues to support the provision of U.S. weaponry for Israel’s military operation against Hamas without condition.

The United States finds itself on both sides of the war in a way, arming the Israelis while trying to care for those hurt as a result. Mr. Biden has grown increasingly frustrated as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel defies the president’s pleas to do more to protect civilians in Gaza and went further in expressing that exasperation during and after his State of the Union address this past week. But Mr. Biden remains opposed to cutting off munitions or leveraging them to influence the fighting.

“You can’t have a policy of giving aid and giving Israel the weapons to bomb the food trucks at the same time,” Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said in an interview the day after the speech. “There is inherent contradiction in that. And I think the administration needs to match the genuine empathy and moral concern that came out last night for Palestinian civilian lives with real accountability for Netanyahu and the extreme right-wing government there.”

The newly initiated American-led air-and-sea humanitarian campaign follows the failure to get enough supplies into Gaza by land and represents a sharp turnaround by the administration. Until now, American officials had eschewed such methods as impractical, concluding that they would not provide supplies on the same scale as a functional land route and would be complicated in many ways.

Airdrops are actually dangerous, as was made clear on Friday when at least five Palestinians were killed by falling aid packages, and they can create chaotic, hazardous situations without a stable distribution system on the ground. The construction of a temporary floating pier will take 30 to 60 days, if not longer, according to officials, and could entail risk for those involved, although Mr. Biden has stipulated that it be constructed offshore with no Americans on the ground.

But the administration reversed course after more than 100 people were killed and hundreds more injured last month when a crowd gathered around a convoy of aid trucks and the Israeli military opened fire. A senior American official who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations called the disaster a tipping point for the administration’s thinking.

The official said aerial video of the episode made clear the desperation of Gazan civilians. Although Israeli officials had hoped the release of the video might exonerate their troops by showing an out-of-control mob, the official said that instead it revealed conditions dire enough to make people rush a convoy at 4:30 a.m.

Critics said the supplies now floating down by parachute hardly meet the needs and only highlight the moral conflict in Mr. Biden’s approach to the war, which started when a Hamas terrorist attack killed about 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7 and prompted an Israeli response that has killed more than 30,000 people in Gaza.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Yousef Munayyer, the head of the Palestine-Israel program at the Arab Center in Washington. “It’s akin to showing up at a five-alarm fire with a cup of water while giving fuel to the arsonist. The administration is trying to deal with a political problem, which is the optics of supporting this horrific war with these cosmetic measures that are aimed at defusing some voter anger.”

Israelis and their supporters reject that logic. “Why are they at cross purposes?” said Eyal Hulata, who served as national security adviser to former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. “The message is — and I strongly support Biden for doing so — that he supports the elimination of Hamas, which is the source and cause of all those atrocities, while at the same time putting a lot of emphasis on assisting the civilian population of Gaza.”

“People who say that” there is a contradiction “actually don’t differentiate between Gazans and Hamas,” he added. “We do differentiate between Gazans and Hamas.”

White House officials have declined to be drawn into a public discussion of the thorny questions raised by dropping aid to the same people trying to escape American-provided arms.

“We have been very, very clear about our concerns over the humanitarian situation there and how unacceptable it is that so many people are in such dire need,” John F. Kirby, a national security communications adviser to the president, told reporters from The New York Times this past week.

Mr. Biden has strongly supported Israel’s right to defend itself and retaliate for the terrorist attack. He has been criticized by some in his own party for not expressing commensurate empathy for Palestinian civilians, many of them destitute and displaced amid the destruction of their coastal enclave.

During his State of the Union address on Thursday, though, he went further than before in lamenting the suffering. The president did not change policy, but his tone and emphasis represented an evolution of his public messaging.

“This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined,” Mr. Biden told a national audience. “More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands of innocents, women and children. Girls and boys also orphaned. Nearly two million more Palestinians under bombardment or displacement. Homes destroyed, neighborhoods in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine. It’s heartbreaking.”

The president went even further in a post-speech conversation on the House floor with Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat who pressed him to “keep pushing Netanyahu,” known by the nickname Bibi.

“I told him, Bibi — and don’t repeat this — but, ‘You and I are going to have a come-to-Jesus meeting,’” Mr. Biden explained to the senator in a comment caught on a microphone.

After an aide whispered in his ear, Mr. Biden acknowledged that he had been overheard — but seemed perfectly content to have his irritation known. “I’m on a hot mic here,” Mr. Biden told Mr. Bennet. “Good. That’s good.”

The change in tone did not go unnoticed. “There was a recognition among progressives that this represents a shift in language by the president and that language matters,” said Mr. Khanna, who exchanged texts during the speech with Arab Americans in Michigan, where anger at the president has been particularly heated. “He’s becoming more public with it.”

The friction has grown especially over humanitarian assistance. United Nations officials have warned that more than 570,000 Gazans face “catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation” and that “if nothing changes, a famine is imminent in northern Gaza.” Before the war started, Gaza relied on 500 truckloads of aid a day, but the World Food Program said it is now down to 150 and needs to double that to meet some of the strip’s basic needs.

The senior American official said that Israel’s strategy during the conflict has been to allow just enough aid in to prevent starvation and nothing more. But in recent weeks, several factors have threatened to push conditions below that threshold, including Israeli protesters who have blocked aid convoys from leaving Israel on the grounds that the aid benefits Hamas and slows the release of the Israeli hostages being held. A state of virtual anarchy within Gaza has also made efficient distribution nearly impossible. One result is that malnourished babies have begun showing up at Gaza’s few functioning hospitals.

The official said that, while airdropped packets of meals would most likely make only a marginal difference, Mr. Biden’s plan for a floating pier could have a substantial effect on conditions within Gaza — eventually.

So in recent days U.S. officials, including Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, have adamantly insisted that Israel facilitate more aid into the territory without further delay.

The official added that Israeli leaders may have anticipated that a deal would be reached by Ramadan, which is expected to start on Sunday, to release some hostages and pause their military campaign. That would have allowed a major influx of aid by trucks and spared Mr. Netanyahu from making hard political concessions in a domestic environment where many Israelis oppose sending more sustenance to the place from which the Oct. 7 attack originated.

But David Miliband, the president of the International Rescue Committee, said on Friday that airdrops and a pier were “last resorts” that were “expensive and risky” without solving the underlying problem.

“All of these should not divert attention from the material evidence that only a cease-fire will provide the civilian protection, aid flows, repair of infrastructure and public health measures that are so needed,” he said. “Fourth- and fifth-best solutions should not be normalized as effective alternatives to better solutions.”

The Senate gave final approval on Friday to a $460 billion spending bill to fund about half the federal government through the fall, sending the legislation to President Biden’s desk with just hours to spare to avert a partial shutdown.

The lopsided 75-to-22 vote cemented a resolution to at least part of a spending stalemate that consumed Congress for months and has repeatedly pushed the government to the edge of shutdown. Mr. Biden was expected to sign it ahead of a midnight deadline to keep federal funding flowing.

But top lawmakers were still negotiating spending bills for the other half of the government over the same period, including for the Pentagon, which Congress must pass by March 22 to avert a shutdown. Several thorny issues, including funding for the Department of Homeland Security, have yet to be resolved.

The legislation passed on Friday packages together six spending bills, extending funding through Sept. 30 for dozens of federal programs covering agriculture, energy and the environment, transportation, housing, the Justice Department and veterans.

“To folks who worry that divided government means nothing ever gets done, this bipartisan package says otherwise,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader. “It helps parents and veterans and firefighters and farmers and school cafeterias and more.”

The package adheres to the funding levels negotiated last year by Mr. Biden and the House speaker at the time, Kevin McCarthy, keeping spending on domestic programs essentially flat — even as funding for veterans’ programs continues to grow — while allowing military spending to increase slightly.

Democrats rejected the most divisive Republican policy demands, including a bid to defund a new rule by the Food and Drug Administration allowing mifepristone — the first pill used in a two-drug medication abortion regimen — to be distributed through the mail and at retail locations, and efforts to cut and restrict nutritional benefits for low-income families.

“Today, we got the first half of the job done — passing a serious bipartisan package to fund key parts of our government,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee. “This isn’t the bill I would have written on my own, but this is a strong bipartisan package that sustains vital resources that matter in people’s lives.”

House Republicans secured some smaller victories, including modest cuts to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the F.B.I. and environmental programs, though some of the reductions were far smaller than they appeared. And they won the inclusion of a measure curtailing a policy instituted by the Veterans Affairs Department that aims to prevent veteran suicides by flagging a federal gun background check system when veterans are found to lack the mental capacity to handle their own finances.

One Democrat ultimately opposed the spending legislation because of the inclusion of that policy.

“I’m voting no because I do not accept a return to a time when the gun lobby could bury gun riders in appropriations bills (which happened frequently before Sandy Hook),” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said in a statement. “This cannot happen again.”