WASHINGTON – House Republican leaders are confident they will pass comprehensive intelligence reform legislation by the first week of October, but they fear a significant overhaul bill will not reach the Oval Office before the election because of differences with the Senate.

A draft House bill could be ready as early as today and Republican leaders say it will be similar to a White House proposal submitted to Congress last week. The proposal calls for the creation of a powerful new national intelligence director post but withholds broad budgetary and personnel authority, as the Senate has requested in its reform legislation.

“Our bill will be very close to what the White House submitted,” a spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois, John Feehery, told the New York Sun. “We have avoided any poison pills in this legislation that would trigger a partisan fight, and we have a good chance of it being passed in the House quickly, but the difficulties are going to come later with the Senate.”

Election-year politics are driving the Capitol Hill reform effort. House members do not want to be vulnerable to campaign criticism that they were slow to respond to the September 11 Commission findings, say House aides on both sides of the aisle. But some Democrats, and also some senior Republicans, say Mr. Hastert is being overly optimistic in setting an October deadline.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has criticized the GOP leadership for not being bipartisan enough in drafting the legislation, suggesting that there could well be problems on the floor of the House when the bill comes up.

Under the House bill, the Pentagon would be left in control of the military intelligence agencies and the secretary of defense would have substantial influence over the budget process for those agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency. The new intelligence tsar would get budgetary authority over the National Foreign Intelligence Program, the portion of the budget dealing with the collecting and sharing of foreign intelligence, which accounts for about half of the $40 billion the federal government spends on intelligence.

The tsar would also lack complete budgetary control over the nonmilitary agencies and would have a guidance role.

In a joint statement last week, Senator Collins, a Republican of Maine, and Senator Lieberman, a Democrat of Connecticut, who are overseeing the Senate’s response to the September 11 Commission, expressed disappointment about the White House proposal, noting, “The administration’s bill is not as comprehensive as the proposal we have already announced.”

Some intelligence experts worry that the speed with which Congress is now moving to pass an intelligence overhaul could backfire later. Ron Marks, a former CIA officer who has also served as intelligence counsel for the Senate Republican leadership, told the Sun that while he welcomed the creation of an intelligence tsar, the “devil will be in the details.” He also said, “In the best of worlds they would be spending three months on this, and we would see nothing before January, but they want to get this off the table before the election.”

Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday held a second hearing on the nomination of Congressman Porter Goss of Florida to be CIA Director. Democrat Senators were again arguing that Mr. Goss is too partisan a figure to head the troubled agency.

Senator Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat, led the charge. Armed with two white, three-ring binders filled with Mr. Goss’s previous statements, Mr. Rockefeller asked how Mr. Goss would separate his past life as a congressman from a new role as CIA director.

“On the things that count, the things that are not just the interplay between the two agendas of the two parties, there’s only one flag in the room … and we all know that. National security is one of those areas,” said Mr. Goss. The Senate is expected to confirm his nomination.