ALBANY — After a brief period of political accord, Governor Spitzer is readopting the aggressive style he wielded as attorney general, releasing an executive budget that butchers several of the Legislature’s sacred cows while challenging the Assembly’s authority to pick a new comptroller.

With tensions escalating between Mr. Spitzer and the Assembly’s Democratic speaker, Sheldon Silver, over choosing the state’s chief fiscal watchdog, Mr. Spitzer yesterday proposed a budget that shakes up decades-old funding formulas for education and health care that are dear to legislators and powerful interest groups.

With his budget director, Paul Francis, looking on, the governor hailed his first executive spending plan as a first step toward bringing accountability, order, and competence to a state government that, for example, spends more per capita on Medicaid than any other state but whose residents have the highest chronic disease death rate in the nation.

“We’re not just going to take the money and just throw it away,” Mr. Spitzer said. “We’re going to impose reform and accountability.” While calling for an infusion of billions of dollars for education aid and property tax reductions, Mr. Spitzer also is proposing a fundamental change in the way the state distributes dollars for education, Medicaid, and tax relief, a shift that will likely provoke fierce resistance from lawmakers.

To pass this budget, Mr. Spitzer will need the support of a Legislature that is already uneasy with the governor’s forceful tactics and that has traditionally made mincemeat out of attempts by previous governors, including George Pataki and Mario Cuomo, to rethink how Albany spends taxpayer dollars.

Yesterday, Mr. Spitzer assured lawmakers, who must approve the budget by April 1, that there’s “always room to negotiate.” Such assurances were greeted with skepticism amid a report in the New York Post that Mr. Spitzer recently had a heated exchange on the telephone with the Assembly’s Republican minority leader, James Tedisco, in which the governor called himself a “steamroller” who will “roll over you and anybody else.” Mr. Spitzer reportedly said he had accomplished more in three weeks than any governor in the history of the state.

With that exchange, Mr. Spitzer has now clashed with three of the four leaders of the Legislature. On the question of the comptroller, Mr. Spitzer has locked horns with Mr. Silver, who wants one of his own members to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Alan Hevesi.

The governor also is engaged in a proxy battle against the Republican Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, for control of the Senate. Mr. Spitzer is actively campaigning for the Democratic candidate vying for an open Long Island Senate seat, and some in Albany say the governor is even considering spending his own wealth to help get the candidate elected. Mr. Spitzer further flexed his muscles at the budget press conference. “I was elected with a mandate to change the direction of Albany and the direction of the budget of the state of New York,” he said during a lengthy PowerPoint presentation. “I am saying right here, right now we are going to defend the principles in this budget. I will not become under any circumstances one more in the voices of the status quo paradigm that is destroying our economic future.”

The approach that Mr. Spitzer is taking with his first budget is far different from the one taken by Mr. Pataki in his first term. The centerpiece of Mr. Pataki’s first budget in 1995 was an actual cut in spending. Mr. Spitzer, on the other hand, is proposing a spending increase that is slightly larger than the one Mr. Pataki called for a year ago in his final executive budget. Mr. Spitzer is raising state funds, which is everything that is spent using revenue collected by the state, to $83.6 billion from $77.5 billion, an increase of 7.8%. Mr. Pataki last year proposed an increase of about 7%.

The key features of Mr. Spitzer’s budget are the ones that are likely to receive the most opposition from lawmakers.

His largest new spending initiative is a property tax plan that piggybacks on Mr. Pataki’s School Tax Relief program, under which state funds go to school districts to offset property taxes through partial exemptions. Mr. Spitzer wants to increase the STAR program to $5.1 billion from $3.6 billion and direct more of the reductions to lower income property owners.

Homeowners with an income of less than $80,000 would see their STAR tax reductions increase by 80%, while those earning between $120,001 and $235,000 would see an increase of only 30%. Such a sliding scale in benefits is not going to be easily swallowed by the Republican Senate, whose power base is in Long Island among residents with higher incomes.

Mr. Spitzer is proposing an inflationary freeze in reimbursement rates for hospitals and nursing homes and a reduction in pharmacy reimbursement rates for brand and generic drugs.

Messrs. Silver and Bruno greeted Mr. Spitzer’s Medicaid plan with reservations. Two powerful interest groups in the health industry, the Greater New York Hospital Association and the 1199 SEIU health care workers union, indicated that they are prepared to battle Mr. Spitzer for more health dollars.

“A freeze in hospital and nursing home rates will make it impossible for providers to afford the latest medical supplies, equipment, pharmaceuticals, and other items for which costs are rising, items that New Yorkers desperately need,” the group said in a statement.

Mr. Spitzer will be sitting out at least one budget battle. He did not propose any major changes to public pension benefits, one of the main contributors to New York’s high tax rate. “He has not proposed anything at all in that area. So that’s one third rail he is simply steering clear of,” the director of Empire Center for New York State Policy, E.J. McMahon, said.