While Congress was thinking big when it adopted the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act to expand the country’s national-service and volunteering programs, the Obama administration has decided the government can’t afford to pay for all of the new projects right now.

Nicola Goren, acting chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service, said that although the president proposed a big increase in her agency’s budget for fiscal year 2010, “it could not come close to what was contemplated in the [Serve America] Act.”

“We therefore had to prioritize this year and were not able to make big increases across all our programs, or propose funding for every new initiative in the Act,” she told participants at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service.

Among the programs that bit the dust: Silver Scholarships and Encore Fellowships, two programs designed to attract volunteers aged 55 and older; Serve America Fellowships, to provide stipends and education grants to certain volunteers; Campuses of Service, to provide grants to colleges for community-service programs; and a Nonprofit Capacity-Building Program, to provide $25-million over five years for management help to small and medium-sized charities.

The president also proposed spending $10-million on a Volunteer Generation Fund, which would provide grants to help nonprofit groups recruit and manage volunteers. That is down from $50-million envisaged by the Serve America Act. The only new program that remained fully intact in the administration’s budget was the Social Innovation Fund, which will provide $50-million in grants to help nonprofit groups expand effective social programs.

In an interview, Ms. Goren said the president’s overall budget for the corporation was set in February, before the Serve America Act created the new programs. She said they would have added about $200-million to the already increased budget — considered impossible in the current “tough budget environment.”

The president proposed a 29-percent increase in the agency’s budget for 2010, to almost $1.15-billion. That included money for 10,000 new slots for AmeriCorps, the main national-service program, bringing the total number to about 83,560 — slightly less than the 88,000 proposed by the Serve America Act. But Ms. Goren said the administration still aims to increase AmeriCorps members to 250,000 by 2017 as envisaged in the legislation.

Congress will still have its say in the matter. Ms. Goren says she expects the House to draft a bill appropriating money for the corporation in July.