President Bush has promised to quickly sign the legislation into law. He intervened last month to save the bill, after a pair of powerful House committee chairmen blocked House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's effort to bring it to a vote during the post-election lame duck session.

Under current law, the Pentagon controls some 80% of the estimated $40 billion annual intelligence budget. The bill would transfer some of that authority to the national intelligence director, who will write the budgets for those intelligence agencies that do not provide combat support.

The national intelligence director also will be able to shift limited amounts of money from one intelligence program - or agency - to another, and to reassign some personnel from one agency to another. The director also will serve as the president's chief intelligence advisor.

The legislation also codified the national counterterrorism center created by executive order that is meant to coordinate intelligence collection and analysis across agencies, and creates a civil liberties board charged with ensuring that the government's war on terror does not infringe on civil liberties and privacy.

The bill's many law enforcement, border security and immigration elements include provisions that will increase the number of detention beds available to hold illegal immigrants and increase the number of border patrol officers.

The bill allows the government to more easily track suspected "lone wolf'' terrorists, believed to be operating independently of any organization. It also lays out federal standards for issuing drivers licenses - considered an element in fighting terrorism because the documents identify individuals.

The bill, which runs to more than 600 pages, contains other measures meant to strengthen border security and expand the federal government's law enforcement powers in the fight on terrorism. In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union said it opposed the bill because some of the provisions infringe on civil rights and privacy.

"This restructuring will centralize the intelligence community's surveillance powers, increasing the likelihood for government abuses, without creating sufficient corresponding safeguards," the organization said in a statement. "In one of the biggest disappointments, the compromise bill severely watered down a strong, independent review board designed to protect civil liberties. On one hand, lawmakers want to vastly increase the government's power; on the other, they want to diminish oversight."

Relatives of some of those slain in the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and members of the Sept. 11 commission, hailed the bill's passage.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), the ranking member of that committee, said the legislation addressed flaws in the intelligence system detailed by the Sept. 11 commission.

The commission found that the lack of a single, powerful intelligence director had contributed to a culture in which the 15 spy agencies often hoarded information rather than sharing it.

Collins and Lieberman have devoted hundreds of hours to negotiating the details of the bill since Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) turned to their little-noticed committee, rather than the Armed Services or Intelligence committees, to tackle the most sweeping reworking of the intelligence community in decades.

"We did not want a figurehead," Collins said on the Senate floor as the bill was debated.

The junior senator from Maine has earned praise from her colleagues - and begrudging respect from House opponents - for her tenacious defense of the core powers of the national director of intelligence.

Still, even as a string of senators rose to praise the rare bipartisan effort that had produced the bill and predicted that it would start the fundamental transformation of the intelligence community, some said Senate negotiators, in their determination to get the bill enacted into law, had made too many concessions to the House.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was "mystified" that the Senate had agreed to drop several provisions from the Senate's version of the bill meant to ensure the independence and objectivity of intelligence gathering. Levin had written several of those provisions in what he said was an effort to stop the politicization of intelligence.

Byrd decried the speed with which Congress enacted the bill, saying it was such an important governmental reform that it deserved far more scrutiny than it was given by lawmakers who received the final version just hours before voting.

But Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who joined forces with Lieberman after the Sept. 11 attacks to push for creation of the commission investigating what went wrong, said the legislation was "monumental."