WASHINGTON  President Obama on Thursday will unveil nearly $17 billion in additional budget cuts for the coming fiscal year to showcase what a top adviser called a “constant” effort to find savings at a time when the government’s costs for bailouts, health care and wars are mounting far faster. 

The savings for the budget year starting Oct. 1 represent the sum of Mr. Obama’s promised “line by line” scrubbing of the federal budget.  But, underscoring the nation’s fiscal plight, the proposed cuts represent about 1.4 percent of the $1.2 trillion deficit that is projected for the fiscal year 2010. 

The president’s 10-year budget outline, released in February, shows the deficit declining by his final year in office to $533 billion, mostly through assumptions about when the recession will end and the pace of renewed economic growth that many economists consider somewhat optimistic. 

The $17 billion would be saved through terminating or reducing 121 federal programs, ranging from $632,000 to eliminate the post of an attaché for the Education Department in the American Embassy in Paris to $142 million by ending a program to clean up abandoned mines.