WASHINGTON >> The thick binder is dominated by a drawing of a chubby Uncle Sam, with shirt buttons straining against his girth, and a fleshy hand open and outstretched.

“Uncle Needs a Diet,” declares the package assembled by Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., one of three candidates in the race for one of the most powerful, and now paradoxical, jobs in government: leading the House Appropriations Committee in the new Congress as the Republican leadership tries to transform the panel from a fountain of federal spending into ground zero for budget cutting.

Selecting a chairman — a party vote is expected Tuesday — is the first step in perhaps the most audacious aspect of the plan by Rep. John A. Boehner, the incoming Republican speaker, to alter the way the House works. Like Lewis, the two other leading candidates, Rep. Harold Rogers of Kentucky and Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, are campaigning to convince their party’s leadership that they can cast aside their own histories as earmarkers and pork-allocators and lead a shift in focus from how to spend to how to save.

To make the effort more than a slogan will mean upending one of the most entrenched cultures in Washington, a bipartisan tradition of directing money to favored causes with an eye as much to political gain as to policy outcome. Under both parties, the committee has long been a power unto itself, a secretive realm in which subcommittee chairmen hold sway over Cabinet secretaries and generals, and financing can almost magically materialize or disappear for little-scrutinized local projects even as national priorities are set or dismissed.

Leading the committee toward a belt-tightening mandate would also mean taking on an entire industry that has been built up around the federal trough, a complex of lobbyists, consultants and corporations that feeds off the competition for dollars and with some regularity produces scandals — and provides a substantial chunk of the campaign contributions that fuel the U.S. political system.

“It has been a favor factory for years, and now it is going to become a slaughterhouse,” said Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican and longtime antagonist of the Appropriations Committee who Monday was endorsed by Boehner to be one of several anti-spending conservatives to be seated on the panel. “It is going to get ugly.”

All the candidates for chairman have more than 15 years on the committee and all have hungrily sought earmarks. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, in the last fiscal year, Lewis won 62 earmarks worth $97.6 million, followed by Rogers with 59 costing $93.4 million and Kingston 40 worth $66.8 million.

Lewis was chairman of the committee before Democrats took control of the House in 2006 and would need a special exemption to be chairman again because of party-imposed term limits. In campaigning for the job, he has emphasized his past efforts to push spending cuts. Rogers has promoted his party fundraising and his willingness to confront the executive branch on spending. Kingston has the backing of some outside fiscal watchdogs and promises a new openness on the panel.

The team of Republican leaders planning to take over the House on Jan. 5 is exploring a variety of changes intended to break the committee’s spending mindset, starting with the new majority’s promise to slice $100 billion from President Barack Obama’s budget request for the current fiscal year.

The three longtime committee members who aspire to head the panel have clearly gotten the message.

Like Lewis, his two rivals for the chairmanship are also committee members who have promised to devote themselves to paring spending, although all have funneled money to scores of projects through earmarks in past bills. The effort to reshape the committee promises to be a stern test of Republicans’ rededication to fiscal sobriety after falling off the wagon during the dozen years, through 2006, that their party controlled the House, when government spending rose at rapid rates.

“They have promised things that they have neither delivered in the past nor, in my opinion, are going to be able to deliver on in the future,” said Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat and a veteran of the Appropriations Committee.

To succeed and satisfy the conservative Tea Party-style voters that propelled them to power, Republicans will have to quickly make significant cuts in government programs and somehow find a way to enact those cuts into law in cooperation with a Democratically controlled Senate and a Democratic president.

It will not be easy. In this year’s turbulent political atmosphere, the Democratically led Congress passed exactly zero appropriations bills, leaving the government running under a stop-gap measure at the moment.

Republicans acknowledge they are setting lofty goals when it comes to congressional appropriations but say they are serious about reaching them.

They have already banned earmarks — the pet spending projects that have been the fruit of service on the committee — and hope to give members of the committee more time to focus on oversight of agencies in pursuit of savings. Besides Flake, the leadership plans to install on the panel other Republicans who have strongly criticized spending.

“I want to place as many reformers as I can on the committee,” Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 House Republican, said.

House Republicans also say they will no longer allow consideration of omnibus spending measures, those unwieldy and impenetrable conglomerations of multiple spending bills that are hard for members to oppose since they contain so many politically sensitive and popular programs.

Instead, they are considering breaking spending legislation into smaller pieces, raising the prospect that they would have to pass scores of individual bills on the House floor to finance the government agency by agency, allowing a more focused debate on priorities but also creating the potential for legislative gridlock.

In a move that was symbolic but telling, the new leadership disclosed last week that it was ousting the Appropriations Committee from its prime office space just steps from the House floor, ordering the panel to vacate the rooms where such legendary chairmen as James A. Garfield, Joe Cannon and Jamie Whitten had held sway since the Civil War.

The Appropriations Committee has not only enjoyed a privileged status on Capitol Hill; it has also been a route to greater congressional power. The top three House Democrats — Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Hoyer and Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina — all served on the panel and cut their congressional teeth there.

In contrast, Boehner has spent his career resisting earmarks, and he and his fellow Republican leaders have not sat on the Appropriations Committee, freeing them to push for major changes but leaving some wondering whether they understand the panel’s delicate workings enough to avoid mistakes that could paralyze the spending process.

“If the Appropriations Committee can’t figure out a way to get the White House, the Senate and the House together on a common ground, then you hit a brick wall and critical parts of the government start to fall apart,” said Scott Lilly, a former top Democratic staff member on the committee who is now a fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group.

Even some Republican members of the committee expressed doubt about the prospect of considering separate measures for individual agencies rather than the dozen bills that combine many Cabinet departments.

“We have had a hard time passing 12 bills,” said Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, “so if you try to do 40 or 50, it is kind of tough.”

The aspirants for the chairmanship say that changing the spending culture will depend to some degree on public support, which in the wake of the midterm election they say is there.

“When you go from a spending history as a committee to a cutting committee, it is not automatic,” Lewis said. “But the thing we have going for us that we haven’t had in recent decades is that suddenly the public is involved.”

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