Franklin Roosevelt, confronted with the worst economic crisis in the nation's history, wrote the book on government jobs programs. Since FDR, presidents have been less ambitious because the economic challenges they faced were less severe.

President Barack Obama, battling the worst downturn since FDR's time, has put together a grab-bag program that borrows a little from Roosevelt but much more closely resembles the approach taken by recent presidents of both parties, who have leaned heavily on tax cuts to spur job creation.

Obama's New Deal-lite approach represents a compromise between putting more resources into getting the country out of a recession and the limitations he faces with budget deficits that have already soared past the $1 trillion mark, raising concerns among the foreign investors who buy America's debt.

Given those soaring deficits, Obama is not trying to push jobs programs of the scale that FDR used to fight the 1930s Depression, when he created an alphabet-soup collection of government agencies to put people back to work, from the Civilian Conservation Corps to the Works Progress Administration.

Instead, Obama is emphasizing further increases in infrastructure spending beyond what is already in the pipeline from the $787 billion economic stimulus bill.

Taking a page from past Republican and Democratic administrations, Obama also is proposing tax credits targeted to small businesses to help them hire new workers and give them a tax break for buying new equipment to expand and modernize their operations.

He also is proposing extending a number of programs already included in his February stimulus measure, including extra support to state and local governments to keep them from having to lay off workers.

"Obama is trying an eclectic approach to jump-starting employment growth and that is not surprising given that the labor market today is the worst it has been since the Great Depression," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.

Obama's efforts are sizable compared with the stimulus measures offered by recent administrations _ also not surprising, given that the recession that began in December 2007 is the longest and deepest since the 1930s.

President George W. Bush offered immediate tax rebates when he was trying to get the country out of the brief and mild downturn that hit during his first year in office.

Like Obama, Ronald Reagan also faced unemployment above 10 percent during his first term, but his answer to the 1981-82 recession was to emphasize a major tax cut that reduced the top tax rates. Reagan's jobs program was a sizable military buildup that increased troop strength and bolstered employment among defense contractors.