Caught between Tuesday’s election results and Friday’s unemployment numbers, the White House faces increased pressure to slow spending next year but also to produce more Main Street jobs to match Wall Street’s recovery.

Going into the 2011 budget cycle, the administration now appears on course to impose close to a freeze on new discretionary appropriations after the double-barrel increases in 2009 and 2010. The costs of the Afghanistan war are a wild card, but even before the polls closed Tuesday, White House Budget Director Peter Orszag was talking up deficit reduction in New York, and his earlier guidance to agencies calls for alternatives that assume a freeze at 2010 funding levels, or a 5 percent reduction.

Republicans warn that President Barack Obama can’t ignore what they see as Tuesday’s backlash against the “overspending” and “overgovernment” in his first year in office...