Washington — The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee warned education lobbyists today that they may never see the $2-billion Pell Grant increase that his panel approved in July.

In a speech before the Committee for Education Funding, a coalition of 100 education associations, Rep. David R. Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat, said that President Bush was serious in threatening to veto the education-spending bill, which would raise the maximum Pell Grant by $390 in the 2008 fiscal year, which begins on October 1. If the president carried out that threat, Mr. Obey said, lawmakers may lack the votes to override the veto.

“You will be very, very lucky to get one dime more than the president has in his budget for education,” he said. “There is going to have to be a lot more noise coming from the education community than we’ve heard to date.”

But it’s unclear whether the Pell Grant Program will get a discretionary increase even if Mr. Bush abandons his veto threat. The Senate’s version of the appropriations bill, which must be reconciled with the House’s version, contains no increase for the program, and appropriators have been talking about shifting some of the Pell money in the House bill to other programs now that Congress has passed legislation providing for a mandatory increase for the program.

That bill, a budget-reconciliation measure that the president is expected to sign, would increase the maximum Pell Grant to $5,400 over five years, provided that appropriators do not cut the program’s baseline. —Kelly Field