British prime minister David Cameron arrived at the White House Tuesday for a meeting with President Obama that is expected to be dominated by discussions of the economic recovery, BP’S oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and new scrutiny of the company’s role in lobbying for a prisoner-transfer agreement between Libya and Britain that preceded the release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber.

The prime minister called the release of the bomber from a Scottish prison last year “profoundly misguided” in a radio interview on Tuesday morning but said it was a government decision, not one made by the battered oil giant BP.

Mr. Cameron, in office just 10 weeks, makes his first visit to the United States as prime minister. He is also seeking to wave away another potentially major source of disagreement: the strikingly different approaches the two men are taking to budget-cutting at a time of a fragile economic recovery.

The fledgling coalition government that Mr. Cameron leads has called for budget reductions of 25 percent by every British government department. That approach has placed the Cameron government at odds with the Obama administration.

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