His death was confirmed in a statement from Mr. Carter, who called him "one of the most competent and dedicated public servants I have ever known."

Mr. Lance died at home near Calhoun, Ga., Thursday evening, said the Gordon County deputy coroner, Heath Derryberry. The cause was not immediately known, Mr. Derryberry said, but Mr. Lance had been in failing health and was receiving hospice care.

Cleared of wrongdoing in 1980 after a highly publicized 12-week bank fraud trial in Atlanta, Mr. Lance resumed his business career in Georgia, insisting that he held no animosity toward the government officials and journalists who had pursued him.

Though friends said he longed for redemption, Mr. Lance, who often prayed with Mr. Carter, declared that "bitterness breeds destruction."

Mr. Lance's troubles during his brief Washington tenure were a blow to the new administration, which took office in 1977 after campaigning as an antidote to the Watergate era culminating in the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. His departure meant the loss of an important bridge to the business community and a voice counseling restraint of the populist tendencies elsewhere in the administration.

Later, Mr. Lance was indicted and subsequently cleared in the financial scandal involving the shuttered Bank of Credit and Commerce International, for which he served as a consultant after selling his controlling interest in the National Bank of Georgia to an Arab business associate of the B.C.C.I. president.

Nor did he abandon political life. He became chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party in 1982 and chairman of the 1984 presidential campaign of Walter F. Mondale after Mr. Mondale was reportedly talked out of making him the vice-presidential nominee, turning instead to Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro. In 1988, Mr. Lance served as a top adviser to his friend the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who sought the party's presidential nomination.

An affable 6-foot-5-inch bear of a man with heavy-lidded dark eyes, Mr. Lance, whom Mr. Carter said was like a brother to him, was once described as "a guy with the charm of an old song-and-dance man and the irrepressible guile of a safecracker."

He was also something of a phrase maker, widely associated with an expression that has persisted in American culture: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

At the budget office, Mr. Lance, the first person chosen by the president-elect for a cabinet-level post, advocated a device called zero-based budgeting, in which each budget item has to be freshly justified each year before it is approved rather than subjected only to financial adjustment. Although Mr. Lance succeeded in rolling back some spending proposals, the device failed to catch on and the goal of balancing the budget by the end of the Carter presidency went unachieved.

Thomas Bertram Lance was born June 3, 1931, in Gainesville, Ga. His father, Thomas Jackson Lance, was president of Young Harris College, a small Methodist institution in northeast Georgia. Young Mr. Lance attended Emory University and the University of Georgia, but under financial pressure to support his wife, the former LaBelle David, whom he had married in 1950 at age 19, and their newborn son, he dropped out shortly before he would have graduated.

He took a job as a $90-a-month teller at the Calhoun First National Bank, which had been founded by his wife's grandfather. He and some associates bought control of the bank in 1958 and five years later Mr. Lance had risen to chief executive.

The bank, with acquisitions and easy financing that lured some carpet manufacturers to Calhoun from nearby Dalton, grew rapidly, and Mr. Lance became acquainted with Mr. Carter at a regional planning meeting.

After one unsuccessful run for governor, for which Mr. Lance generated business support, Mr. Carter was elected in 1970 and named Mr. Lance director of the state's crony-ridden and inefficient highway department.

Mr. Lance set about reorganizing it, and within six years, the department had tripled the volume of contracts it let, with a staff that had shrunk by 26 percent.