Labor Dept. Budget Seeks $37.6 Billion

Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich released a proposed $37.6-billion 1994 budget for his agency Wednesday, highlighted by increased funding on a broad range of workplace, job training and unemployment-assistance programs central to the White House economic plan.

In announcing the department’s budget one day before the rest of the Administration’s spending plan is released, Reich said his budget includes $4.9 billion earmarked for Clinton’s long-term “investment” agenda. It would pay for new programs to create summer jobs, provide emergency unemployment insurance, help workers who have lost their jobs because of plant closings and create a broad range of new job-training and educational programs.

In addition, the Labor Department projected a 10.5% increase in the number of retired workers whose pension obligations will shift to the government because more U.S. corporations are expected to fail to live up to long-term pension obligations.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., the federal agency under the Labor Department that pays pensions for workers when their private pension funds go bankrupt, estimated Wednesday that it will have to spend $210.3 million more in 1994 on retiree pensions.

Now, the agency is able to finance coverage for those retirees through premiums paid by corporations. But analysts have warned that the agency eventually may need a taxpayer bailout because the number of corporations that abandon their pension obligations is expected to surge in the next decade.

Clinton will submit a $1.51-trillion federal budget for fiscal 1994 today, fleshing out the details of the economic plan he announced in February.

“What comes tomorrow is all of the nitty-gritty detail,” said Alice Rivlin, deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

In his economic plan, Clinton projected that the government would be saddled with a $262-billion deficit in 1994. Some slight revisions in the budgetary outlook may be included in the official budget released today, but no major changes are expected from the February estimates.