Bill to Extend Jobless Benefits Languishes : Unemployment: The proposed 13-week payment extension has been stalled by efforts to attach a federal work force reduction plan. A compromise measure was rejected by the House.

In an unexpected setback for California and other states with economic troubles, a Clinton Administration proposal to extend jobless benefits for 1 million long-term unemployed people may not win approval this year, congressional leaders said Tuesday.

Although the $1.1-billion emergency benefit extension has already passed the House and Senate in slightly different versions, a Senate-House compromise has been rejected by the House and efforts to revive it have shown little progress.

The bill would provide 13 extra weeks of payments in California and other states with high jobless rates and a seven-week extension in all other states for people who have exhausted their basic 26 weeks of benefits, retroactive to Oct. 2.

Over the last two months, an estimated 60,000 people a week have exhausted their benefits and probably will not get additional benefits if Congress adjourns next week without acting on the measure.

Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.), noting that more than $21 billion has already been approved to provide additional payments to long-term unemployed people in the last two years, said he could not say whether the pending extension will be passed this year.

“There’s a point at which some members feel strongly that the (unemployment insurance) program has to be restructured,” Foley said.

House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), however, was trying to work out a revised version of the bill that could be rushed through the House and get Senate approval in the closing days of the session.

“We’re close to an impasse that will carry us beyond this session, and that would be a real loss,” said California Rep. Vic Fazio (D-West Sacramento), vice chairman of the Democratic caucus and a member of the Democratic leadership. “I’m going to try hard to avert that.”

The main hang-up involves the apparent determination by the House to use the jobless benefit measure as a vehicle to write into law an unrelated proposal: the recommended elimination of 252,000 federal workers that was included in President Clinton’s report on reinventing government.

The proposed amendment was added to the bill by the Senate on an 82-14 roll call and it was endorsed in principle by the House on Nov. 4, when it voted 275 to 146 to issue non-binding instructions to House negotiators to include it in the final version of the legislation.

The proposed language would lock the government into reductions over a five-year period. But the Democratic leadership and the White House oppose the provision, arguing that the timing and form of cutbacks should be negotiated as part of the federal budget process.

The Senate-House committee working for a compromise on the legislation decided to drop the provision. But the full House disagreed, voting 226 to 202 on Nov. 9 to return the measure to the conference committee with a renewed demand to include the cutback in government employment.

As a result, the bill has languished in conference with no agreement on how to proceed.

“We’re getting a lot of angry phone calls from constituents,” said one House aide on the Ways and Means Committee, where the bill originated nearly two months ago.

Overall, however, the bill to extend jobless benefits, which once was widely popular with House members, has become something of an orphan in the closing days of the first session of the 103rd Congress.

The number of workers who have been unemployed for six months or more stands at 1.7 million, substantially more than the 1.3 million people who were in the long-term unemployed category when the first extension was passed in the closing days of 1992, when George Bush was President.

“If George Bush were still President, it would probably still be a ‘motherhood’ bill” that no one would vote against, a Democratic staff aide said.