Deadlock Over Budget Continues, Meaning Shutdown Will Spread Sunday Talks Yield Little, Except The Sending Home Today Of 260,000 Federal Workers

White House and Republican budget negotiators impatiently circled one another but reached no agreements Sunday, allowing the full force of the year’s second government shutdown to take effect this morning.

Disruptions caused by the shutdown, which began at midnight Friday when short-term funding expired, will expand today. Nine Cabinet departments and agencies that remain without funding are to begin sending about 260,000 federal workers home.

Unlike the last shutdown, the District of Columbia government will continue operating. Congress reached an agreement on its funding that President Clinton is expected to sign on Tuesday.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers and White House officials met in small gatherings and large. They grouped and regrouped in sessions aimed at finding a budget compromise outside the regular budget negotiations that broke off Friday in a hail of political sound bites and one-liners.

White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta said Democrats planned to offer a new proposal this week to break the stalemate with the Republicans. “This is really an effort to basically hold Democrats together. We’re making good progress. This is a new offer that basically protects our priorities and balances the budget,” he said.

Administration officials met Sunday mostly with groups of Democrats but also with a bipartisan group of senators - who also met with Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M. - in search of a formula that might get enough votes from Democrats and centrist-to-moderate Republicans to force a break in the impasse. No break was apparent Sunday when the sessions ended.

Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole, R-Kan., said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that time was running out for a full budget agreement and that the result may be interim funding at sharply reduced levels that would delay the resolution of the major disagreements between the White House and congressional Republicans over taxes, spending for programs such as Medicare and Medicaid and welfare reform.

“If we don’t have it by next Friday, it probably won’t happen,” he said of the search for a compromise on the balanced budget. In that case, he said, Republicans will approve legislation to restrict federal spending so sharply that Clinton “will wish he had a budget agreement.”

“I just hope that we can reopen the government tomorrow and then resume these talks in good faith,” President Clinton said Sunday morning. He said he had “made far, far more movement than they have” and he complained, “This cannot be a one-way street.”