The current budgetary standoff between US President Bill Clinton and the American Congress has filtered down to Bermuda, limiting the services that are available to US citizens here and bringing all visa applications for entry to the US to a halt.

Three staff members in the office of US Consul General Mr. Bob Farmer, meanwhile, have been temporarily laid off as a result of the crisis.

And the Bermuda consulate's deputy principal officer, Mr. Bruce Berton, said yesterday that he saw no end to the shutdown in sight.

"It (the impasse in Washington) has affected our consulate,'' Mr. Berton said in a telephone interview from the US mission in Devonshire. "I honestly don't know when it'll get back to normal.'' Yesterday, some 800,000 US federal workers were forced to stay home for the second day in a row after Mr. Clinton ordered much of the government to cease providing all of its "non-essential'' services on Tuesday.

The shutdown, which is affecting operations from social security handouts to the staffing of US national parks to American missions overseas, came after the president and Congress failed to reach an agreement in recent weeks on legislation to extend the spending authority of federal government agencies.

In Bermuda, the shutdown has meant that US consular staff are providing only minimal service to American citizens on the Island and little or no service to foreigners, including Bermudians.

"All normal visa services have been suspended,'' Mr. Berton told The Royal Gazette . "We're trying to assist US citizens where we can, but we're only granting immigrant visas on a humanitarian or emergency basis.'' Consisting of one American and two locals, the three staff members who have been "placed on furlough'' included a pair of consular workers and one "political economic'' assistant, Mr. Berton revealed yesterday. Their dismissal, which is "most definitely'' temporary, has reduced the number of employees at the consulate from 14 to 11.

"We expect,'' Mr. Berton told The Royal Gazette , "that all of the furloughed workers will be paid retroactively.'' In the US, however, officials who fear that doing so would cost millions of dollars in lost work for the government have given no guarantee that such payments will be made.

Comparatively speaking, Bermuda's US consulate has not been as hard hit as other US overseas missions.

In Finland, for example, the staff of 100 at the US embassy in Helsinki faced reduction this week by as much as a third or half.

None of the overseas offices, however, has been as severely downsized or restricted as government agencies in the United States.

"Overseas posts,'' Mr. Berton explained, "are generally regarded as smaller, in the international eye and important to national security. The overseas posts have not been affected as much as Washington.'' In that city and across the United States, Americans had to contend yesterday with closed passport and IRS offices, unmailed social security and disability cheques and skeleton crews at just about every other government agency.

Visitors, too, were being turned away at unmanned monuments from the Statue of Liberty in New York City to Alcatraz prison in San Francisco, while only one staff member each was being retained at 17 national fish hatcheries on the Pacific coast to feed and care for spawning salmon stocks.

With Mr. Clinton, moreover, expressing little signs of optimism last night over talks with Congressional leaders, an end to the shutdown seemed nowhere on the horizon.

"We (in Bermuda),'' Mr. Berton told The Gazette , "are watching the news as much as anyone else.

"It's now up to the president and the Congress to work something out.'' VIP