Washington ? Obama administration officials and lawmakers are scrambling to find a way to funnel some of the financial industry’s record earnings back to the still-struggling taxpayers who helped rescue the industry from looming disaster.

The White House is considering a fee on banks and other financial companies as one approach, with revenues earmarked to help recoup any losses from the government’s $700 billion bailout, a senior administration official said.

Some in Congress want to add a tax on bonuses or assess a small fee on all stock transactions, which would hit large banking companies hardest.

Washington’s determination to find ways of pulling cash from overstuffed Wall Street wallets stems in large part from fear of a public backlash against multimillion-dollar bonuses at a time when unemployment still stands at about 10 percent and record budget deficits plague the federal government.

But the ideas under consideration all have potential problems, including that they could stunt the anemic economic recovery and be circumvented by clever industry pay tactics, as has happened with past attempts to rein in compensation.

“I fully understand why the public is very, very mad, and it’s appropriate to be mad at the bankers. The problem is the things that would be truly emotionally satisfying are almost always bad policy,” said Douglas Elliott, an economics fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank and a former investment banker. “We could go and do something that could really scorch the bankers. But it could cause people to move out of the banks and go work for hedge funds.”

Still, the Obama administration plans to try as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and other recipients of bailout money are set to announce billions of dollars in bonuses this month after making huge profits last year.

A possible levy on banks could be included in the proposed budget for the 2011 fiscal year, said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans have not been finalized.

“The president has made a commitment to the American people that he will recoup their investment in the financial industry,” the official said.

The law creating the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program requires that the government come up with a plan to recoup any losses from the industry so the fund doesn’t increase the federal deficit or overall U.S. debt. But such a plan is not called for until October 2013 — five years after the fund was created — when the White House is supposed to prepare a report for Congress about how much is left in the fund.

The administration recently estimated that TARP will lose about $141 billion over the next 10 years — about $200 billion less than projected in August. Most of the large recipients of TARP funds have repaid their money, with the federal government making a profit on the sales of some of the stock warrants it received as part of those initial investments.