The welfare reform bill passed by the House last week may be the most consequential of the Republican “Contract With America” proposals yet approved on that side of the Capitol. It faces substantial alteration in the Senate and a potential presidential veto. But its passage by the House is still a dramatic reversal of 60 years of social policy.
In essence, the plan ends the open-ended federal guarantee of income, food and other services to low-income families with children and, instead, provides a fixed-sum block grant for each state to use as it sees fit to assist single mothers and their kids. The states would be barred from providing cash assistance to anyone for more than five years, from aiding legal immigrants who have not become citizens or giving additional dollars to women who have more children while on welfare. Beyond that, their discretion is very broad.
The issues embedded in this proposal are fundamental: How do you affect behavior in the underclass? What training and support is required to move women from welfare to work? Where will the jobs be found? Can you punish irresponsible behavior by adults and at the same time protect children?
As important as any of these is the question of federal vs. state responsibility for the “safety net” social programs. The Democrats, predictably, opposed the measure almost unanimously because of their commitment to Washington as the protector of needy.
Republicans, however, are split, as the Senate debate will show. Their division illustrates, once again, the differences between the disciples of Richard Nixon and the followers of Ronald Reagan, a political/policy fault line that has been spotlighted in this column on other occasions.
The first view has been articulated by Richard P. Nathan, a domestic policy adviser during the Nixon administration, now the director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York in Albany.
Nathan, in a forthcoming article, points out that the Nixon administration sought to decentralize responsibility for services like education, job training, community development and law enforcement “for which conditions and needs vary among communities and where local decision-making was felt to be especially important.”
But it sought further centralization of “safety net” programs, involving both cash and in-kind assistance, where “national action ensures that benefits are uniform throughout the country,” and not subject to the shifting political winds of 50 state legislatures.
As Nathan notes, when Nixon tried in vain to persuade Congress to enact a national system of uniform cash welfare payments, which he argued would “empower” individual recipients and be cheaper to administer, Ronald Reagan “as governor of California fought the Nixon plan.”
When Reagan became president, he wanted to give the states full responsibility for welfare; in return, the federal government would have paid all the bills for Medicaid, the joint federal-state health program for the needy. That plan too was blocked in Congress; as it turned out, it would have been a good deal for the states.
Now the Republican governors who lead 30 of the 50 states are cheering on the House move to “block grant” welfare money, without asking for any offsetting shift of responsibility for Medicaid to Washington.
Nathan-and others-argue that the states will rue the day when recession or simple population growth increases the welfare caseload and the federal dollars remain frozen.
His warning is underlined in an essay by John J. DiIulio Jr. and Donald F. Kettl, published by the Brookings Institution. “Perhaps it will prove possible to have the cake of effective welfare reform and eat the fruits of `less government’ too,” they write. “But there is absolutely nothing in the wide and growing body of empirical research on the intergovernmental administration of work-oriented welfare reform programs to support this hope.
“Much to the contrary, every relevant study indicates that nationally initiated Contract-style welfare reforms can be achieved only where significant resource increases are made in the government bureaucracies that administer the new programs.”
They quote a report by Lawrence M. Mead of Princeton of the successful welfare-to-work program pioneered by Wisconsin Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson. The reason it has worked, Mead says, is close supervision of clients by an expanded corps of social workers. “Dependency is falling precisely because government is growing, and not in spite of it.”
That is a sober message for the Senate-and the states-to ponder.
