Yet now, when nobody’s looking, those soft-headed, entitlement-loving politicians in Congress are busy undermining the 1996 reform, gutting its work requirements and imposing Washington-knows-best restrictions that ensure states will not be able to put large numbers of recipients to work.
Typical. Except for one thing: the members of Congress doing the undermining are Republicans in Republican-led committees in a Republican Congress.
It is, as Gingrich would say, frankly bizarre. You’d think the GOP would jealously protect last year’s achievement. The 1996 law abolished the main federal welfare program and gave the money in a ““block grant’’ to states to spend on aid programs of their own devising. To prod governors in the right direction, the law required states to have a rising percentage of their caseloads working - 50 percent by 2002. Wisconsin has been leading the way, with an ambitious program to require all recipients to work, in last-resort ““community service’’ jobs if necessary.
If you wanted to subvert this successful (so far) scenario, what would you do? Not launch a frontal assault on the popular reform. Instead, you’d just change a few crucial details. Two, in particular:
Fifty percent of the caseload must be ““working’’ in 2002. Sounds tough. But let’s look at the math. Under the original reform, states get credit for any caseload drop since 1995 - already about 15 percent. Then there’s a credit for recipients with part-time jobs - about 4 percent of the caseload. Plus the ““mothers with kids under age one’’ loophole (you don’t want to know the details), which is good for another 3 percent. That’s a total of 22 percent right off the bat.
And, this past week, Republican committees in the House and the Senate opened up new loopholes. Under the House Ways and Means plan, states could count as ““working’’ teenage parents in school - about 7 percent of the caseload. And, in 2002, states could put another 15 percent of the caseload into classrooms and count that as ““work,’’ too. Add up all those numbers and you realize that the average state could, without getting any additional recipients working, achieve a ““work’’ percentage of 44 percent. If the caseload drops 6 more points, most states wouldn’t have to require a single soul to work.
At least states like Wisconsin that want to put recipients to work can do it, right? Don’t be so sure. In the current budget debate, three key GOP-led congressional committees, with Republican votes, have approved union-inspired restrictions that would make it very hard to give ““work- fare’’ participants work worth doing.
Workfare has always been a threat to government employees, who worry that cheap workfarers will take their jobs. The 1996 law said existing workers couldn’t be fired and replaced with welfare recipients. That seems only fair. But the new ““anti-displacement’’ restrictions would ban a welfare recipient from doing a task if it would ““infringe in any way upon the promotional opportunities’’ of existing workers, or be ““inconsistent’’ with union work rules.
The practical effect, as Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson argued in a letter of protest, will be to let unions block workfare assignments ““at will.’’ Governors will be forced to place workfarers far away from anything existing workers are already doing, which is to say anything visibly useful. No fixing up parks, no cleaning up subway stations. Instead, recipients will be pushed into the amorphous nonprofit sector, into make-work and fake-work. That’s what happened in the last big public-jobs program, CETA. The government wound up paying people to do things like ““checking on’’ cars in a housing project.
Don’t be fooled by the showy congressional debate over whether workfarers should get the minimum wage. The ““antidisplacement’’ provisions are the real nub of the current welfare fight. There are signs GOP House leaders are finally waking up to the threat to last year’s reform. But, with the welfare changes passed by committees in both houses, it may be too late. And the two sets of changes, read together, do make strange and brilliant sense: the union-inspired restrictions make it hard for states to require work; the new loopholes tell them they don’t really have to. The end result could be a welfare system a lot like the one we thought Congress replaced in 1996.
