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C*******r
发帖数: 10345 | 1 Welfare Reform as We Knew It
It's hard to remember now, but this summer Mitt Romney opened a useful
debate about "dependency"—concerning President Obama's regulation to
rewrite the 1996 welfare reform. Democrats deny any such intent, but as
early as this week the House plans to hold a vote to override the new rule.
So it's a good moment to dissect what the Administration is really trying to
do, because in this case Mr. Romney is right: The Administration has made
welfare's work requirements far weaker, and for ideological reasons that the
press corps has failed to report.
The 1996 welfare landmark is among the few serious bipartisan reforms of
government since the Great Society. State innovators like Tommy Thompson's
Wisconsin gave Contract-with-America Republicans a model, while Bill Clinton
promised to "end welfare as we know it." Their insight was that both
welfare recipients and the bureaucracies built around them needed better
incentives to end dependency, such as time limits on cash benefits and
asking the able-bodied to work or train to prepare for work.
Unreconstructed liberals—then about half of Democrats in Congress—
predicted a return to Bleak House. Some Clinton officials resigned when he
signed the bill. They were wrong in every way. Caseloads plunged by half, to
5.9 million in 2000 from 12.6 million in 1996. Health and Human Service
Department studies show that most found work and saw their incomes rise.
The anti-reformers have nonetheless looked for an opening to resurrect the
old system. They have now found a way via an HHS regulatory "information
memorandum" in July that said the agency would waive workfare requirements
if states asked.
HHS is selling this under the guise of "flexibility" and says the point is
to get more people working, not fewer. But recall that the joint state-
federal welfare program has always had "work" requirements. Prior to 1996,
they included such demands as journaling, bed rest and massage therapy.
For this reason, the statute specifically enumerated a 12-point definition
of "work." People who can but don't meet the work terms eventually lose
benefits. States have enormous flexibility to help recipients back into the
job market. But they forfeit a portion of their federal money unless a
certain percentage of their caseload complies—generally between 30% and 40%.
HHS has unilaterally upended these incentives. States can now get a waiver
if they want "to test approaches and methods other than those set forth in
section 407," the work requirement provision, including new "definitions of
work activities and engagement."
But states are already allowed to experiment now, as long as beneficiaries
meet the work quotas defined by current law. The crucial change is that HHS
is saying they can experiment instead of complying with the law.
HHS suggests, for example, that states adopt "a comprehensive universal
engagement system in lieu of certain participation rate requirements."
Universal engagement means that everybody is doing something constructive
with their time "for at least one hour per week," even if that's as simple
as "researching child care options" or "a job readiness workshop," as a 2008
HHS document put it. So everybody can spend an hour looking into day care
instead of—"in lieu of"—the work that 30% to 40% are supposed to be doing.
This new standard didn't appear out of thin air, but is part of a liberal
critique of welfare reform that has made its way into the Administration. In
2005, Mark Greenberg of the Center for Law and Social Policy told Congress
that welfare needs to be retargeted to families that are "not in work and
not receiving welfare" and states ought to "work with, rather than drive
away, families with serious employment barriers."
In a 2006 article for the journal Policy & Practice, Mr. Greenberg worried
that "the challenge is to ensure that compliance and penalty avoidance do
not become the central goals of welfare reform." He added that the work rate
"was never a good measure of state efforts to help families get and keep
jobs" and called for "more balanced approaches," including "promoting
sustainable employment" and "supporting labor market progress."
Where's Mr. Greenberg now? Well, he's an HHS deputy assistant secretary for
policy and the architect of the workfare waiver.
The problem with the waiver is also its illegality. Congress went to great
lengths to ensure that work requirements aren't subject to waivers to
prevent backsliding. Yet with no more than a paragraph of legal analysis,
HHS simply ruled it could suspend enforcement of laws that Mr. Obama does
not like. This is unconstitutional, as the Washington lawyers David Rivkin
and Lee Casey noted in these pages.
When its welfare rewrite became a political issue, HHS then invented a new
standard that appears nowhere in its original memorandum and says that 20%
more people need to move to work from welfare than before to get a waiver.
The Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector points out that this metric is bogus
. The easiest way to achieve it statistically is to put 20% or more people
on the rolls and then get credit when some naturally leave.
HHS's last line of political defense is that the Republican Governors of
Nevada and Utah asked for this change. They did, though they claim they
weren't trying to weaken the work requirements. In any case, in 2005, 29 GOP
Governors including Mr. Romney asked for waivers on "allowable" work
activities.
Yet the principle—those that can work must—isn't partisan. The drafters of
reform knew that Governors of either party might try to take the path of
political least resistance. Many Republican Governors are as bad as
Democrats on Medicaid spending, for instance. That's why reformers created a
structure that would resist gaming.
This is the reform that the Administration has, in fact, gutted. There's
flexibility to innovate and there's "flexibility." In the first case, HHS
has denied Governors the running room to redesign Medicaid to be more cost
effective. But now it tells states that they don't have to comply with the
most basic obligation of welfare reform. It's as if HHS told states they can
have the "flexibility" not to cover health care for poor people.
Americans support a safety net for those who fall on hard times, but they
don't want welfare to become a way of life. Mr. Obama seems to disagree,
even if he denies it for the purposes of getting past Election Day. The
House resolution to override the HHS waiver is an important reform moment,
and if the Romney campaign were competent it would let every American know
about it. |
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