Welfare reforms taking shape

 

Bush plan calls for states to promote marriage, job searches

 

By Amy Goldstein
THE WASHINGTON POST

 

Feb. 7 — The Bush administration began yesterday to sketch out its plans for revising the nation’s welfare system, calling on states to find new ways to promote marriage and to help poor workers secure better jobs – but without providing additional federal money for those priorities.

        While some aspects of the administration’s ‘family formation’ proposals remain unclear, the $100 million could be used for premarital education, helping couples in troubled marriages and education campaigns that ‘talk about the importance of marriage.’                                                   SENIOR AIDES to the president made clear publicly for the first time that they will ask states to continue to operate their welfare programs with exactly the same financial help they began to receive a half-dozen years ago, primarily from annual grants totaling $16.5 billion.
       Administration officials also said they want to use $100 million for selected states and communities to experiment with strategies to encourage low-income people to get - and to stay - married. The administration proposes to pay for the experiments by eliminating the financial bonuses the government has been giving to states in which births to unmarried women have decreased - an initiative regarded as ineffective.
       The future of welfare is a prime concern of the White House and Congress because the 1996 law that redesigned this basic element of the country’s social safety net is set to expire in October unless it is renewed. In one of the most dramatic recent changes to social policy, that law abandoned a federal system of unlimited monthly welfare checks, converting the system into state-run programs of temporary cash assistance that require recipients to get jobs.

       The question of how to refine the changes begun six years ago is emerging as one of the touchiest domestic policy questions, producing an ideological crossfire on Capitol Hill and beyond that the administration is seeking to navigate.
       Democrats in Congress have said that, in the midst of a recession, the welfare system needs larger subsidies and greater emphasis on efforts to lessen poverty. However, conservative politicians and policy specialists say that, now that welfare rolls have plummeted, the government should give states less money and impose stronger measures to foster marriage than the administration envisions.
       Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson yesterday told the House Ways and Means Committee that President Bush is advocating “a clear and important next step to welfare reform.”
       Thompson, a champion of welfare changes while he was Wisconsin’s governor, told the committee that the administration wants to focus on ways to “help those families that have left welfare to climb the job ladder and become more secure in the workforce.”
       
‘IT REQUIRES TRAINING’
       The number of families receiving cash assistance has fallen by more than half during the past several years, to slightly more than 2 million, but many former welfare recipients who have gone to work remain poor and tend to move into and out of jobs. “It requires training. It requires education. It requires a lot of assistance to move people up the ladder,” Thompson said.
       He also said that the administration wants to write into law a new basic purpose for the welfare system - to promote children’s well-being. Democrats have proposed adding a different basic goal - to reduce poverty and help former welfare recipients become self-sufficient.

While laying out their initiative’s overall direction, administration officials emphasized that they have not yet disclosed - or, in some cases, decided - key details of how the welfare changes they favor would work. Administration sources said they are still considering whether to endorse two changes favored by Democrats: giving states more freedom to extend the time limits for cash benefits if people hold jobs and restoring legal immigrants’ benefits, which were taken away by the 1996 law.
       The administration will explain its plans in more detail in about three weeks, said Wade F. Horn, assistant HHS secretary for children and families. He said in an interview that, in addition to keeping states’ block grants the same size, the administration wants to restore two smaller pools of money that were phased out last year. One would provide $319 million a year to states that historically have paid relatively low welfare benefits. The other would offer up to $2 billion over the next five years to states with the most widespread unemployment.
       
MARRIAGE COUNSELING
       While some aspects of the administration’s “family formation” proposals remain unclear, Horn said that the $100 million in grants could be used for premarital education, helping couples in troubled marriages and education campaigns that “talk about the importance of marriage.”
       Conservative policy analysts believe such measures do not go far enough. Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said the government should cut states’ block grants by at least 10 percent and designate at least $300 million a year to encourage states, cities and community groups to promote marriage.
       On the other hand, Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), the main sponsor of the Democratic welfare bill in the House, said states need at least another $25 billion over the next five years for bigger block grants, child care subsidies and the return of benefits for legal immigrants. Yet Cardin said the administration’s proposal “is probably about the best we could have expected at this point in the process. . . . I’m optimistic we can work it out.”
© 2002 The Washington Post Company                                                                           

 

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