The Workfare State. Eva Bertram
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Lyndon Johnson did little to clarify or resolve the dilemma after assuming the presidency. Johnson declared a “War on Poverty” in his first State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, and signed the Economic Opportunity Act eight months later. His position on public assistance largely reflected and extended Kennedy’s vision. But the focus on self-support grew more explicit under Johnson, and the emphasis shifted to services designed to more quickly prepare individuals for the workforce.
Johnson’s emphasis on creating opportunity became a guiding principle for the War on Poverty, and was intended to convey a new Democratic commitment to helping the poor help themselves: “Rather than fight poverty by means of the dole,” explained one analyst, “we were to restore the poor to self-sufficiency through education, training and work—all in the spirit of the Economic Opportunity Act.”91 The focus on opportunity obscured more than it illuminated, however. The issues that divided Democrats in the 1960s, as in the 1930s, were not whether generating opportunity was desirable, but what if anything government would do to provide opportunities if they were not readily available in the private labor market, and whether programs promoting opportunity and self-support would replace or complement cash assistance for those who could not or did not support themselves.
Johnson expanded on the work components of Kennedy’s Public Welfare Amendments with his own reform—the Work Experience and Training program (WET), under Title V of the Economic Opportunity Act.92 Unlike the CWT program, WET was fully funded by federal dollars. Federal funding led to its adoption by all but one state, but its results were hardly more encouraging than those of CWT. Between 1964 and early 1967, WET enrolled only 133,000 individuals; even at its high point in this period, just 5 percent of adults in AFDC participated in the program.93
Meanwhile, political struggles over welfare were heating up. The 1964 election of the most liberal Congress since the New Deal had effectively split the Democratic Party in three over the welfare issue, with the Kennedy–Johnson reformers occupying the rapidly diminishing middle-ground position. To their right were the conservative Democrats, whose frustration with AFDC was growing. But pressure was also building to the left of the administration, generated in part by civil rights and welfare rights activists. They mobilized in poor communities and pressed for reforms that went well beyond the commitments of the New Deal and the promises of the Great Society. Many argued (as earlier welfarists had) that the Democrats should abandon the model of limited categorical assistance, to provide an expanded and more generous entitlement for all poor families. The concept of providing a denser safety net for all who needed it—perhaps through a basic guaranteed income—was also making headway among many government officials.94
Pressed from both sides, liberals in the Johnson administration continued to seek compromise positions that could appeal to all. This strategy, however, was slowly collapsing. With each reform initiative, administration officials had promised that the welfare rolls would drop—and yet the rolls continued to spiral upward. Between early 1962 and 1967, the number of AFDC recipients increased from 3.5 to 5 million. Costs escalated from $994 million in 1960 to $2.2 billion in 1967.95 The successive Kennedy–Johnson reforms, meanwhile, had gradually shredded the always tenuous distinction between the employable and unemployable poor at the heart of the New Deal rationale for public assistance. Aid was now granted (through AFDC-UP) to employable AFDC fathers, and (under the CWT and WET programs) to mothers as well as fathers who were encouraged to work. If federal policy directed aid to employable as well as unemployable poor adults, what was the basis and what were the parameters of public assistance for poor families? Who defined how employable a recipient might be? By 1967, the party’s conservative faction was ready to provide its own answers.
As the Public Welfare Amendments approached the end of their five-year authorization that year, the president sent Congress new plans for addressing poverty among children and the elderly. Despite public criticism of the rising AFDC rolls, Johnson argued for new expansions in aid, claiming that too few poor children were receiving the help they needed. He condemned states for meager benefit levels and for not taking advantage of AFDC-UP to expand the program, and also criticized states for failing to fully implement CWT programs.96 Johnson sought to sustain the same political balancing act that he and Kennedy had throughout the 1960s—combining welfarist expansions with noncoercive provisions to encourage work through incentives and social services.
But social service proponents were on the defensive. Measured against a yardstick selected by advocates themselves—declining rolls and costs—the 1962 services strategy had yielded few results in five years.97 At the same time, increasing numbers of nonwhite and never-married recipients had gained access to the program since its inception, and the backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement had generated new attacks on AFDC and its recipients. Women were entering the workforce in larger numbers, fueling demands that poor single mothers on welfare work for wages. And state welfare offices were clamoring for fiscal relief. Demands for conservative reform, in short, were mounting from many quarters.98
In Congress, critics were increasingly frustrated with the unmet promises of liberal welfarists within the party. “Witness after witness told the Congress over the years that if we would just do this and do that to improve social insurance, then public assistance would eventually wither away,” Wilbur Mills explained to social welfare officials in Arkansas. “And this is turning out to be largely true for every cash public assistance program except the AFDC program.”99 Mills directed particular ire at the failure of the services strategy to produce program reductions and savings.100 Welfarist advocates countered that there had not been the time or opportunity for a true test.101 Politically, however, the services strategy had run out of time. Mills and other congressional leaders had had enough. When the Johnson administration provided an opening by proposing an expanded work support program as part of AFDC’s reauthorization in 1967, they seized the opportunity to press their own agenda for conservative reform.
The break with the administration on welfare policy had been brewing for some time, as tensions rose between Southern conservatives and Northern liberals over civil rights and the Great Society. The 1966 congressional midterm elections had strengthened the Southerners’ position, as the liberal wing lost its majority. Democrats retained control of Congress but gave up forty-seven seats in the House, and more than three-quarters of those losses were from outside the South. In the wake of race riots in Newark and Detroit in July 1967, Mills’s committee finally moved to “kill a major proposal to liberalize welfare,” reported the Wall Street Journal.102 Instead of approving Johnson’s plans for AFDC, the committee sent the House a package of reforms that would, for the first time, require states to enroll AFDC recipients in work programs, formally alter the program’s stated aims, and effectively end its entitlement status by freezing the number of recipients. The proposals, developed by Mills’s committee in executive session over months, caught the administration by surprise.103
Tougher work policies, Mills suggested, would solve the AFDC crisis. His proposals built on the earlier Kennedy and Johnson programs—but shifted their logic and intent. The Ways and Means Committee began by revising the preamble to Title IV of the Social Security Act (AFDC). States should now ensure “that each appropriate relative, child and individual will enter the labor force and accept employment.”104 The committee crafted a new section to be added to Title IV, creating a Work Incentive (WIN) program. States would be required to establish work-training programs for adults and children over sixteen receiving AFDC; they would also be required to set up day-care centers for AFDC parents with young children, making these parents eligible for work and training as well. All eligible recipients were to be referred to the programs by state and local welfare agencies, and the committee envisioned that the vast majority of adult recipients would be judged appropriate for work referrals. Refusal to work or receive training without “good cause,” the committee suggested, could lead to termination of AFDC assistance.105 Mills’s committee also included a measure to reward employment by creating positive incentives for welfare recipients, a strategy supported by liberals. Expanding on an administration proposal, Ways and Means proposed a work incentive permitting working parents to keep $30 plus one-third of their earnings before any deductions were made to their AFDC checks.