Welfarists Confront Workfarists: The Family Assistance Plan

      As the 1968 presidential race took shape, welfare reform emerged as an unavoidable campaign issue for both parties. In addition to congressional complaints about AFDC’s rising price tag, a growing chorus of opposition arose from state and local officials facing grave fiscal crises.¹ These included prominent Republican governors from states such as California, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania; more than one-fourth of the AFDC caseload burden was carried by these four states alone.² “If you were going to run for President of the United States, you had to have a welfare reform program,” said Martin Anderson, who became research director for Richard Nixon’s campaign in 1968. But if welfare policy was familiar territory for the Democrats, it was, he observed, a “somewhat treacherous issue for a Republican candidate.”³ Anderson and other staffers were charged with developing policy proposals to aid the poor. Nixon’s team produced plans combining program improvements and work measures, and the campaign staff believed they had achieved their goal: “The Democrats lost an issue, the press seemed baffled, and Nixon was very pleased with himself.”⁴

      On November 5, with the long economic expansion of the 1960s slowing, Johnson standing on the sidelines, and the country divided over war in Vietnam and racial tensions at home, Nixon won a narrow victory against Hubert Humphrey. The limits on the new president’s power were clear from the outset. Democratic majorities controlled Congress, 243–192 in the House, and 58–42 in the Senate. Nixon had run a carefully calibrated race, touting a long list of positions designed to appeal to the “forgotten middle” in American politics. These included law and order in America’s cities and a peace strategy for Vietnam. On the social welfare front, Nixon called for returning power to state governments—a reaction to what he saw as the excesses of the Great Society—and a commitment to “liberate the poor from the debilitating dependence on government.”⁵

      The president’s conservatism led many to assume that he would follow the path charted by congressional passage of WIN, consolidating a shift toward greater work obligations for AFDC recipients and further restricting the reach of public assistance. Instead, Nixon’s advisers crafted a plan to expand cash support for the poor and take public assistance reform well beyond the confines of AFDC. The most striking feature of Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP) was its radical proposal to guarantee an income floor for all poor families, including two-parent working families. After a three-year struggle in which the proposal came surprisingly close to passing, FAP died in Congress. A small avalanche of expert opinion and analysis followed, seeking to make sense of its rise and fall.⁶ But with a few notable exceptions, much of the scholarly literature on U.S. social welfare soon came to regard the politics of FAP as a footnote to history, a story about the reform that never happened—an interesting tale, but one largely irrelevant to the development of American social policy.⁷

      The political significance of FAP, however, lay not in the content or fate of the failed Nixon initiative, but in the reaction to the proposal, particularly among the Southern Democrats who had begun to assume a more assertive role in shaping federal policy on work and welfare. The battle over FAP triggered a broad conservative shift in welfare policy at the federal level, reflected not only in the defeat of FAP (1969–72) but also in the creation of new work-based initiatives in its wake (1971–75). The Southern conservative drive for reform began with the WIN amendments to AFDC in 1967. But it was during the struggles over Nixon’s FAP that a coherent alternative to New Deal welfarism emerged, an American brand of workfare that would change the basic functions of public assistance for poor families.

      The core features of and contrasts between welfarist and work-based models of social provision have been charted and assessed in comparative studies by a number of scholars, such as Jamie Peck.⁸ But how and why does a welfarist system change into a workfarist one? This chapter and the next focus on the politics that produced such a shift in U.S. public assistance programs in the early 1970s. Two distinct approaches to U.S. public assistance had emerged by then, with different guiding principles, ends, means, and measures of success.⁹ Under New Deal welfarism, the guiding principle was government entitlement. The end of public assistance was to provide a basic safety net for certain groups of eligible poor Americans; the means toward this end was cash and in-kind assistance. Work might be encouraged and supported (as in the Kennedy–Johnson reforms), but these were not central strategies at the federal level and, above all, were not to undermine the larger end of guaranteeing a safety net. The measure of success was the policy’s ability to provide income assistance to those who were eligible. Under workfare, in contrast, the guiding principle was not government entitlement, but market incentives. The end of public assistance was to promote, require, and reward work among all poor adults who were physically able to perform it, and the means was mandatory work requirements and job training or preparation. The primary measure of success was the policy’s ability to ensure workforce participation, reduce reliance on government assistance, and leave to the market the functions of job allocation and wage setting.

      Both approaches had deep roots in Anglo-American poor relief policies. Welfarism was rooted in the principle that those who were poor and unable to provide for themselves should receive some measure of government assistance; workfare grew out of the English poor law principle that relief should not intervene in the logic or incentives of the market. It was welfarism that had formally governed federal public assistance policies since the New Deal. The WIN amendments had signaled a shift. Debates over the Family Assistance Plan would now clarify the direction policy would take.

      The FAP debates concerned the relationship between welfare and work, and between public assistance and the labor market; they boiled down to two issues. Should the welfare poor work, and if so, what policies should be used to encourage or require this? And should the working poor receive welfare, and if so, what policies would ensure that they continued to work? It was in the struggle over FAP in the late 1960s that income assistance for the working poor was first placed on the national policy agenda, leading ultimately to the creation of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in 1975.¹⁰