The Workfare State. Eva Bertram
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the combination of FAP’s cash aid and existing in-kind benefits might offer poor workers a better deal than they could find in the labor market. In response to the committee’s concerns about this and other issues, administration officials reworked the legislation. Once again, the revisions earned little additional conservative support and turned liberals already troubled by what they saw as low benefits and harsh work requirements more adamantly against FAP.80
Throughout the summer and fall of 1970, the Nixon White House believed that it had the votes to win passage—if the bill could be moved out of the Finance Committee and onto the Senate floor. But Long and others strategically delayed the vote, and the bill stalled in committee.81 Lacking the support of even a majority of Republicans, FAP needed Democratic votes to pass. Yet in the partisan atmosphere of the fall of 1970, as the nation geared up for a congressional election, few Democrats were in the mood to hand the president a legislative victory. When Vice President Spiro Agnew hit the campaign trail with stump speeches condemning “radical liberals,” resentment surged among liberal Democrats—and FAP’s prospects plunged further. By the time the vote was taken in the Senate Finance Committee on November 20, four liberal Democrats joined the conservatives in defeating the bill, 6–10. These included not only Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) but Fred Harris (D-Okla.), who was swayed by NWRO arguments, and Albert Gore, Sr. (D-Tenn.), who was one of the Democrats bruised by Agnew’s attacks. A last-ditch effort to secure a victory on the floor of the Senate also failed, 21–49.82
Undeterred, Nixon vowed to make FAP a “major legislative goal” for the new ninety-first Congress. A reworked FAP once again passed the House, and, once again, stalled in the Senate.83 The revised bill, called H.R. 1, offered some new attractions for both conservatives and liberals. But conservative objections were sharpened by an increase in the basic benefit level, and removal of the stipulation that recipients could be forced to take any job paying standard local wages, no matter how low.84 And liberals were outraged by the elimination of the guarantee that recipients would not receive less under FAP than under existing AFDC programs, and removal of the provision allowing recipients to refuse to take jobs that were not “suitable.” The NWRO, moreover, organized a more effective and far-reaching opposition to the bill among congressional liberals this time.85
In the Senate, welfarists and workfarists crafted alternative legislative proposals. Liberals lined up behind Senator Ribicoff (D-Conn.), who came forward with a more generous family assistance bill in October 1971 that shored up and strengthened the welfare entitlement. Senator Long of the Senate Finance Committee unveiled his own plan, billed as a true and tougher “workfare” proposal. The Finance Committee—still dominated by a conservative majority—rejected both FAP and the Ribicoff proposal, and approved Long’s workfare plan.86
The bill was slow to reach the floor of the Senate, and as months passed, Nixon lost interest in the FAP campaign. When the full Senate finally turned its attention to family assistance in the fall of 1972, the nation was in the throes of another election season, including a vitriolic presidential campaign pitting Nixon against Senator George McGovern (D-S. Dak.), the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing. In the end, none of the three bills—H.R. 1, the Ribicoff plan, or the Long alternative—earned enough support to pass. The struggle over family assistance was over.87
FAP’s Failure and Welfare’s Future
One of the most remarkable conclusions about the story of the Family Assistance Plan is how close it came to becoming law. A legislative proposal that would have remade federal social welfare policy by extending aid to all poor families—working or nonworking, single or two-parent—cleared the House twice with strong margins. According to the White House’s vote count, it may well have cleared the Senate had it been brought to a vote in the summer of 1970; even at the end, in the fall of 1972, FAP might have been enacted if the administration or the Democratic leadership had found the eight votes to reverse the 35–51 outcome on October 4.88
Despite its defeat, the battle over the Nixon proposal changed the terms of the debate and defined new political coalitions in the politics of public assistance. FAP had put the working poor on the national political agenda: both sides in the FAP debate agreed that the problem demanded attention. The welfare poor did not fare so well. The sustained attack on AFDC in the campaign for FAP had left the program and its recipients more discredited than ever, and proposals (by liberal Democrats) to broaden welfarist protections, or to defend the principle of choice in the labor market (as Shultz had argued), were rejected.
The dominant explanation for FAP’s defeat was that the proposal was unable to gain adequate support from either liberals or conservatives. Strictly speaking, this is accurate, but it obscures two deeper factors essential to understanding subsequent welfare politics. First, by the early 1970s, the debate over work and welfare was not simply a debate between “liberals” and “conservatives.” It had evolved into a struggle between two competing conceptions of public assistance, each with its own logic for work and welfare. One was welfarism, rooted in the premise of entitlement to cash assistance to all eligible families; a noncoercive approach to work could be accommodated within this framework. The other approach was a modern form of workfare. The idea at its core—that the poor must be made to work—was not new, of course; nor was the policy of work requirements for welfare recipients. But the concept of elevating work promotion and enforcement above and outside of the commitment to the traditional safety net against poverty, and the idea of replacing the logic of entitlement with the logic of work incentives, was just beginning to take form as a full-blown policy alternative to welfarism at the federal level.
The battle over FAP exposed and deepened the political divide between welfarists and workfarists. It also pushed workfarists to more aggressively articulate and advocate for their alternative. The defeat of FAP struck an ideological blow for their position. Workfare would not gain institutional expression until the passage of three legislative initiatives, described in the next chapter. It would not become the dominant approach to public assistance until the passage of the 1996 welfare reform. But it was during the political struggles over FAP that many of the core ideas behind U.S. workfare began to coalesce, along with the beginnings of a political coalition to support it, from state and local officials to Southern Democratic and conservative Republican lawmakers.
A second critical factor in the battle over FAP was the role of moderates and conservatives. The conventional wisdom on the defeat of FAP emphasizes the actions of liberals: the widespread perception was that liberals “lost” FAP in the quest for an even more far-reaching reform. Liberal defections gained far more media and scholarly attention, particularly from those partial to the reform. These observers aimed their harshest criticism at liberal opponents for being too “pure” in their position, or for demanding even more than FAP proposed—and more than was politically feasible.89
In fact, a close analysis of the votes undertaken by Lester Salamon showed that liberal support for FAP was extremely strong in the final vote tallies. The critical defection from FAP came from the absence of both conservative and moderate support in the Senate. In the face of a strong conservative challenge in the Senate led by Long and his Republican Finance Committee colleagues, there was a palpable lack of leadership to mobilize support for FAP among moderates. Senate Majority Leader Michael Mansfield (D-Mont.), for example, did not take a position. By the time FAP arrived on the Senate floor, moreover, even the president had distanced himself from it, giving moderates still greater reason to play it safe on the issue. So although more than 70 percent of moderates in the House voted in support of H.R. 1, for example, less than 40 percent did so in the Senate.90
The role of moderates and conservatives in FAP’s defeat also supports a core claim of this chapter: by the time FAP came to a vote, there was little common ground in the debate over work and welfare. Policymakers and the public were divided between liberal welfarists and conservative workfarists. Each had moved toward a stauncher position through the late 1960s. The Nixon administration’s strategy of appealing to each side in the FAP debate of the early 1970s only widened the chasm between them. Moderates, meanwhile, were left with little reason to believe that anything would work, and no new middle ground to stand on.
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