The Workfare State. Eva Bertram
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2003–2007
Source: Congressional Directory, 1935 to 2012; History of the Committee on Finance, United States Senate (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981), 141–53.
Note: Southern legislators (in italics) dominated the chairmanships of committees with jurisdiction over social welfare policy from the New Deal to the mid-1970s, a period in which committee chairs exerted a high degree of control over legislation. Southerners chaired the House Ways and Means Committee in thirty-six of forty years, and the Senate Finance Committee in thirty-eight of forty years, from the time of the Social Security Act to 1975. Their influence continued for some years afterward, though it was diminished. Note: Lee Metcalf (D-Mont.) was Finance Committee chair on January 14, 1966, the day Long began his tenure. Grassley also served as chair from January 20 to June 5, 2001.
These Southern lawmakers’ policy decisions in the first three decades of the New Deal system reveal clear priorities.58 They wanted to increase federal funds for those they considered truly “unemployable” and permanently outside of the labor force—namely, those physically unable to earn wages. And they wanted to ensure that others—including most single mothers with care-giving obligations—would work: they were not persuaded that these families should receive aid on the same terms as other categories of the “unemployable” poor. These priorities translated into active Southern support for the programs for the elderly, blind, and disabled poor, and deep suspicion of the ADC program. On five occasions in the 1950s, Southern and Western congressional leaders led the charge for increases in public assistance funding—particularly for the favored categories of elderly and disabled poor—that were not requested by the Truman administration, and that were opposed (to the point of a veto threat) by the Eisenhower administration.59
Southern Democrats were successful in increasing aid for the elderly and disabled poor through the 1950s, but they were frustrated by the growth of ADC. Over time, they became convinced that the answer was to change federal policy to restrict aid to and require work of ADC recipients.60 Federal policy, however, regarded poor, single-mother families as one of the original categories of “unemployables” eligible for public assistance. Southerners had little chance to challenge these categories—until the 1960s, and reforms introduced by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
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Although they shared an ambitious antipoverty agenda, reforming the New Deal public assistance programs was not initially a high priority for either Kennedy or Johnson. Kennedy’s early domestic agenda focused on controlling unemployment levels in the wake of successive recessions between 1957 and 1961, and many of Johnson’s antipoverty programs concentrated on creating opportunities and services for employable Americans.61 Kennedy and Johnson recognized, however, that new policies were needed to reach those unable to earn wages in the labor market: fully three out of five poor Americans were under eighteen or over sixty-five years of age.62 Both administrations pursued expansionary reforms in public assistance and sought to extend the core welfarist commitments of the New Deal programs.
As the Kennedy team prepared to take office in 1961, a task force charged with proposing reforms for the new president took a first step in this direction. It was chaired by Wilbur Cohen, who had staffed FDR’s Committee on Economic Security and later the Social Security Board. Cohen’s team called for welfarist measures such as securing federal funding for state general assistance programs, pressing for more uniform assistance payments across states, denying aid to states that imposed undue restrictions, and boosting federal matching funds as a means to increase benefit levels.63
But the welfare system, and particularly ADC, was under attack as the new administration began. The controversy was fueled by the rising costs and caseloads of the program—which were spiraling up, not down as promised—and more pointedly, by the changing demographic composition of its recipients. An increasing proportion of ADC mothers were nonwhite and nonmarried. Conservative critics were building support for efforts to slash welfare rolls and costs. Some demanded that suspected “cheaters” be rooted out; others argued that all recipients able to work for wages should do so. Attempts to purge ADC rolls and to restrict welfare use at the state level had begun to escalate, particularly in the South and Southwest.64 The regional and racial dimensions of the welfare struggle were underscored months before Kennedy’s election, when state officials in Louisiana issued a tough new rule denying ADC benefits to mothers who failed to maintain “suitable homes.” More than 23,000 children instantly lost eligibility; 95 percent of the children were black, and 70 percent were born to nonmarried mothers.65 Although the Louisiana crisis was resolved by a federal ruling the following year, the case drew national attention.
Confronted with a widening political controversy over welfare, administration leaders crafted a series of reforms between 1961 and 1967. The first was the 1961 ADC-UP program; it was followed by the 1962 Public Welfare Amendments and the 1964 Work Experience and Training program. They were meant to simultaneously meet expansionary liberal aims and mollify conservative concerns about ADC’s trajectory. Ironically, reform strategies intended to strengthen welfarist commitments to poor families would backfire by 1967 and instead advance a workfare alternative.66
Kennedy made the case for his first reform in a February 1961 message to Congress. He proposed to broaden ADC by permitting states to assist certain two-parent families. “Needy children are eligible for assistance if their fathers are deceased, disabled, or family deserters. In logic and humanity, a child should also be eligible for assistance if his father is a needy unemployed worker—for example, a person who has exhausted unemployment benefits.”67 The reform, which Kennedy had championed as a senator, was called “ADC-UP,” for “unemployed parent.”68 In addition to softening the impact of the economic downturn for poor families, Kennedy had another motive. Critics had long argued that ADC unfairly favored single-parent homes and unintentionally created incentives for the breakup of two-parent families. Many ADC supporters shared these concerns. In seeking congressional support for ADC-UP, Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) Secretary Abraham Ribicoff emphasized that the reform would remove any rationale for unemployed fathers to leave their homes to make their families eligible for assistance.69
Advocates hoped that this approach would increase support for the expansionary measure among moderates and conservatives—and the initial signs were positive. Jurisdiction over the proposed changes lay with the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees, chaired by Southern Democrats Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.) in the House and Harry Byrd (D-Va.) in the Senate. The House Committee produced a bill that largely reflected the administration’s proposal, and the measure was eventually approved in both chambers by voice vote. The new law authorized federal ADC grants for two-parent families with a parent who was either out of work or working fewer than a hundred hours a month.70
ADC-UP’s smooth ride through Congress obscured important differences over key provisions among Democratic leaders, however. Passage was eased by the administration’s decision to make ADC-UP optional, not mandatory, for states; as soon became clear, Southern states had no intention of adopting the welfarist expansion. Both committees also added language to restrict its scope and toughen its provisions. Mills’s Ways and Means Committee sought a more aggressive approach to work promotion for the newly eligible unemployed parents—adding, for example, a provision that aid would be terminated if the parent refused a job offered by a state employment agency “without good cause.” This stipulation would become a staple of workfare reforms in the years ahead.71
Liberals heralded the reform as a major new expansion. Many welfarist reformers believed it had the potential to transform ADC from a program for a select group of single-parent households to one serving the broader population of poor families, and might even lead to a more universal approach to public assistance.72 Hopeful liberals misjudged the reform’s