WHEN PRESIDENT CLINTON VETOED) welfare form on January 9, he quashed states’ opes of receiving block grants and, with them, greater freedom to manage welfare as they saw fit. Nevertheless, confident that block grants will eventually pass, California governor Pete Wilson is pressing ahead with his state’s first overhaul of Aid to Families with Dependent Children since the program was started for widows and orphans in 1935.
Wilson plans to introduce his legislative package in March or April, after holding hearings around the state. The proposed remake is the brainchild of Eloise Anderson, 53, whom Wilson recruited from Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson’s innovative welfare team. Now director of the California Department of Social Services, Anderson, the daughter of a maid and a janitor, began her career as a social worker in Toledo, Ohio, trying to help women keep their children and get off welfare.
Her familiarity with the system has bred contempt for welfare as we know it. She describes AFDC as “government-sponsored child abuse,” a deeply destructive program that has crippled poor communities, undermined family formation, marginalized poor men, and victimized children. When she unveiled her reforms on January 10, she vowed her “drastic” changes would lift “the cover off the cesspool of AFDC” and cast the light of day on its festering social pathologies.
The reforms draw on decades of welfare research, data from California’s respected collection system, suggestions from the counties, Anderson’s own formative experiences, and her twice-monthly visits to welfare offices around the state. If implemented, her scheme will transform the largest welfare system in the nation, covering 2.6 million people and consuming more than a quarter of all the money spent nationwide on AFDC.
The plan distinguishes four groups of welfare clients: the temporarily unemployed, who make up about half the caseload and who usually leave the system within two years without help from the state; hardcore welfare dependents, some 15 percent of the caseload, who often start receiving AFDC as teenagers and who may have other problems, like substance abuse, mental instability, or illiteracy, that make them only marginally employable; the dis- Eloise Anderson abled; and children whose parents are ineligible but who need assistance. The reforms would primarily affect the first two groups.
For the temporarily unemployed, the emphasis would be on getting work. Beneficiaries would receive a flat cash grant regardless of family size, reduced every six months, for up to two years. Some child care and other services would be provided, to facilitate an intensive job search based on a successful model developed in Riverside County. The message to recipients is clear.
“We expect them to walk in and say, “You know, I’ve got a problem, my husband and I have separated, I’m without a job, I need some help,'” Anderson says. “And our response is, “Well, what do you think you can do, since you can’t stay here for long? How can we help you to be at work at least part- time in six months?” . . . People live up or down to the expectations we have of them. If we approach people like that from the beginning, I think you have a very different response than we’ve been getting.”
Another major change is that beneficiaries without work experience and deemed at risk for long-term dependency would be ineligible for cash grants. Instead of a monthly check, they would receive vouchers for various living expenses equivalent to the current grant of $ 607 a month, along with vouchers for intensive social services, including drug, alcohol, and mental health treatment. A five-year lifetime limit would apply.
In an attempt to head off some long-term dependency, the reforms would radically change California’s approach to unwed mothers. For one thing, women would no longer have to be single to receive aid, upending AFDC’s original assumption that widowhood or desertion was the cause of women’s need for state support. At last, AFDC would cease to be a disincentive to marriage. Intact families and men caring for their children would be eligible if they met income and asset tests. On the other hand, mothers would be expected to work.
An important special provision would apply to unwed teenage mothers. In a return to an older social-work model, before the welfare rights movement of the 1960s made cash the solution to poverty and dismissed social workers as intrusive, Anderson would institute intensive “home visitation.” Social workers would visit teen mothers at home (that is, in most cases, at the home where they grew up, since welfare would no longer provide teens the cash with which to pay their own rent).
The workers would keep an eye on the entire household situation. They would be authorized to intervene not just to help the teen mother, but also to address a young brother’s involvement with a gang, say, or the alcoholism of an adult in the family. A home worker who discovered problems, like drug abuse or child neglect, would take some kind of action.
The purpose here is to break a cycle documented in California’s welfare data: AFDC is feeding people into the state’s costly foster care, drug treatment, and juvenile delinquency systems. The numbers were so striking, Anderson says, “that it became clear that we cannot continue to walk away, just giving these families money and assuming that money is what they need.”
Children especially would have a better chance, Anderson believes, if they could be helped before they started failing in school or suffering the extremes of neglect required to trigger intervention now. New research, she says, shows that home visitation reduces child abuse, unintended pregnancies, and unemploy- ment.
Intervention, of course, requires the client’s cooperation — or else. Under California’s proposal, if a welfare recipient refused help and came up against the five-year time limit, the ultimate sanction would be removal of children from the home. Anderson contends that this already happens, but much later in the family’s history — after children have suffered more, and it is often too late to give them a decent start. Most children in California’s foster care system, she says, were not beaten or sexually abused but simply neglected.
The five-year cutoff is intended as a strong incentive for people to take hold of their lives. Right now, Anderson says, welfare recipients feel they can get treatment or not, with no sense of urgency. If the state offers intensive help of many different kinds but only for a limited period, the theory goes, some people will realize they must act. If they are treated as capable adults, rather than helpless and irresponsible ones, some will meet the system’s higher expectations.
Over time, she predicts, the new approach could cut long-term dependency by two-thirds and slash juvenile crime and foster care. Because the long-term AFDC population is relatively small but the source of so many costly social problems, Anderson says the Wilson administration is willing to spend heavily on intervention, drawing on savings expected in the rest of the system as time limits shrink caseloads.
But the question remains: Will Washington politicians agree to go along? Eloise Anderson, for one, is scathing about the presumption of those who would block serious attempts by states like hers to tackle these problems in favor of the status quo. She reserves particular scorn for President Clinton.
“This man ran for president saying “I’m going to end welfare as we know it’ . . . Well, I’m sorry, but . . . nothing that he has put on the table deals with the issues that we believe are big issues in this AFDC population. He has put nothing on the table to talk about substance abuse among parents. He has put nothing on the table to talk about mental illness among parents. He’s put nothing on the table that talks about how do we begin to help teen morns, nothing about that. Nothing about juvenile delinquency. Nothing . . . . And I thought that the child-loving Democrats would do something different.”
In fact, Clinton did try to do something different, with his misbegotten plan for universal health care. Nor is there any guarantee that California’s new approach to welfare will succeed. Still, it is hard to imagine that the reformers have come up with anything worse for children or more costly to society than the bankrupt welfare system that exists now.
Carolyn Lochhead is Washington correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle.
