IN THE LATE AFTERNOON or November 8, Bill Clinton met with advisers in the Oval Office to discuss an analysis of the Senate’s welfare legislation by the Office of Management and Budget. The study indicated that the bill — which Clinton was on the record as supporting — would push an additional 1.2 million children into poverty. That figure, coming after immense pressure on the White House from liberals to oppose Republican welfare reform, prompted Clinton to backtrack. Now his support for the Senate package is conditioned on an increase: in the minimum wage and on guaranteed funding for programs such as child care and workfare. The president’s reversal reflects the administration’s deep division over welfare — and makes speedy agreement with congressional Republicans unlikely.
The division boils down to policy versus politics. One group, primarily welfare wonks from the Department of Health and Human Services, opposes Republican-style reform and has mounted a concerted campaign for two months to stop Clinton from signing what it considers detestable legislation. The other group, led by political advisers and the White House Domestic Policy Council, has been determined to fulfill the president’s campaign pledge to ” end welfare as we know it.” Until late October, when the Los Angeles Times was leaked an earlier Hits analysis of the Senate’s welfare package, the politics crowd looked to be the victor.
With the release of the budget-office study last week, the welfare wonks have moved ahead. But this shakeup did not occur overnight. Upon seeing the numbers from the original HHS study, Budget Director Alice Rivlin had expressed concern about the impact of welfare reform on children, and congressional Democrats including Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Henry Waxman, and George Miller had complained to the president. Then Marian Wright Edelman, president of the liberal Children’s Defense Fund and an old friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, published an open letter to the president in the Washington Post on November 3. She excoriated the House and Senate bills as “fatally flawed, callous, anti-child assaults” and warned Clinton that his decision on welfare would be “a defining moral litmus test” for his presidency.
The White House should have been prepared for this liberal insurrection. The HHS study, completed on September 14, contended that the Senate welfare proposal would push an additional 1.1 million children into poverty and would see the poorest 20 percent of families lose 6 percent of their annual income, or $ 800. The study concluded, “The severity of the impact of [the Senate bill] on poor families exacerbates the deteriorating economic situation for these families who have lost a greater share of their income in the past 15 years than families with higher income.”
Presuming that the White House would shrink from signing any welfare bill with these effects, Donna Shalala, secretary of Health and Human Services and a cabinet liberal, personally gave a copy of the study to the president the day after its completion. The ploy didn’t work. In his weekly radio address on September 16, Clinton laid out the major provisions of the Senate welfare package and embraced them, saying, “All these things have long been critical elements of my approach to welfare reform.” Three days later, the bill passed the Senate with overwhelming support from Democrats — none of whom knew that an administration study critical of the legislation existed.
That was not the end of the story. The HHS study had been supervised by Wendell Primus, a deputy assistant secretary (and author of the notorious House Ways and Means Green Book falsely showing 1980s income gains going primarily to the rich), but both the Treasury and the White House budget office were involved. Thus, a number of liberals throughout the administration had learned of the study’s existence and were intent on publicizing its findings — even if doing so undermined the president’s political strategy. Their worst fear — that it was Clinton’s senior aides who favored going along with the Republicans’ welfare reform — was confirmed by a September 25 column in the Washington Post, in which Jack Anderson and Michael Binstein described White House chief of staff Leon Panetta exchanging “exuberant high-fives with aides” after the Senate vote.
A number of administration officials urged the White House publicly to acknowledge the HHS study. They encountered strong opposition from Bruce Reed, a New Democrat in charge of welfare reform, and Rahm Emanuel, a high-level political aide. The possibility of not releasing the HHS study was first broached at a White House staff meeting the day after it was completed; in subsequent meetings it was decided that if the study leaked, the White House would challenge its methodology. The coverup was deliberate. Before the White House released, on October 13, an interagency analysis of Republican budget proposals’ impact on family income, Press Secretary Michael McCurry excised the section in which HHS spelled out the impact of welfare reform on children.
To no one’s surprise, the suppression strategy sprang a leak. Moynihan learned in early October that a study of the Senate bill’s impact on children existed, but Clinton officials turned down his request for a copy. He held his fire until October 24; then, at a public committee meeting, he denounced the White House’s refusal to release the report.
An HHS spokeswoman initially denied that there was any such study, only to be Confronted three days later with Elizabeth Shogren’s story describing its contents in the Los Angeles Times. The White House responded as planned: It challenged the study’s methodology. “There are hundreds of . . . preliminary draft estimates as people Work through and analyze legislation,” said McCurry On October 27. “We’re not going to provide . . . estimates or analyses that are less than accurate and less than complete.”
The latest developments raise the possibility that Clinton will actually veto Whatever welfare bill emerges from the House-Senate conference. But if he does sign welfare reform into law, his administration won’t deserve much credit, or blame: It has been almost totally irrelevant to this year’s welfare debate. The House bill, which passed in March, contains virtually no administration fingerprints, while the Senate bill emerged more satisfactory to the Clintonites only because Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole had to make concessions to moderate Republicans.
And so, even as the White House pounds Republicans for a budget it claims will harm the poor, until recently it has embraced welfare legislation its own analysts insist will have precisely that effect. The president’s current qualified support for the Senate package gives liberals some hope, but plenty of administration officials are embittered.
Says one: “The controversy over the administration’s welfare analyses is just another example of the bad judgment that has plagued the domestic policy decisions of this White House. So-called Clinton New Democrats are watered- down plagiarists of the conservative agenda.”
by Matthew Rees
