Scott Walker: Welfare reformer?

At the end of his tenure, “I want to look back and say I’ve done everything in my power to make sure those who are able to work — are able to,” the Wisconsin governor said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.

This year, Walker is pursuing that goal with a package of reforms to public assistance in the state budget, changes meant to move people from government programs to work.

Walker’s proposed reforms include a mix of familiar conservative ideas, such as new work requirements for benefits, technocratic tweaks to existing programs to reduce disincentives to work, and populist-friendly paternalism, such as drug testing.

It’s a combination that could prove a model for Republicans in the President Trump era.

In the 1990s, another Republican Wisconsin governor, Tommy Thompson, charted a course for Republicans by instituting work requirements in welfare.

Today, the circumstances are far different. Welfare as it was known in the 1990s has ended, but a host of other federal programs, such as food stamps, have grown in its absence. Conservatives fear that those programs don’t have the same pro-work incentives.

Walker says his proposals are all about work. With the state unemployment rate at 3.9 percent and labor force participation at 68 percent, eighth highest in the nation, “I just desperately need more people in the workforce,” he says.

To that end, the budget would add work requirements to the food stamp program on a trial basis. Able-bodied adults with school-age children would be required to work 80 hours a month or participate in job-training programs to receive food stamp benefits. Childless, able-bodied adults already required to participate in the training program have earned an average hourly wage of more than $12 and are getting nearly 34 hours a week, according to the Department of Health Services.

Walker is also aiming to boost work requirements in other programs, including for childless Medicaid beneficiaries and for housing voucher recipients, but it is the food stamp work requirement that has been criticized as punitive. For a single mother struggling to balance taking care of her children and facing an unpredictable schedule for entry-level work, holding down a job is not practical, said Jon Peacock, the research director at the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families. “To sanction people in that kind of situation because they can’t keep steady employment is mean-spirited and counterproductive,” Peacock argued.

Wisconsin is “extremely generous” in accommodating individual circumstances, Walker countered, noting that people who can’t meet the work requirements can receive benefits if they enroll in job-training programs.

Nor is drug-testing for applicants suspected to be at risk for addiction meant to be punitive or stigmatizing, Walker says. Instead, it’s meant to push people toward treatment before they fail a drug test during a job application.

Altogether, the budget is meant to constitute a conservative approach to poverty. Yet some provisions might have bipartisan support.

One such measure: For some families, Walker aims to increase the earned income tax credit, which essentially subsidizes paychecks for low workers, cutting them a check if they don’t have tax liability. The budget proposes to boost the credit for some families and give newly married couples a “honeymoon” from a marriage penalty the credit’s structure might impose on them, partly reversing cuts Walker made to address a budget shortfall in 2011.

Another would be eliminating an income “cliff” in the state child-care subsidy. Currently, when workers hit an income that is 200 percent of the poverty level, they lose more in child care subsidies than they make in new earnings. As a result, they may ask their bosses to limit their hours or avoid promotions. Walker would institute a phase-in rather than a cliff by allowing families to keep receiving a partial subsidy.

That would cost money, as would the stepped-up job training measures and the earned income tax credit.

Walker, though, is not presenting the reforms as budget-cutting measures. There, he has conservative support.

“Fiscal conservatives here in Wisconsin are willing to see if it works,” said Brett Healy, the head of the MacIver Institute, a free-market state think tank. “And willing to pay a little more upfront if, in the long run, it helps someone transition to a family-supporting, self-sustaining job.”

Not every item of Walker’s reform agenda is relevant nationally. Under his plan, the homestead tax credit, a benefit originally meant to protect housing for people on a fixed income, would see new work incentives for able-bodied adults, saving money to be applied to the earned-income tax credit expansion.

Another example: The budget aims to increase child support from both parents, under the logic that they are the best nurturers and most responsible for their kids. Noncustodial fathers would get the carrot-and-stick approach: If they are paying child support, they would get an expanded earned income tax credit. If they’re struggling to pay support, Walker proposes experimenting with court-ordered work programs for them. And to receive food stamps, parents would be required to help identify noncustodial parents and get them to provide child support. That last provision elicits criticism from some analysts who fear, despite the governor’s assurances, that it could put mothers in the position of having to interact with abusive men.

Yet, in other ways, the budget, which is due in June, provides an indication of where conservatives could be headed nationally.

Liberals, in recent years, have drifted away from former President Bill Clinton’s welfare rhetoric and toward an embrace of pre-reform cash assistance. While Walker was vying for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015, Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary sought to use Hillary Clinton’s support for her husband’s reforms as a point against her. The 2016 publication of “$2 a Day,” in which the academics Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer argued that the prevalence of extreme poverty has increased, has generated enthusiasm among liberals for more generous cash assistance programs.

Congressional Republicans, worried that the growth in food stamps and other in-kind programs has merely replaced cash welfare, have explored extending reform to food assistance. GOP-led states have moved to limit such benefits for recipients able to work.

Tommy Thompson led the 1990s welfare reform effort by requiring work. He succeeded in shrinking the welfare rolls — today, they are one-fifth of what they were 25 years ago in Wisconsin — and moving beneficiaries to work, but at the cost of higher spending on job training and other programs.

Peacock fears that Walker does not have the same level of commitment to government assistance, should he be forced to make a choice between spending and assistance.

Walker, however, said that his six years in office, talking to employers, social workers and poor families, have left him more convinced that people overwhelmingly want to work, but in some cases are thwarted by poorly designed programs. “Let’s look find all the barriers, and let’s knock them off,” he said.