Paul LePage pushed the boundaries of conservative populism for years as Maine’s governor, including by imposing work requirements for food stamps that shrunk the rolls.
Now, the Trump administration is looking to emulate Maine.
The Pine Tree State is a leader in the pack of Republican states that have imposed new work requirements for public assistance programs in recent years. Kansas, too, has placed work requirements on food stamps for healthy childless adults.
In Wisconsin, Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed legislation that would extend work requirements for food stamps to parents with children. In Walker’s years-long quest to move Wisconsin from purple to red, being seen as a welfare reformer is an advantage.
President Trump, too, is angling to be a welfare reformer, following the lead of LePage, Walker and others.
He signed an executive order last month requiring his administration to address poverty by strengthening work requirements and promoting work.
At first blush, the order targets a few big government programs, starting with food stamps. For conservatives, Medicaid, housing assistance and cash welfare are top candidates for stiffer work requirements. From the other side of the aisle, work requirements for those programs would amount to kicking millions of people off benefits.
Yet Trump’s executive order goes much further than that.
“I think it’s the starting point of the largest welfare reform movement we’re going to see in a generation,” said Kristina Rasmussen, vice president of federal affairs for the Foundation for Government Accountability, an outside group that has advocated work requirements for benefits.
The order requires agencies to report on ways to improve antipoverty programs. What’s notable is that the agencies aren’t just the Department of Agriculture, which manages the food stamp program, or the Department of Health and Human Services, which manages Medicaid and a host of other social programs.
It also encompasses the Department of Transportation, the Department of Labor, the Department of Commerce, the Treasury Department, and the Department of Education — some of which do not have major, well-known benefit programs.
Representatives for the agencies declined to say which programs they might review, beyond simply that they were working to comply with Trump’s directive.
And White House representatives wouldn’t say why they were chosen, other than to suggest that they provide public assistance.
That might be because they are not necessarily sure what they are looking for, proponents suggest.
“One of the things that’s come out of this entire conversation is how welfare programs really are sprinkled throughout the federal government,” Rasmussen said.
Fourteen departments and agencies administer 89 “welfare” programs, totaling more than $800 billion annually, according to the Heritage Foundation.
The agencies will have to track down each of the programs they are responsible for and then judge whether or not they are promoting work.
It’s more than that, though. They also will have to assess them based on whether they promote social networks, especially marriage. Additionally, they are supposed to gauge whether they help disadvantaged groups such as single parents, drug addicts and ex-prisoners. When that’s finished, the programs have to be checked to see if they’re duplicative.
Programs that almost no one would consider “welfare,” such as Labor Department job training programs or Transportation grants, might be wrapped into the findings, Rasmussen suggested. For instance, Transportation might propose ways to better provide help in getting people newly subject to work requirements to job sites.
That is a lofty goal, by the standards of a major bureaucracy, especially when the first step is simply assessing which programs exist in the first place. “You’ve gotta know the questions to ask,” said Mary Mayhew, the former commissioner of Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services.
Mayhew, now a Republican candidate for governor, spearheaded the state’s food stamp reforms, which led to a 90 percent decrease in able-bodied, childless recipients. When Trump came into office, the White House consulted her on welfare reform. She warned that managers of existing programs will protect their turf at all costs, resisting any changes.
Perhaps most ambitiously, the executive order calls on agencies to examine how it can get state and city governments to report on and measure the programs they help run. For example, the USDA might require states to say whether their administration of the food stamp program has boosted employment or overall nutrition.
“The notion that we haven’t been doing it is insane,” Mayhew said of the lack of outcome measurement.
Maine touted the finding that individuals’ incomes rose 114 percent in one year after the imposition of the new food stamp work requirements.
LaDonna Pavetti, though, a researcher at the left-of-center Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, called the Maine administration’s citation of that figure “egregious.” Her organization published a report noting that the Maine program did not compare the people who left the food stamp program to a control group. In general, it noted, people on food stamps are likely to get back up on their feet at some point after getting benefits, making it less of a surprise when their incomes improve when they leave the program. Pavetti described Trump’s order as an “attack on the poor” that suggests that government programs aren’t important in lessening poverty.
The reports would be the beginning of a long process. In the early days of his administration, Trump demanded similar reports from the Treasury Department regarding lightening regulatory burdens on banks and financial firms. The Treasury is still rolling out the reports, which called for a mix of rulemaking and legislation.
But Trump appointees are beginning to work on revising rules and regulations. Meanwhile, Congress is moving toward legislation, passed on a bipartisan basis in the Senate, that would implement many of the recommendations of the report.
Similarly, House Republicans, led by welfare reform booster House Speaker Paul Ryan, are slowly moving on some of the same ideas expressed in Trump’s welfare order.
House Republicans, for instance, have sought to tighten some food stamp work requirements in the Farm Bill. Last week, Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Fla., introduced legislation that would revise the way rent is calculated in federal housing assistance programs, opening the door to some localities implementing work requirements. Ross’ bill is similar to legislation that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson submitted the same day.
Legislation, especially partisan legislation, may never make it to Trump’s desk. And rule changes are months or years away. But the order means that the idea that the U.S. should be more like Maine is one to take seriously.
