ENDING WELFARE, TAKE 2

With the House’s approval last week of welfare reform, the question of whose welfare is being helped most has been answered by Rep. Tom Allen, who reports that the federal government will shed itself of some $11 billion in costs currently covered under the ’96 reform. These are programs the states have said were needed to help the maximum number of people off welfare and into productive work. In Maine, that unwelcome and unfunded mandate adds up to $10 million annually.

The House closely follows the proposal by President Bush, who wants more people who receive Temporary Assistance to Needy Families to work more hours – 40 instead of the current 30 – and to have fewer activities counted toward those hours. He would increase from 50 percent to 70 percent the number of state participants either working or in volunteer work-fare programs but would not include current programs as work, such as vocational education. The House earlier rejected, along party lines, an amendment by Rep. Ben Cardin, D-Md., that would have increased TANF funding by the rate of inflation over the next five years and increased funding for child care by $11.2 billion. Maine Reps. Allen and John Baldacci supported this improvement and voted against the bill that eventually passed.

This bill gives provides approximately $2 billion more for child care than proposed by the president, but falls some $9 billion short of meeting inflation in this area over the next five years and offers no guarantees that any child-care increases will occur after the first year. As disappointing, the increasing number of hours for government make-work jobs and the reduced time parents will have to spend with children, particularly children with special needs, would force states to do what they have been doing for six years: seek waivers to avoid the most punitive measures, add funding from their own budgets and stress the importance of education for recipients in ways Congress can’t seem to comprehend. Washington welfare reformers can then claim credit for the reform’s success, as they have with the previous version.

All of this will cost the states considerably. Rep. Allen tallied Maine’s costs based on figures from the Congressional Budget Office and found that if Maine were to keep up its programs while meeting inflation, it would have to find another $56 million over the five-year life of the reauthorization. Maine is having enough trouble paying its own bills without also taking on the bills of the federal government.

The ’96 reforms were improved in the Senate, where Sen. Olympia Snowe led the fight to increase child-care funding and prevent states from slashing welfare budgets. Similar improvements could happen again this time with help from Senators who a month ago heard the concerns of governors, mostly Republican governors, who said the lack of flexibility and the mostly flat funding would harm programs that have worked best for reducing the number of people dependent on welfare. Sen. Snowe, along with colleagues John Breaux and Jim Jeffords, already has begun to suggest improvements in child care funding this year and in the number of required work hours. Yesterday, she properly held up as a model Maine’s successful Parents as Scholars program, an education program that has proved to be an affordable and permanent exit from welfare for many Maine parents.

If Congress doubts these types of reform are needed, they should check back with the governors, who have direct experience in seeing what works in their states and are willing to fight to keep from losing those programs. The Senate should take their concerns more seriously than the House did.