Gov. Reagan’s Workfare: No ‘Gang Busters’ in a Short Life

As governor of California, Ronald Reagan presided over a workfare program that was never fully implemented and was abandoned by the state soon after he left office.

Now as President, Reagan is touting that experiment of the 1970s as a model for overhauling the nation’s welfare system. And in doing so, he has made questionable claims about the success of the California program.

Reagan told reporters in Washington last week that California’s mandatory work program for welfare recipients “worked like gang busters” and put 76,000 people into “private enterprise jobs.”

State records show, however, that only about 8,000 welfare recipients ever took part in the program during its operation between 1972 and 1975. State officials say they do not know how many people found jobs as a result of workfare, which was officially known as the Community Work Experience Program.

“CWEP as designated and implemented in California did not prove to be administratively feasible and practical,” concluded a 1976 study by the state Employment Development Department, which had operated the program.

Issue Throughout Political Career

Throughout his political career, Reagan has campaigned on the issue of welfare reform and has sought to make able-bodied welfare recipients work for their benefit checks. As both governor and President, he has fought for major changes in the way welfare programs are administered.

While the Reagan workfare program may not have succeeded, it was a key part of his welfare reform package of 1971 that led to stricter eligibility requirements and higher welfare benefits. It was also the predecessor of a more sophisticated workfare and training program for welfare recipients that was adopted by California last year.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday, Reagan signaled his intention to try once again to reshape the welfare system and reduce the dependency of poor people on their welfare checks.

He called on his staff to conduct a comprehensive review of the welfare system by Dec. 1--one month after the fall elections--and to provide “a strategy for immediate action to meet the financial, educational, social and safety concerns of poor families.”

“I am talking about real and lasting emancipation because the success of welfare should be judged by how many of its recipients become independent of welfare,” the President said.

Earlier that day, in discussing his welfare initiative with some bureau chiefs of Washington news organizations, Reagan brought up the California program as an example of what he was seeking to accomplish.

“We tried an experiment in California when I was governor. It was tremendously successful,” Reagan said in a lengthy discourse on the program. “We funneled 76,000 welfare recipients in that brief period out into private jobs . . . As I say, it’s worked like gang busters.”

Despite Reagan’s optimistic view of his workfare program for recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, it was widely regarded as a failure. His successor, Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., let the three-year pilot program die within months after he took office.

“Workfare didn’t really work out,” said former Assemblyman William Bagley, a Republican who chaired the Assembly Welfare Committee during the early 1970s and helped negotiate the compromise package that included the workfare experiment. “It was never really implemented by the counties. There is also a limit: There are only so many people who can rake leaves.”

Deputy Legislative Analyst Tom Dooley, who at the time was a key staff member in the negotiations, said counties were reluctant to implement the program because the state did not provide funds for equipment and supervisory personnel.

“We didn’t supply money for the shovels and rakes,” he said. “He (Reagan) and some other people take great credit for the program but it never worked.”

‘Didn’t Get Broad Acceptance’

Carl Williams, a Reagan appointee who helped administer the program, said the mandatory work program succeeded in several counties but was never fully implemented by most of the 34 counties authorized to operate it.

“We didn’t go very far with it,” conceded Williams, who at the time was assistant director of the Department of Public Welfare. “It didn’t get broad acceptance statewide and (former Gov.) Jerry Brown stopped it when he came into office.”

Williams said he did not recall any estimate that 76,000 people got jobs in private employment as a result of the program. Similarly, reports on the program provided by the state Employment and Development Department contain no such estimate.

“I cannot tell you where that number comes from,” said Williams, now a deputy director in the state Department of Social Services who is helping to implement California’s new workfare program.

White House officials did not respond to a reporter’s telephone calls about the President’s statements on his welfare program.

Reagan’s workfare program was part of California’s 1971 Welfare Reform Act, a compromise between the conservative chief executive and liberal legislators. It removed many aid recipients from the welfare rolls by tightening eligibility requirements and instituting a computerized system of cross-checking outside income to crack down on fraud.

Subsequently, court victories by welfare rights advocates chipped away at many of Reagan’s efforts to tighten eligibility requirements.

Perhaps the most enduring part of the 1971 welfare reform was the inclusion of an annual cost-of-living increase for recipients that was sought by liberal Democrats.

Reagan, not anticipating the high inflation that occurred later in the decade, agreed to the provision that led to the nearly tripling of benefits over the last 15 years. Republican legislators subsequently have battled without success to eliminate the cost-of-living clause.

“We picked his pockets,” said former Democratic Assemblyman John Burton of San Francisco, who also participated in the negotiations. “We let him make the speeches and take the bows.”

In the years after the Reagan reforms took effect, the welfare rolls in California dropped dramatically. Reagan and his supporters unquestionably credited the changes in the law for causing the decline.

Others, however, suggest that additional factors were also at work: upturns in the economy that created more jobs coupled with a reduction in the number of children being born--in part because of the law Reagan signed in 1967 legalizing abortion in California.

“The increased number of legalized abortions, which were getting up to 95,000 a year, resulted in less children being born and thus less people on the caseload,” said Dooley, the deputy legislative analyst.

Reagan, after becoming President in 1981, sponsored changes in the federal law to further such longstanding goals as restricting eligibility for welfare. Legislation approved by Congress also loosened federal restrictions on workfare programs, touching off a period of experimentation in which about two-thirds of the states have approved some kind of work program for welfare recipients.

In part because of the new federal law, California adopted its new workfare program that combines job training, education and mandatory work. Its passage came last year, barely a decade after Reagan’s first workfare program was abandoned.