White House Stresses Welfare Strategy in Plans for ’87

President Reagan’s aides announced a federal welfare initiative Friday and promised to conduct studies on domestic policy issues ranging from Wall Street insider trading to outdoor recreation.

As it pushed ahead with its agenda for 1987 amid continuing controversy over arms sales to Iran, the White House made public the draft of a lengthy report delivered to Reagan on “a new national public assistance strategy.”

White House spokesman Larry Speakes said the announcement of the new domestic policy programs was not intended to distract attention from the Administration’s current problems.

The welfare report, prepared by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, proposed “a sharp change in direction in national welfare policy,” but it offered few specific proposals and made no recommendation either to increase or decrease the amount--put at $150 billion--that is spent annually on state and federal relief programs, which assist 52 million people--nearly 20% of the U.S. population.

Flaws in System Blamed

The working group that prepared the report “has concluded that weaknesses within our centralized welfare system contribute significantly to the persistence of poverty in America,” the document said. “The system makes a special attempt to aid children, yet it provides little or no incentive for mothers and fathers to form and maintain self-reliant families. The system should encourage people to be self-sufficient, yet its incentives inspire passivity and undermine the desire to work.”

Criticizing the way the federal government conducts welfare programs, the report stated that “this strategy needs to be turned on its head.”

It recommended that “policy ideas and implementation be allowed to percolate from the bottom up, to the federal government from the individuals, communities and states that have to live with these policies.”

It called for a halt in changes in welfare programs until there is better understanding of how poverty and dependency on welfare can be reduced.

‘Experiments’ Recommended

“The federal government should initiate a program of widespread, long-term experiments in welfare policy through state-sponsored and community-based demonstration projects,” the report said.

Robert J. Fersh, executive director of the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit organization that analyzes public policy issues and monitors federal regulations in food programs, called the report “extremely disappointing.”

“At a time when hunger and homelessness in this country have reached levels unmatched since the Great Depression, the White House offers only platitudes and experiments to deal with the real pain and suffering that millions of Americans face each day,” he said.

“Just before Christmas, the White House is saying to the poor: ‘Let them eat experiments.’ ”

A spokesman for the organization said Census Bureau figures on poverty show that 11.7% of Americans subsisted below the poverty level in 1979, and that proportion had risen to 14% by 1985. According to the report, however, the general poverty rate reached 15.2% of the population in 1983 and is declining.

Government ‘Poverty Line’

The government-defined “poverty level” income for a family of four is $10,989 a year.

In calling for five-year demonstration projects, the report cited a number of state programs, including one that would form a public corporation to manage assistance and California’s Project GAIN, which requires welfare applicants to sign a contract and take part in a program of job counseling.

The report, delivered to Reagan by Charles Hobbs, chairman of the White House Office of Policy Development, was the first of several such documents that are to be presented to Reagan in the coming weeks. Together, Speakes said, the reports will set the Administration’s agenda of domestic policy issues for 1987.