Work, Family Obligations Emphasized : Congress Sifts New Welfare Policy

Congress is moving toward a radically new national welfare policy that emphasizes the traditional values of work and family responsibility--a sharp departure from past attempts by both political parties to establish government-guaranteed incomes.

The new approach might require some welfare mothers with infant children to accept federally subsidized child care so that they could receive job training and accept part-time work. If they refused, their benefits would be halted.

Absentee fathers of these children would be identified, pursued by the state and forced to contribute to their family’s support through payroll deductions.

To be sure, the proposed changes have drawn strong opposition from advocates of higher welfare benefits. They argue that the new approach is punitive and would perpetuate poverty rather than improve prospects for the aid recipients.

Criticizes Cost

And the Reagan Administration, which is critical for different reasons, contends that the legislation moving forward in Congress would cost too much and impose work requirements that are not tough enough.

Especially in an election year, however, both arguments appear to be carrying little weight with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Most seem to agree with Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, (D-N.Y.), a chief architect of the new approach.

“Welfare mothers need work,” Moynihan said in an interview. “Fathers have to support their families. Children need care. Our purpose is to free these women and children from the stigma of dependency.”

Moynihan, who was once on the welfare rolls himself as a child growing up during the Great Depression, is a living symbol of the change in attitude.

As a White House adviser to then-President Richard M. Nixon, Moynihan did his best to secure congressional passage of a family assistance plan that would have guaranteed a minimum income to everyone, whether employed or not. The novel approach--which horrified conservatives--died a lingering death after President Jimmy Carter subsequently failed to persuade Congress to go along with the concept.

Takes Opposite Approach

Now, nearly two decades later, Moynihan is the main author of an opposite approach. Instead of offering guaranteed benefits, Moynihan would use education and job training to try to break welfare mothers’ cycle of poverty and lifelong dependency. His plan also takes a get-tough line toward “runaway papas” who father children but then disappear and provide no child-support payments.

With the bulk of liberals and conservatives supporting the new welfare consensus, Moynihan’s bill sailed through the Senate Finance Committee, the burial ground of the more ambitious income plans, by a vote of 17 to 3 last month. The bill, which would cost an estimated $3 billion over the first five years, is expected to pass the Senate by a wide margin when it comes to a vote next month.

The House, by a vote of 230 to 194, passed its own welfare bill last December. The bill is about twice as expensive as Moynihan’s bill--an estimated $7 billion over the first six years--because it contains incentives for states to raise welfare benefits. But like Moynihan’s bill, it also includes provisions that embrace the formerly conservative theme of shifting people from welfare rolls to payrolls.

The greatest obstacle to overhauling the welfare system this year may be President Reagan. The Administration favors a five-year, $1-billion measure with far more rigorous work requirements than those adopted by either the House or the Senate Finance Committee. Reagan’s budget director and three departmental secretaries warned the Finance Committee that they would recommend a veto of its bill.

Regardless of the Administration’s stance, the congressional mood has undergone a sea change. Moynihan attributes the turnabout to frustration with the ever-mounting numbers of recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children--3.7 million beneficiaries last year--and new research from the University of Michigan showing that fully one-quarter of them are on welfare for at least eight years out of 10.

States Offer Innovations

Washington’s new approach to welfare also has been inspired by state innovations in California under conservative Republican Gov. George Deukmejian and in Massachusetts under liberal Democratic Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, his party’s apparent presidential nominee. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Southern liberal who represented the National Governors’ Assn., beat the drums for the concept on Capitol Hill.

Enthusiam Dampened

One more cause for the changing mood in Congress is the series of record Reagan-era budget deficits, which have dampened enthusiasm for high-priced and untested social programs.

The Moynihan bill, for example, would devote most of its $3-billion cost over the first five years to grants to states for education, training and job searches for welfare mothers. Other additional expenses would include federal child-care support during the first nine months of work and extension of Medicaid for a year to aid their transition.

The bill also includes revenue-raising provisions designed to offset the costs. It would abolish the child-care tax credit for families with adjusted gross incomes higher than $93,750 and allow the Internal Revenue Service to deduct money owed other federal agencies--such as overdue student loan payments--from tax refunds.

Under Moynihan’s plan, all able-bodied parents would be required to take part, but states would have to spend at least half of their grants on hard-core welfare recipients: “lifers” and “recidivists” with the longest time on welfare rolls and unwed women who had children as teen-agers. Moynihan said in an interview that he wanted to direct special help to those who had been on welfare the longest and to unwed teen-age mothers who had never worked.

Work Incentive Cuts

The federal government already runs a program--called the Work Incentive program, or WIN--that is designed to find work for welfare recipients. But the WIN budget, which the Reagan Administration has sought to abolish, has declined from a high point of $365 million in 1981 to $92 million last year.

Another focus of Moynihan’s bill is identifying absentee fathers of welfare children by requiring the Social Security numbers of both parents to be furnished to authorities at the time of birth. Where paternity was in doubt, the bill would provide money to states for blood testing to discover who fathered the child.

If a court ordered child support payments, they would be deducted automatically from the father’s wages. As it is, welfare mothers get only about one-sixth of the money due them from fathers of their children.

In another innovation, the bill would require all states to provide aid for at least six months of every year to poor families with two parents in the home--a benefit now available in only 26 states.

Opponents of the Moynihan bill are trying to mobilize opposition from the left, contending that the legislation offers too little money for training and would force welfare mothers to take the lowest-paying menial work, give up Medicaid protection as they moved off the welfare roles and bear the expense of child care after a short interim period.

Spokesmen for the United Church of Christ, for example, called it “a significant step backward” and added: “Workfare can force fragile families to bear the additional burden of endlessly working off their benefits in dead-end jobs.”

Urges Voluntary Program

Margaret Prescod of Los Angeles, spokesman for the Wages for Housework Campaign and an opponent of the bill, said the work-training provisions should be voluntary rather than compulsory to allow women to raise their children at home.

“Being a mom is already a 24-hour job,” she insisted in an interview. The House bill, she said, is better than the Senate’s because it would give states an incentive to raise welfare benefits.

The Friends’ Committee on National Legislation said: “This package only helps to push poor families further into poverty.”

Aides to Moynihan, however, said it was likely the work requirement would affect only a small fraction of the 3.8 million welfare mothers because states would not be able to come up with the matching funds needed to get federal money.

Moynihan himself is confident that the Senate will pass his bill by as much as 3 to 1, giving the Senate strong leverage in bargaining with the House on a compromise measure.

“If the President vetoes it, the next President will sign it,” he said. “We have reached a consensus on absolutely every issue.”