Senate Passes Must-Work Provisions in Welfare Bill

The Senate Thursday overwhelmingly approved a landmark welfare bill that would put heavy emphasis on training unwed mothers for work and require absentee fathers to pay child support.

The measure, though threatened by a presidential veto, passed on a surprisingly lopsided 93-3 vote after its Democratic sponsors reached compromises with conservative Republicans on key provisions.

The bill would provide a relatively modest $2.8 billion over the next five years for basic education and training to prepare welfare recipients for work. Child support payments could be withheld from the wages of fathers who have abandoned their children.

The House has already approved a $7-billion bill that would also provide federal incentives for states to increase their welfare benefits. A House-Senate conference committee will try to reconcile differences between the two bills.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), chief author of the Senate measure, called it a major restructuring of the 53-year-old program of Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

“We’ve had an income maintenance program with a mild jobs program,” he said, “and we are reversing that.” The federal and state governments share the costs of AFDC, with the states setting benefits levels and other regulations under general federal guidelines.

In negotiations with the bill’s Republican critics, its Democratic sponsors agreed to change several provisions of the bill as initially approved by the Senate Finance Committee.

The bill as approved by the Senate, for example, would require that at least 14% of able-bodied adult AFDC recipients participate in work, training or education in 1991, a level that would grow to 22% by 1993. The Finance Committee version of the bill included no such provision.

Two-Parent Households

Democrats refused, however, to meet a Republican demand that the states not be required to extend AFDC benefits to two-parent households in which both parents are unemployed. At present only 27 states permit benefits to two-parent families, and the Senate bill would require the other 23 states to make AFDC payments available to such families for six months a year.

Senate Republican leader Bob Dole of Kansas was able to force through an amendment to make this provision more palatable to President Reagan, however. Dole’s plan would require one of the two jobless parents in a welfare family to spend at least 16 hours a week in community work experience programs, sometimes known as “workfare,” in order to qualify for benefits.

Moynihan said the change would affect only 6% to 7% of AFDC recipients--about 1 million individuals at most. He opposed Dole’s proposal on grounds that it would not help those who needed training and said that many of the nation’s governors objected to workfare as costly, cumbersome and ineffective. But his effort to kill the amendment was defeated, 54 to 41.

Fears Welfare Expansion

Reagan had protested that the extension of the benefits to families with two unemployed parents would expand the welfare rolls rather than reduce them, as he wants.

Moynihan said Sen. William L. Armstrong (R-Colo.), who voted against the bill in the Finance Committee but supported it once the compromise agreement was reached, would try to persuade the President to drop his veto threat of the Senate bill.

Armstrong praised the Democrats for their willingness to modify the bill. “They could have stiff-armed everybody and rammed this bill through,” he said.

In order to encourage women on welfare to find and keep jobs, the bill would pay for nine months of child care and up to a year of continued Medicaid coverage even though they would not be eligible under present law if they had a job.

It would also require states to focus education and training on the 50% of welfare recipients who are least likely to succeed in jobs--young, unmarried mothers who have dropped out of high school and have no work experience. The bill would exempt mothers with children under 3 years old from the work-training programs, but states could lower the age level to 1.

Not Sure of Bill’s Fate

Asked what kind of bill would emerge from a House-Senate conference committee in view of the House’s decision to provide federal incentives for states to raise the level of benefits, Moynihan avoided a direct answer.

“We can’t seriously address the question of benefits at the national level,” he said, “until we persuade the American people this is a work program and a child support program.”

The three senators who opposed the bill on final passage were Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), Gordon J. Humphrey (R-N.H.) and William Proxmire (D-Wis.).