Reform-Minded Welfare Experts Get Key Posts : Poverty: Appointment of the two is viewed by some as a signal that Clinton is firm in his commitment to changes.

President Clinton’s appointment of two top poverty experts to the Department of Health and Human Services is being viewed by welfare-reform advocates as a sign that he is serious about revamping the nation’s welfare system.

The basic federal welfare program, known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, is administered through the states at a cost of $150 billion a year.

Campaign rhetoric by both major political parties last year has resulted in bipartisan calls for limiting the time that recipients can remain on the AFDC dole and for the need to give them education and jobs to lift them out of poverty.

Appearing to signal that he intends to follow through on his campaign pledge to make such changes, Clinton has named David T. Ellwood and Mary Jo Bane to sub-Cabinet posts at the Department of Health and Human Services. Both are reform-minded poverty experts who worked together at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Ellwood has remained a professor there while Bane has been New York state’s commissioner of social services. Once they arrive in Washington, they will work with a Cabinet-level task force on welfare reform that the President will appoint soon. Its mission will be to make recommendations to Congress by early summer--after the Administration’s health care proposals are completed, White House officials said.

Welfare-reform advocates acknowledge that the task is fraught with problems.

Susan Steinmetz, a welfare authority at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank that studies issues affecting the poor, said: “You won’t find two better experts in the country than Ellwood and Bane.”

The chief problem with AFDC, as currently constituted, is that it offers too few incentives for people to rise out of poverty, Steinmetz said.

“Our aim should be to enable families to find jobs that allow them to be economically independent in the long haul,” she said. “But our welfare rules punish people who go to work and also treat people who marry in an unfair way by eliminating benefits.”

Ellwood, the newly appointed HHS assistant secretary for planning and evaluation, agreed with her assessment. In an analysis he wrote last December, Ellwood said the current welfare system “frustrates, isolates, humiliates and stigmatizes.”

Among its regressive aspects, he said, is the fact that “welfare benefits are reduced dollar for dollar with earnings.” However, training recipients to enter the workplace also has its problems, others noted.

Robert Greenstein, a Washington-based authority on poverty, said studies show that “those who remain on AFDC longest tend to be those who have the least education and employment experience and the most serious personal or family problems.”

Although the task will not be easy, welfare reform seems to be an idea whose time has come--largely as a result of the presidential election campaign when Clinton and former President George Bush both called for changing the system.

Early this month, four Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee introduced legislation that they claimed was closely modeled after Clinton’s ideas to “break the cycle of dependency” by welfare recipients.

Sponsored chiefly by Rep. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), the bill would provide up to two years of education, training, job search and work experience aimed at preparing welfare recipients for taking a permanent job. Ultimately, it would make receipt of AFDC benefits contingent on work.

The legislation also would expand state waiver authority to encourage states to experiment with new social programs--an idea Clinton endorsed in an appearance before the National Governors’ Assn. on Feb. 3.

In that speech, the President renewed his pledge to fix the welfare system and repeated the major reforms he had proposed during the campaign, including two years of job training and education for welfare mothers before requiring them to take jobs.

“We must begin now to plan for a time when people will ultimately be able to work for the check they get, whether the check comes from a private employer or from the United States taxpayer,” Clinton told the governors.

Cost is a major problem with welfare reform, especially at a time when taxpayers are demanding reductions in government spending. The Republican bill calls for $3.6 billion over five years for states to run education, training and work experience programs for AFDC recipients.

Democrats also acknowledge that job training and child care services for welfare mothers who go to work could run into billions of dollars, even though savings ultimately would occur as more recipients went off welfare and others were discouraged from applying, as welfare became less attractive.

As a result of the initial costs, Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento), who chairs the Ways and Means subcommittee on human resources, says serious congressional work on welfare reform is not likely before efforts are well under way to improve health care, stimulate the economy and narrow the federal budget deficit.

And Robert Rector, a scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation, insists that “Clinton will need a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats to get his proposals through Congress.” In the 1980s, said Rector, “Ronald Reagan had a more modest work requirement than Clinton and basically got his proposal thrown in the trash can by the Democratic majority in Congress.”

Rector, who long has studied welfare issues, said the position of some liberal groups has been that welfare mothers “are social victims, and requiring them to do anything like working is a double victimization.”