Clinton Aides Find Welfare Vow Easier Said Than Done : Policy: Reform task force runs into snags as it tries to hone a plan to trim the rolls. The big problem is money.

It was, of all Bill Clinton’s campaign promises, one of the most popular and most often repeated: “We will end welfare as we know it.”

But as Clinton aides have long known, redeeming that ringing promise will be far more difficult than unfurling it. As they work toward a mid-December deadline for presenting welfare reform options to Clinton, a team of Administration aides has been wrestling with a series of problems that stands between the President and his goal.

The biggest problem is money.

Many Americans see welfare as government waste, paying people not to work. But the paradox of reform has long been that providing jobs for welfare recipients, or even helping them find jobs for themselves, costs much more than merely giving them checks.

Under Clinton’s plan, the roughly 4.5 million adults--the vast majority of them women with children--who currently receive welfare would be limited to two years of benefits. After that they would be required to get a job. But with more than 8 million Americans already unemployed, Clinton aides acknowledge that many of those jobs would have to be provided by the government.

While White House officials promise budget savings in the long run, they concede that to begin with, requiring work would cost about $3,000 to $5,000 more per person each year than would allowing recipients to stay at home. The increased costs would be largely for day care, transportation and supervision of new workers.

Most welfare recipients do get off the rolls in less than two years on their own. But a substantial share--one-third in some studies, nearly one-half in others--stay longer. Changing that fact is the aim of Clinton’s policy.

“Our main goals are to restore work and responsibility as central to every American’s life,” said Bruce Reed, Clinton’s deputy domestic policy adviser and co-leader of the Administration’s welfare reform task force. “That’s the only way we can break the cycle of welfare dependency.”

But, warned Mark Greenberg, senior attorney at the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington, “if the primary focus of welfare reform is to get more people working, we have to expect it is going to cost more money.”

More money, of course, is something Clinton’s budget advisers are loath to talk about. “There is no new money in this town,” Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala said in a recent talk on welfare reform.

Already, the Administration faces a multibillion-dollar gap between its proposals and the money available under the deficit-reduction plan adopted this summer. Because of that, aides say, Clinton probably will have to settle for a lengthy phase-in period for his welfare reform goals.

How long that phase-in will be is one of the key decisions Clinton must make in the next few weeks. One likely possibility is that the Administration would impose the two-year limit initially only on new recipients; other options are to impose it at first only in certain states, or only on women with older children.

Other issues awaiting Clinton include making it easier for states to deny additional benefits to women who have children while on welfare and imposing an absolute time limit on the public service jobs welfare recipients could receive.

Once he makes those decisions, Clinton will face a difficult political task of trying to keep the welfare debate from spinning out of his control as Republicans try to use his ideas as an opening to move further to the right. He also faces the reality that the congressional committees with jurisdiction over welfare programs are the same that must consider his health reform plans.

“We have to engage in the welfare reform debate” in 1994, White House Budget Director Leon E. Panetta said. But actually passing a bill next year may not be possible, he said. “The Administration’s main focus is to try to get health reform passed.”

For most of the six decades in which it has been in existence, welfare has been a controversial program--a degree of controversy that far outweighs the program’s share of the federal budget.

Currently, federal payments for the government’s main welfare program--Aid to Families With Dependent Children--come to roughly $15 billion per year, or about 1% of the federal budget. Adding in food stamps, about $27 billion, and housing subsidies, $9 billion, brings the cost to about 6% of federal spending.

But many opponents of the welfare system argue that more is involved than money. Welfare, they have long charged, breeds dependency and undermines families by providing money that helps women have children out of wedlock. Forty percent of women now receiving welfare had their first child before age 19, and having a child out of wedlock was the triggering event for 30% of those going on the rolls.

The opponents of welfare decry the steady increase in people on the dole--now roughly 14 million, up more than 80% from a generation ago, even taking into account the overall growth in the population--and say the program has contributed to the rise of lawlessness and violence in American cities.

In response, advocates for the poor argue that government attempts to reduce welfare costs have succeeded only in hurting children. About 9 million children now receive welfare. They account for about 65% of the rolls. From 1970 through 1992, the average monthly AFDC check declined by 40% after inflation, they note, and in no state are welfare benefits enough to lift a family even to the threshold of poverty.

The debate between those two groups long has been bitter. Making it even more polarizing is the fact that long-term welfare recipients disproportionately are black. During the 1980s, 1.2% of white women and 7.7% of non-white women spent more than eight years on welfare.

Clinton has argued that the country needs to radically transform welfare into a program that puts people to work rather than supports them in idleness.

The Administration and many Republicans now agree on the idea of limiting benefits to two years followed by public service jobs.

But some difficult issues about the time limit remain to be resolved, and the whole idea makes many liberal Democrats uneasy. Recently, 89 liberal Democrats in the House of Representatives wrote Clinton criticizing the time limit as “a simplistic and thoughtless response to a complex problem.”

As Clinton tries to keep Republicans working with him without alienating too many in his own party, he faces several difficult questions. One is whether, in addition to the time limit on welfare benefits, the new law should place a second time limit on the public-sector jobs that a welfare beneficiary could receive.

A welfare reform bill backed by nearly all the Republicans in the House would allow states to cut off recipients from those jobs after three years--in effect placing a five-year absolute limit on all public assistance.

Administration officials consider Clinton unlikely to concur for fear that in the end some of those jobless recipients’ children would wind up without support. Instead, the Administration may seek to discourage open-ended stays on welfare by allowing states to reduce the grants to recipients who return to the rolls after a stint on public employment.

A closely related second question is how to protect the children of parents who refuse to work. The Administration’s plan would propose penalties for recipients who refuse to take jobs, but Administration officials are still exploring how to provide a “safety net” for children in those circumstances.

Other initiatives may attract more consensus. Clinton will propose new efforts to transform welfare offices from bureaucracies primarily aimed at distributing checks to operations aimed at finding work for recipients almost from the first moment they walk in the door.

“It’s not just waiting until the two years are up,” says Reed. “The most important challenge is connecting welfare recipients to the private-sector job market and getting welfare offices into the business of finding these people jobs rather than writing them checks.”

By far the biggest problem with the time limit is how to pay for it. Even if exemptions are provided for the disabled and others unable to work, a significant work requirement would cost as much as $6 billion annually, Administration planners acknowledge. Budget constraints mean that sum “is going to have to be paid for largely from savings in other entitlements,” said Panetta. Whether farm support money, veterans benefits or something else, each would be well-defended by its constituency.

The second major policy issue in the welfare reform debate could be more emotional than the work requirement: how to discourage out-of-wedlock births and the formation of welfare families in the first place.

“Getting people off welfare and into work is going to change very little in the inner cities,” says conservative welfare critic Charles Murray, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “You will still have the majority of children growing up in fatherless families. The measure of success in any welfare reform has to be to reduce the number of illegitimate babies that are born.”

Increasingly, policy-makers across the ideological spectrum agree with Murray that the rising number of out-of-wedlock births is a key element not only of the welfare conundrum but other social problems, like crime.

Such births are “a one-way ticket to poverty, and unless we discourage that, you never catch up,” said Rep. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who led the House GOP task force on welfare reform.

Shalala said: “We will never successfully deal with welfare reform until we reduce the amount of teen-age pregnancy in this country.”

But agreement on the problem quickly collapses into arguments about the solution.

The Administration, for example, probably will propose making it easier for two-parent families to collect benefits. Some believe that the tight limits on benefits for two-parent families now encourage men to move out so that the mothers can receive checks. But conservative critics warn that changing the rule could backfire, reducing the incentive for men to work and merely swelling the welfare rolls.

An even more controversial issue is whether to grant blanket permission for states to deny additional benefits to women who have children while receiving welfare. Currently, this requires federal approval and only New Jersey and Georgia have obtained it.

The task force is almost certain to call for a limited test of an idea that runs in the opposite direction: a guaranteed minimum child support payment for all children living with one parent. Proponents, like Administration welfare expert David Ellwood, believe such “child support assurance” could encourage work, because, unlike welfare, the grant would not be reduced if the recipient takes a job. But critics say it would be expensive and amount to an entitlement for out-of-wedlock births.

Looming over all these policy choices is the political question of how to build the congressional coalition for welfare reform with sharply conflicting views in both parties. But the Administration’s welfare reformers insist they can thread a path through the middle. “In the end, welfare reform has broad support in both parties,” said a senior official. “The debate will be over the details of ending welfare as we know it, rather than the threshold question of whether the time has come to end it.”