White House Delays Debut of Welfare Reform

White House officials have quietly shelved plans to announce President Clinton’s welfare reform proposal in the State of the Union speech next month, a bow to the realities of time and budget that probably will prevent any reforms from being enacted before 1995.

The decision to delay announcement of a proposal is a major victory for White House advocates of Clinton’s health reform plan, who had feared that a full-scale push for welfare reform would seriously complicate their efforts.

The delay also pleases public employee unions, which have worried that plans to give public service jobs to welfare recipients could displace some of their members. The unions met repeatedly over the last two weeks with Administration officials to seek a delay that would give them more time to lobby for protections of their members.

The decision also represents a clear signal that the White House, which spent much of 1993 wrestling with a long list of conflicting priorities, plans to ration its attention far more strictly in 1994--honing in on health care to the exclusion of anything else that might get in the way.

But delaying the welfare plan carries considerable potential costs for Clinton. The President’s campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it” had been one of his most popular pledges during last year’s contest--a key element in his effort to convince voters that he was a “different kind of Democrat.”

Clinton’s political advisers had hoped he would be able to campaign for Democratic candidates in next year’s congressional elections with the promise fulfilled. Now, the best he will be able to do is say that he has made a proposal.

Welfare reform has been a high priority for some key members of Congress, most notably Senate Finance Committee Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who has expressed annoyance in the past at suggestions that the Administration would not push welfare reform hard enough.

Putting off the plan was a “tricky call” because the White House did not want to be seen falling behind schedule, said one senior Administration official who has been active on the issue. But “health care reform is going to be a very tough battle, and we have to be sensitive not to overload the legislative calendar,” he said.

The first solid indication of the slowdown came Tuesday, when White House officials released an outline of the budget the President will send to Congress in February: notably lacking was any allowance for the initial costs of a welfare reform plan. Asked Wednesday about that lack of funds, Administration officials conceded their schedule had slipped.

“We’re getting things ready for whenever we get called off the bench,” said one senior policy adviser. Until then, “there’s really no way to talk about the schedule.”

Until now, Administration officials had predicted publicly that the welfare reform plan would be announced in the State of the Union speech, which is scheduled for Jan. 25. Officials had maintained, despite skepticism on Capitol Hill and in some parts of the White House staff, that the proposal could be enacted by Congress next year.

Officials now say the schedule for presenting a finished plan to Capitol Hill is uncertain. Clinton probably will discuss welfare reform in the January speech, but formal submission of a legislative package would not take place until much later--perhaps as late as May, according to some White House officials.

Administration aides offer several explanations for the delay. One simply involves Clinton’s schedule. To meet a January deadline, officials of the President’s welfare reform task force had hoped Clinton would make final choices among welfare reform options this month. But “the President hasn’t had any time to focus on the policy” because of the heavy demands of the budget process, said Bruce Reed, a White House deputy who co-chairs the task force.

“The President’s January is not exactly empty either,” Reed added, noting that Clinton is scheduled to be out of the country for a week for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit and a meeting with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, starting Jan. 8. “He’s not going to have a lot of time to sweat the details.”

A second problem involves the congressional schedule. The congressional committees that have jurisdiction over welfare programs--the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee--also have jurisdiction over much of the health care plan.

“We are in exactly the same position we were in (this past summer) with health care and the budget. You cannot push health care and welfare reform through the same committees at the same time,” a senior White House official said.

A third problem involves politics.

“The issue of welfare reform has the potential of fracturing the Democratic members of Congress even more than NAFTA,” said one Administration official, referring to the hotly debated North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada.

“Why would you want that tension in the midst of health care reform, which is the main initiative?” asked the official, who is a member of the Administration’s welfare reform task force. Welfare reform “can be viewed as a liberal versus conservative issue and could polarize the Democrats along those lines, which NAFTA did to an extent.”

Members of the conservative wing of the Administration have long disputed that argument. “Welfare reform can help health care,” said a White House policy aide who fits into that camp. By proposing a welfare reform plan now, the aide argued, Clinton could build bridges to more conservative members of Congress who mistrust his health care plan.

For now, at least, that argument appears to have failed.