White House Unveils Welfare Overhaul : Policy: Proposal would make it easier for recipients to find jobs. But work would be required after two years of benefits.

Administration officials Wednesday unveiled the outline of a plan to reform the nation’s welfare system through a delicate balance of new services to benefit recipients and tough restrictions to impress wary taxpayers.

The package would expand training, job placement and government-subsidized child care for recipients to make it easier for them to go to work. But, for the first time, it also would require work after two years of benefits and make it harder for teen-age mothers to collect benefits.

The package puts together elements that the Administration has discussed before and adds new detail. But reflecting disputes within the Administration, it leaves unresolved several important issues, including how the program will be financed and who may be exempted.

The proposal would limit the program to those born after 1972, the youngest third of the 5 million adults on welfare. Welfare recipients in that group who are unable to find jobs would not be left without a safety net: They would be placed in temporary government-subsidized jobs if they could not find employment in the private sector.

Even though the other two-thirds of recipients would not face those requirements, officials stressed that the proposal would fulfill the President’s campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” “No one can read our papers and not come away struck by the fact that we really are serious. After a period of time, two years, the expectation is that people will go to work and that traditional welfare will end,” one of the officials said.

Welfare experts agreed, saying that phasing in the program may be the only way to make it work, both because the assistance for recipients moving off welfare would be expensive and because enforcing the time limit would require states to make major institutional changes.

“By phasing it in, they may not go as far as what the President promised, but it may be the appropriate way to make sure the systems are in place to enforce the time limit,” said Demetra Nightengale, a welfare expert at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank.

The cost of the proposal is highly uncertain, officials said, because many decisions remain that will greatly affect the price tag. Under one possible breakdown of the package, the nation’s annual welfare bill would grow by $6 billion in 1999, with total additional costs of $15 billion for the years 1996 to 1999, officials said.

One official said that costs should not go higher than that. Welfare currently costs the nation about $22 billion a year.

Welfare reform was one of the most popular issues of Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Record numbers of Americans now receive Aid to Families With Dependent Children and out-of-wedlock births total almost a third of all births. Those facts have caused concern among many experts and politicians as well as taxpayers, who have decried the fact that the current system seems to do little to push welfare recipients off the rolls and does not discourage the births of children, even when parents have no means to support them.

But history shows that grand plans by presidents to overhaul the welfare system often founder in Congress.

Early in his Administration, Clinton turned the task of designing a plan that could win congressional approval over to a 32-member working group of sub-Cabinet officials from eight agencies.

For more than a year, the group has been working on a plan, which was detailed in a 45-page document and presented to Cabinet members last week.

The group, however, has been unable to reach consensus on several of the most difficult policy issues. Some of these will be left for the President to decide before a final proposal is presented to Congress this spring, according to Administration officials.

Unresolved issues include:

* How the reforms should be financed.

* Who among the younger recipients should be exempt from the work requirement.

* Whether government-subsidized child care should be provided to the working poor to help them avoid going on welfare.

* Whether states would be allowed to cap family benefits so that recipients who have additional children would not get added cash benefits.

* How long people can stay in their government-subsidized jobs, and what happens to them after that time limit.

In the dispute over the shape of the government-subsidized job program, planners agreed that there should be disincentives to staying in these jobs and incentives to getting jobs in the private sector.

But some Administration officials have argued that people who are willing to work but cannot find a job should not receive less than they did on welfare. Others favor allowing states to offer part-time work with salaries that do not equal the benefit or limit participation in such jobs.

“One of the themes that the President conveyed throughout the campaign was that families that play by the rules ought to be rewarded,” said Robert Greenstein, an expert here on poverty legislation.

In addition to requiring work from welfare recipients, one of the biggest goals of the working group was to create a policy that would send “the message loud and clear that you should not have a child until you are in a position to nurture and provide for that child,” one Administration official said.

Under the proposal, mothers receiving benefits would be required to help establish paternity of their children. Also, child support would be more stringently enforced and fathers would be provided with job training to help them meet their responsibilities.