‘Family Cap’ on Welfare Benefits Will Get Boost

Ending months of intense debate within the Administration, President Clinton will propose making it easier for states to deny additional benefits to women who have children while on welfare, senior Administration officials said Wednesday.

The decision aligns Clinton with those inside and outside the Administration who argue that government must intensify its efforts to discourage out-of-wedlock births, which now constitute about 30% of all births in the United States. “We think it is very important to discourage additional births on welfare,” one senior official said. “We are saying that states that want to try this approach should be able to try it.”

But the “family cap” policy inspires even more intense opposition among liberals than the proposed two-year time limit on benefits that is at the center of Clinton’s welfare reform plan, which is now expected to be introduced shortly after the President returns from commemorating the 50th anniversary of D-day in Europe next month.

Given its potential to affect the most intimate decisions of millions of women, the family cap issue is certain to provoke a polarized struggle in Congress. Many moderate and conservative legislators see the family cap as a way to promote personal responsibility, whereas liberals largely denounce it as racist and sexist social engineering. No other proposal may more starkly demonstrate the difficulty of finding common ground between left and right on the emotional issues swirling through welfare reform.

“This is clearly one where there are very deep feelings on both sides of the issue and, apart from the families it directly affects, it has a large symbolic impact,” said Mark Greenberg, an attorney with the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington.

In fact, although Clinton settled on the new policy at a Tuesday meeting, Administration officials still appear divided over how closely to identify with the controversial idea. Some officials took pains to say that the Administration does not intend to push states to adopt family cap policies, merely to smooth the way for those interested in the idea. One agency official lukewarm to the policy insisted that the decision leaves the Administration “neutral” on the question of whether more states should adopt the caps.

But other senior officials acknowledged that by signaling at least tacit federal support for the family cap, the Administration plan inevitably will encourage more states to embrace the idea. Outside observers agreed. “Inevitably, by framing it as a state option, it will be taken as a federal encouragement,” Greenberg said.

In opening the way for wider use of the family cap, Clinton continued a movement toward the center that has characterized his final decisions on the welfare plan.

Four weeks ago, Clinton rejected the idea of imposing a new casino tax as a way to pay for more child-care assistance for the working poor--a proposal fervently supported by liberals. And, although agreeing to phase in his proposed two-year time limit by imposing it on younger people first, the President has decided to allow states to require work after two years for older welfare recipients as well, senior officials said.

That proposal, like the family cap, reflects Clinton’s intention to give states more flexibility in managing welfare reform, officials said. Clinton will also propose easing the way for states to condition welfare grants for teen-agers on their school attendance and to encourage work by allowing recipients to keep more of their earnings without reducing their benefits, sources said.

“The notion of states trying different approaches and learning what we can from those different approaches makes enormous common sense and political sense,” said Delaware Gov. Thomas R. Carper, a Democrat who presented the Administration proposals to a closed session of the National Governors’ Assn. executive board Wednesday.

It is a sign of how far the welfare reform debate has shifted in the last year that the family cap Clinton will propose--although anathema to liberal advocacy groups--occupies a middle ground among the competing efforts to discourage out-of-wedlock births.

As a presidential candidate, Clinton declared that he would allow states to experiment with the family cap proposal--although he declined to sign such a law when he was governor of Arkansas.

The Administration plan reflects that perspective. It would not require states to impose a family cap, but it would allow them to implement such policies without federal approval, sources said. Under current law, states cannot implement such policies without waivers from the Health and Human Services Department, a process that can take months and require extensive negotiations.

Only three states have received federal approval for a family cap plan. The George Bush Administration approved a proposal from New Jersey and the Clinton Administration has approved plans in Georgia and Arkansas. Applications are pending from California, Maryland and Wisconsin.

Early results in New Jersey, the only state that has actually implemented a family cap, show that births have declined among welfare mothers since the policy went into place. But it remains uncertain whether those numbers reflect the cap’s impact, a general decline in childbearing in the state, or a decreased willingness among welfare recipients to report new births.