LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : David Ellwood : The Harvard Academic at the Center of Clinton’s Welfare Reform Plan

President Bill Clinton and just about everybody else in Washington want poor mothers to get off welfare, stop having babies and go to work. The agreement stops there. Republicans and Democrats fight each other and themselves over the best way to move people from welfare check to paycheck--but the fiercest battles will rage over who gets the credit.

David T. Ellwood, a leading architect of the Administration’s ambitious remake of welfare, is in the eye of this partisan storm. His background--raised in Minneapolis, educated at Harvard, where he stayed on to become a professor and academic dean at the John F. Kennedy School of Government--signals liberal. But when he links welfare to work and responsibility, he sounds more like Ronald Reagan than Franklin D. Roosevelt, who created Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1935 to help keep widows and their children out of the poorhouse.

Ellwood’s passion for welfare reform stems from an examination of teen-age unemployment he did in graduate school. He concluded that the problem was more than teen-agers without jobs--it included family structure and poverty. A labor economist by academic discipline, he’s written much on the subject, including the highly respected, “Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family.”

But in Washington, his theories are not academic. Officially, Ellwood is the assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s better known, however, as one of the powerful triumvirate that runs the Administration’s welfare-reform task force.

Optimistic, animated and riveting, Ellwood, 40, lives in a suburb of Washington with his wife, Marilyn, also an expert on social policy, and their two daughters, Maranda and Andrea. In spite of his proximity to power, or perhaps because of it, he has no political ambitions beyond encouraging Congress to pass welfare reform.

Will Ellwood’s deadline on the dole become the law of the land? Only time--and politics--will tell.

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Question: How did you get interested in welfare reform?

Answer: I grew up in a family where public service was a fundamental part of what we did . . . . I believe it’s absolutely critical to be involved.

The problems that the country faces in terms of our children, and our future, are just terrifying. If we don’t find a better way for our families than the current welfare system, we’re going to lose not only a generation; we’re going to lose our soul, our country. We’ve ultimately got to find a better way.

Q: Lose our soul?

A: We’re sending the wrong messages to people about how to create a vital future and real hope. The welfare system doesn’t reinforce the things that we all treasure. It doesn’t help people help themselves. Instead, it stigmatizes and isolates. It doesn’t reward work. It doesn’t encourage responsibility. It has all the worst kind of messages. We’ve fundamentally got to find a way where we turn that around, and we start reinforcing work and responsibility and family and opportunity. That’s what’s this plan is ultimately all about.

Q: How do you change the expectations of a teen-age girl who grew up on welfare? Perhaps her mother was on welfare and her grandmother and even her great-grandmother?

A: You start by making very clear that this system is not about permanence. It’s about a transition. It’s about a future. But it’s about a future where there is work and responsibility.

You find ways to send a signal that you shouldn’t have children until you’re in position to nurture and support those children. But if you do have a child, then you make very, very clear we’re willing to help you.

But there are very serious responsibilities associated with that not only for you but for the father of that child as well. Both parents are going to know, if you are a teen-ager, you are going to stay in school. Both parents are going to be expected to provide support. And, ultimately, you are going to have to go to work.

Q: How do you send that message to a boy who doesn’t know who his father is?

A: You start by trying to make sure that everyone knows that when a child is born, we will identify both the mother and the father at birth in the hospital. It is a message of hope. It is also a message of responsibility . . . .

For the boys, to the extent they have money, they are going to be expected to share it with their children. And, to the extent they don’t, we have in the plan opportunities for both training and work for young men to help support their children.

Q: Are you the father of time limits?

A: . . . In some ways, the notion that welfare should be transitional is as old as recorded history.

The reason time limits are important is that we are in the wrong business. We have a welfare system that is basically in the check-writing business. The culture of welfare offices is entirely focused on getting people in, asking them lots of difficult, painful questions . . . then they write them out a check.

Time limits say to the people in the system, the workers as well as the recipients, that this will ultimately come to an end. This is transitional. At some point, the expectation is you are going to have to go to work.

Q: Do deadlines work?

A: Deadlines are one tool . . . . In addition, what we’ve done is make sure, if you go to work, you can support your family . . . through tax credits, child care, health coverage. Health reform is absolutely vital for this whole enterprise. Deadlines are one of many things that will make it very clear that this system is now about transition, about changing the future from one of welfare checks to one of paychecks.

Q: Where do all those jobs come from?

A: Very large numbers of people now on welfare do go to work but often don’t stay there. Seventy percent of the people who come on welfare leave within the first two years; 90% within the first five.

The problem is a large fraction end up coming back on welfare. That’s why doing some things outside of the welfare system, like health reform, child care and tax credits, are so important to helping people stay off . . . . We’re providing training and other sorts of supports.

Finally, if at the end of two years, someone has done everything they can and still can’t find a job, then we’re committed--and we have the money in the bill to do it--to providing short-term, temporary, government-subsidized jobs, preferably in the private sector, perhaps in the nonprofit or the government sector. Jobs so that people can count on some ways to go to work to get a paycheck instead of a welfare check.

Q: What happens at the end of two years to the woman who doesn’t cooperate, who doesn’t follow the rules, who gets thrown off welfare? What happens to her kids?

A: I’ve talked to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people on welfare. I haven’t met one who hasn’t said, “I really want to go to work. I want to do the right thing. I want to move forward. I want to give my children a real future.” This is not going to be a serious problem so long as we really do provide the opportunities for people.

But if somebody is really unwilling to do anything to support their children, and we’ve given them a job opportunity, that is a family we ought to ask what’s going on, and what’s the proper support for those children.

Q: Are you optimistic?

A: I’m optimistic, partly because the system that we’re replacing is so bad. It is so hard on people. Everyone dislikes it. The people who hate it the most are the people in the welfare system.

Q: Can Washington deliver?

A: I’m very hopeful. Here in Washington, and throughout the country, there is a general recognition that the current system has not worked. This Administration and members of Congress are committed to doing something that isn’t just some small piece. It’s putting the pieces together, so when people go to work, they can make it. And the system is designed to help that happen--and to ensure people really do take responsibility for their lives and get the dignity that comes with it.

Q: Won’t politics get in the way?

A: Politics is always tough, and certainly when you deal with low-income issues . . . . But a remarkable consensus is emerging when you look at the bills ranging from Rep. (Robert T.) Matsui’s through the mainstream Republican bills--they all are trying to change the focus to work. They are all saying that both parents ought to have responsibility. They all talk about the notion of beginning to really change the system. They all talk about the problems of young people and teen-agers. So the gulf between the parties isn’t so wide.

Q: Is there a gap between what you learned at Harvard and what you have learned in Washington about welfare reform?

A: Sure. Clearly, there are lots of different people involved, lots of points of view and lots of things that have to be reconciled. But, in both cases, the real issue is people need to spend some time talking to welfare recipients and workers, and they’ll find they are the ones who are urging welfare reform.

Q: Can Washington translate theory into law?

A: That’s a critical question. In Washington, people get very preoccupied with passing a bill and getting a law in place when, in fact, the critical thing is what will have to happen at the street level, what will happen in every city, in every county, in every local office.

How do we take a system that has, for 60 years, been in the check-writing business, that doesn’t really try at all to help people help themselves--and turn it around and focus it on really helping people get a paycheck? That’s going to be extraordinarily tough. The real hard work won’t be passing the bill--although that will be plenty hard; it will be then making something really work. So that, in the end, this system really is about helping people go to work and really encouraging and expecting responsibility.

Q: Do you really believe government can change behavior?

A: Government can send the right signals. When everyone involved in a system is angry and frustrated with it, it’s time to change. Government can be part of the solution. Right now, it’s part of the problem.

Q: Will California be punished because GAIN has already placed people in jobs?

A: California will actually have an easier time than most, because they do have a lot of successful programs in place and are moving forward. Indeed, we’ve used the lessons from California. Part of what we want to do is reproduce some of the best aspects of the California system nationally.

Q: Washington or Harvard--which do you prefer?

A: I think you’ll have to wait and see, but they’re very different environments. One place, you think, but you don’t get out very much. The other place, people are very anxious to act. In the end, what’s really important is what’s going to happen on Main Street.*