Clinton Sharply Attacks GOP’s Orphanage Plan

President Clinton attempted to regain control of the welfare reform debate Saturday with a sharp attack on Republican proposals to eliminate benefits for teen-age welfare recipients and possibly send their children to orphanages.

Such proposals are “dead wrong,” Clinton said. “We need less governmental interference in family life, not more.”

“There is no substitute, none, for the loving devotion and equally loving discipline of caring parents,” Clinton declared.

In response, two Republican legislators offered only qualified support for the orphanage proposal in the House GOP welfare plan.

“I don’t envision under this bill a single child being put in a children’s home for the simple reason that his or her parent is poor,” said Rep. James M. Talent (R-Mo.), whose welfare reform legislation provided the model for the bill in the “contract with America,” the House GOP’s legislative agenda.

Clinton’s remarks in his weekly radio address constituted his second effort in the last week to regain the high ground in the emotional debate over reforming the welfare system. On Thursday, he announced plans for a national summit with governors, local officials and members of Congress, aimed at hammering out agreement on broad principles for welfare reform.

Clinton’s pointed attack on the GOP discussion of orphanages--which aides say he personally toughened from the draft language prepared for the address--also underscored the extent to which the welfare debate is increasingly revolving around the issue of how far government can go to discourage out-of-wedlock births.

In their contract, Republicans in the House proposed that all states be required to deny cash benefits to women younger than 18 who bear children out of wedlock. (States would also be permitted to extend the ban to women younger than 21.) Instead, states could use the money for a variety of alternative services, including encouraging adoption, establishing group homes for unwed mothers and their children, and subsidizing orphanages.

In their discussion of the legislation during the past few weeks, however, incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and other Republican leaders have emphasized the orphanage option. That has generated an intense debate about the fairness of pressuring poor women to give up their children by denying them any cash assistance in raising them.

In a new Time magazine/CNN poll released Saturday, 54% of Americans said they oppose denying all benefits to women younger than 18 who have children out of wedlock.

The House Republican plan also would allow states to eliminate benefits for all recipients after two years on the welfare rolls and require all states to eliminate benefits after five years. In either case, the states would not be required to provide the public service employment that a plan envisioned by the Clinton Administration would have offered recipients hitting the time limit.

Asked if they would support requiring women to find a job in two years or risk losing their children to orphanages if they cannot support them, 72% of Americans said no, according to the Time/CNN survey.

The emphasis on orphanages has also been questioned on fiscal grounds, with experts pointing out that orphanage care has an average annual cost of $35,000 per child. By contrast, a combination of welfare, food stamps, housing and health care benefits for the poor costs the government an average of $4,000 to $6,000 per person annually for a family of three, one Administration official said Saturday.

On NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press” last weekend, Gingrich staunchly defended the orphanage proposal as preferable to existing conditions in many inner-city neighborhoods. “You know,” he said at one point, “the little 4-year-old who was thrown off the balcony in Chicago would have been a hell of a lot better off in Boys Town.”

But Republican sources said many GOP legislators have been shaken by the intense and emotional backlash to the discussion of orphanages. That was apparent Saturday. In the GOP response to Clinton’s address, Rep. Susan Molinari (R-N.Y.) offered a much more tepid endorsement of orphanages than Gingrich had last Sunday--and a much more circumscribed vision of their purpose than suggested in the House GOP bill.

Molinari said welfare reform requires “bold decisions and courageous ideas” with “perhaps . . . the creation of small orphanages and group homes (that) offer safety and security to abused babies and lonely and isolated children.”

In his remarks on CNN’s “Newsmaker Saturday,” Talent emphasized the bill’s option for placing mothers together with their children in group homes where they would be taught “life skills and work skills and parenting skills.”

But while group homes might meet the principal objection to orphanages--the coerced separation of mothers from children--the cost of housing and supervising both mothers and children would logically be even more prohibitive than the cost of caring just for children, experts said.

“If you’re cutting off 2 million children from welfare, you’re going to need an awful lot of small group homes,” said one Administration official. “It’s $100 a day for a kid, and I assume the cost for the mother would be the same. I’ve never heard of any institutional costs that were lower than that.”

Rather than eliminating benefits for young unwed mothers, Clinton argued in his radio remarks for “a national campaign against teen pregnancy and the toughest possible enforcement of our child-support laws.”

Clinton’s flurry of activity on welfare reform partly reflects the fear of White House officials that Republicans have regained control of the politically charged issue. As a candidate, Clinton’s promise to end “welfare as we know it” constituted one of his most popular campaign plans. Last summer, the Administration produced a detailed plan to require welfare recipients--beginning with those younger than 25--to accept public employment after two years on the rolls or face the loss of benefits.

But the Administration subordinated welfare reform to the ill-fated drive to remake the nation’s health care system, and the proposal languished. With control of both houses of Congress, Republicans are now in position to drive the debate.