Governors Have Second Thoughts About Welfare Law

As the nation’s governors converge on Washington for their semiannual meeting, many are voicing new concerns about the sweeping welfare reform legislation that had their nearly unanimous support when it was signed into law last August.

After months of drafting state programs mandated by the measure, a number of Republican governors have developed misgivings about its ban on aid to legal immigrants and are calling for changes.

That crack in the ranks of Republican governors is likely to please President Clinton, who has sought to ease the measure’s provisions concerning immigrants. But it has caused considerable consternation among Republican lawmakers and promises to be a fractious issue among GOP governors.

House and Senate Republicans--joined by a number of GOP governors--have dismissed any likelihood of changing the welfare legislation, arguing that to do so would be expensive and invite a flurry of efforts to unravel the measure.

Iowa Gov. Terry E. Branstad predicted in an interview Friday that the debate among governors over revising the measure will be a major topic during the four days of National Governors’ Assn. meetings, which begin today. That debate, he added, will largely pit governors from states with high immigrant populations against those with very few immigrants.

“I don’t want to see the whole thing jeopardized over that,” Branstad said. “I know they’re big states and maybe difficult to manage, but a lot of accommodations were made to those states in the process. . . . We had this thing worked out pretty well. But some of these big states always have a little problem.”

Offering a clue to California Gov. Pete Wilson’s still-unknown position in the dispute, Branstad said: “I think he’s pretty reasonable on this. I think he sees the dangers of opening [the legislation] up, the potential costs.”

One potential concern Branstad and other governors see is that increased federal spending on legal immigrants, coming at a time when Congress is trying to balance the federal budget, might lead lawmakers to compensate by transferring the much higher cost of the Medicaid program from the federal government to the states. Medicaid provides health care for the poor and eligible seniors.

“If Congress has to pick up billions of additional dollars on the legal-immigrant thing, they’ll take it out on us on Medicaid, which is much bigger,” Branstad said. “For a savings of a few billion, we could risk ending up responsible for hundreds of billions.”

In its uphill struggle to alter provisions for legal immigrants, the White House would clearly welcome the support of such influential Republicans as Govs. George W. Bush of Texas, George Pataki of New York, William F. Weld of Massachusetts and Jim Edgar of Illinois--all of whom have expressed concern in recent weeks about aid to legal immigrants.

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a leading architect of the welfare legislation, bristled with impatience at the complaints because the governors’ association had been deeply involved in the negotiations that produced the measure.

“It’s not like they were kept at the palace gate,” Santorum said. “They had a big part of writing this bill. It was a package. They took things they liked [along with] the things that they didn’t like.”

In a related issue, the administration has sought to defuse a growing controversy over restrictions on the use of state welfare funds--a debate that threatened to put the federal government on a collision course with governors.

The administration issued a directive Friday intended to reassure governors that the federal government will allow states considerable flexibility in the use of their funds.

The dispute arose several weeks ago. It stems from a provision of the welfare reform measure that requires states to continue spending at least 75% as much of their own money on welfare as they did in 1994.

But a question arose: If a state has created a welfare benefit that does not meet with federal approval, could a state’s spending for that benefit be counted toward the 75% minimum?

For instance, the new welfare legislation says a welfare recipient can receive federal aid for a maximum of five years in a lifetime. But what if a state decided to use its own funds to extend that to, for example, seven years? Would that additional spending count toward the 75%?

The administration had suggested earlier that it could not.