Welfare Cuts Get Tougher With Success

Just two years after Congress rewrote the rules of welfare, many of the nation’s most aggressive reformers are coping with the fruits of their success: a remaining pool of 3 million welfare recipients whose problems--from substance abuse to low literacy levels to clinical depression--are posing stubborn obstacles to employment.

In states where welfare rolls have been driven to near unprecedented lows, officials are discovering that it is no longer enough to issue a “get a job” edict and offer some firm prodding to help them make the transition.

To ease these hard-core adult recipients into jobs, officials say, it will take much more--more skill, more services, more money and more patience--than was needed to nudge the first 1,932,000 off the rolls. And, say experts, it may take a softening of the near-fanatical “work-first” approach that many states have used to drive welfare rolls down by as much as 84% in the last five years.

“Overall we’ve found that the more successful we are, the harder the job becomes,” says Don Winstead, head of the social services agency in Florida, where rolls have dropped 64% in the last five years. “That’s predictable, but it means we really have to focus more attention on the families that are left: more services, more nurturing, specific services related to their specific areas of need. There is really no one-size-fits-all approach now.”

In a subtle shift that adds political sensitivity to the equation, blacks and Latinos now make up a growing share of remaining caseloads.

California is still in the throes of its first stage of reform. Its welfare rolls have declined by nearly 400,000 people since 1993, but that represents only a 16% reduction in its huge welfare population. Because the reduction nationally has been a far greater 41%, some experts believe California continues to have a large population of readily employable recipients on its rolls.

In many other states, officials acknowledge that they have done the easy work of welfare reform, nudging the most attractive employment prospects into jobs using a combination of incentives, threats and transitional benefits like child-care subsidies and health-care benefits. “We’ve picked the low-hanging fruit,” says Oregon’s chief of social services, Gary Weeks.

Officials like Weeks caution that, in welfare reform’s second phase, federal officials, state legislators and taxpayers looking for quick welfare savings should get ready for less glowing results and greater setbacks.

“Of the remaining families on assistance, we have moms who have multiple challenges. They have no job history or limited education, or a low functional education,” says Jim Hmurovich, second-in-command in Indiana’s social services agency. “We have higher incidents of domestic violence and substance abuse. It’s almost like an onion we keep peeling off, and we’ve gotten to the heart of dependency.”

In some ways, the timing of their warnings couldn’t be worse, since some politicians are growing impatient to reap welfare reform’s promised cost savings already. In the last year alone, lawmakers in Congress and several state legislatures have pointed to shrunken caseloads and have proposed cuts in welfare funding or staffing. None has resulted in significant reductions yet. But social services administrators fear that just as the job is getting tougher, the consensus that welfare reform should be funded generously is beginning to waver.

The new challenge facing state officials underscores two facts that, though obvious to experts, have been nearly lost in the heady days of plummeting welfare rolls and crowing politicians: First, no matter how successful reform has been, there will always be welfare rolls. And second, some recipients, in some form, are likely always to depend on them.

“It’s definitely a permanent fixture,” says Anna Kondratas, a welfare analyst with the Washington-based Urban Institute. “Whether or not state administrators acknowledge that publicly, they’re making plans for it.”

In Oregon, for instance, the population that remains on Temporary Aid for Needy Families, or TANF, has changed measurably since welfare reform began there five years ago. Length of time on welfare, usually a strong indicator of deeper problems in a recipient’s life, offers one measure of the shift. In the year that ended April 1997, 23% of all welfare recipients coming into Oregon’s system of job counseling and placement had already logged more than 24 months on welfare. By the following year, the proportion of such long-term recipients coming into the system had risen to almost 40%.

For states’ welfare agencies, the looming challenge of dealing with recipients who are politely called “harder to serve” has required a second round of reinvention. As they undertook reform in the early and mid-1990s, many state welfare agencies transformed themselves completely, prodding caseworkers to abandon passive roles and become aggressive job counselors for their “clients.”

In their next incarnation for welfare reform, many caseworkers will need to revert to a more traditional social services role, coordinating intensive and ongoing services--like drug rehabilitation and remedial education--for recipients who are far from ready for the workplace.

“Our goal now is one of resource brokerage,” says Hmurovich of Indiana. “Now, before we even refer [remaining recipients] to an employer, we have to prepare them mentally and physically to walk into a job interview.”

In Florida, the challenge of dealing with these hard-core recipients prompted officials to create entirely new organizations. Because the state limits an individual’s lifetime welfare benefit to 48 months (even stricter than the federal limit of 60 months), Florida officials realized they would have to move swiftly and efficiently to help some of their most dependent population into jobs. In the last two years, the state has created 24 new public-private coalitions of localized social services agencies that swing into action when a recipient comes within six months of a lifetime cutoff.

Rather than assume job-readiness, welfare caseworkers operating within these coalitions begin with an in-depth assessment of a recipient’s assets and deficits. And they jump quickly to address the latter, drawing on a broad range of services at their disposal--from state-funded substance abuse programs to federal emergency housing to private-sector job training cooperatives.

Some states are finding they are better equipped than others to meet the new needs. Weeks of Oregon, for instance, notes that unlike many states’ welfare agencies, the department he heads also includes the state’s child protective services office, mental health and substance abuse programs, emergency housing, and programs for senior citizens and the disabled.

“I can compel resources to be available” for the most troubled welfare recipients, Weeks says. “Most of my colleagues don’t have that advantage. They have to persuade their providers of mental health and alcohol and drug services to cooperate with their welfare caseworkers. You’re talking about some agencies that don’t talk to each other at all, who compete for resources.”

But welfare analyst Julie Strawn says that as states reach into the toughest cases on their welfare rolls, many officials will reassess the benefits of programs that provide, for instance, remedial education geared to employers’ needs. “It’s notable that the states that have done most with the hard-to-employ, and that have been doing it longest, are mixed-strategy states, like Oregon and Utah,” says Strawn, of the Washington-based Center for Law and Social Policy. “They are not work-first-only states.”

But that doesn’t mean that states are giving up on work as the ultimate goal for welfare recipients, cautions Oregon’s Weeks. Some, like Florida and Wisconsin, will insist that even as the least functional of welfare recipients get needed help, they work in community service jobs. Others have transferred welfare recipients with extensive needs to state welfare rolls, so that they can pursue programs not funded under the federal welfare statute. But all, in the end, expect a welfare recipient to work.

“Their future does hold work,” says Weeks. “We wouldn’t spend and invest in people we don’t think have the capacity to be employed. We believe with the right supports and working with them, there is opportunity for them to go to work. We actually think it can happen.”