Bush Urges Welfare Changes

At the White House, President Bush called Tuesday for welfare recipients to work more hours. In Olympia, Wash., and Lansing, Mich., and in state capitals around the nation, welfare officials asked: How?

Facing their worst budget deficits in decades, state after state has cut back the support services designed to wean families from government checks. Tens of thousands of children have been cut off from subsidized day care. Millions will soon lose subsidized health insurance. Less money is available to buy bus passes for families with no transportation to work. Even job-training programs face cuts.

Bush has called for holding welfare funding stable at $17 billion in the next fiscal year -- the same amount that has been authorized every year since 1996.

He argued that because welfare rolls have been slashed in half in the last seven years, states will be able to spend more money per welfare family even though the federal grant will hold steady.

“In states with the strongest work incentives, single parents have seen larger increases in income than in states with weaker work requirements,” Bush said. “The time has come to strengthen that law.”

In the states, however, budget officials and advocates for the poor alike argued that Bush was missing the point.

To keep the welfare rolls low, they said, they need to spend heavily on the families who are already off public assistance -- but who could slip back into dependence at any setback. Parents need reliable child care, health insurance and transportation if they are to hold down jobs. And most minimum-wage workers can’t afford those services without subsidies.

At the same time, advocates for the poor said the families remaining on welfare after seven years of tough work-for-your-check requirements face tremendous obstacles to holding down jobs. In New York, for example, about half of them are illiterate, according to Mark Dunlea, an organizer with the Hunger Action Network.

Welfare experts in several states said they could not see how they could force more of those people into 40-hour-a-week jobs -- at least not without spending money that no state claims to have.

“Structurally, there’s just no way for us to maintain the full array of support services we’ve offered, at least as long as this recession lasts,” said Ken Miller, a welfare advisor to Washington Gov. Gary Locke, a Democrat.

“The first things to get cut are those support services,” added Mark Jasonowicz, chief operating officer of Michigan’s Family Independence Agency, which runs the welfare program. “That just makes it harder for people to maintain their independence.”

The cuts vary from state to state. In California, Gov. Gray Davis has proposed eliminating child-care subsidies for about 55,000 children a month. Illinois will cut its job-training and education funding in half. Massachusetts severely reduced after-school programs for poor kids.

In Michigan, an emergency fund that helped poor families buy a mattress or a refrigerator has been phased out. Washington state may have to slash community college courses that train welfare recipients to drive trucks or answer calls on customer-service hotlines.

“If they impose tougher requirements without recognizing what it takes to meet those requirements on top of the fiscal restrictions all states are in, two very significant things intersect there,” said California Department of Social Services Deputy Director Bruce Wagstaff. “All states are going through the same sort of budget deliberations. To the extent that additional expectations are placed on them ... that’s a problem.”

Davis is already proposing to suspend cost-of-living adjustments in its welfare-to-work program, known as CalWORKS, and reduce cash grants by 6.2%, or about $42 monthly for a family of three. The state’s 475,000 current welfare cases represent about a 46% decline since 1995. Fifty percent of the caseload is working, up from 20% before welfare reform.

Wagstaff noted that Davis is proposing to spend an additional $241 million next year for employment services in the state’s $5.7-billion CalWORKS budget, boosting services like job training, education and substance abuse treatment that can help people get jobs.

Other states have closed welfare branch offices or eliminated caseworker positions, resulting in longer delays to process applications and get recipients into training programs, said Sharon Parrott, an analyst with the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.

Responding to states’ pleas for help, Democrats and moderate Republicans have proposed $8 billion to $11 billion in additional funding for child-care expenses. Bush wants to spend $4.8 billion.

He argued Tuesday that the paramount goal of the welfare system should be to get parents into jobs, suggesting that once they have a foothold in the working world, they will be able to lift their families out of poverty.

Sharing the stage with the president in the East Room of the White House, former welfare recipient Pamela Hedrick of Columbus, Ohio, echoed him proudly.

Once chronically dependent on government checks, she lived in a public housing project so dangerous it was known as “Uzi Alley.” Prodded by changes in the welfare system, she broke an eight-year habit of living on the dole and began working at the United Way several years ago. Her work ethic caught the eye of state officials -- and Hedrick now serves as an assistant to Ohio’s first lady, Hope Taft. She and her husband are now raising her two sons in a suburban house she helped build with Habitat for Humanity.

And she is a clear fan of welfare reform.

“It works,” she said repeatedly.

Bush credited welfare reform with helping to lift 2 million families like the Hedricks into self-sufficiency: “During the period from 1996 to 2001, the percentage of welfare recipients who are working tripled. That’s incredibly positive news. According to the most recent census data, the poverty rate [among] Hispanic children has reached the lowest level in over 20 years. The poverty rate among African American children is the lowest ever recorded. There’s a correlation, it seems like to me.”

That’s why, he said, he backs a proposal to impose a 40-hour workweek on welfare recipients, 16 hours of which could be used for job training, education or treatment for addiction. The law now calls for a 30-hour week.

The Republican-controlled House passed a bill requiring 40-hour workweeks last year, but it never reached the Senate floor. The incoming chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), backs the stiffer work mandates.

Yet advocates for the poor promise a vigorous fight.

They point out that, after years of dramatic decline, welfare caseloads jumped in 25 states from September 2001 to September 2002, the latest period for which complete statistics are available.

In some of the states, the increase was significant: up 31% in Nevada, 16% in Wisconsin, 15% in Colorado and 14% in Mississippi. (California registered a decrease of 1.2%).

In the third quarter of last year, the welfare rolls nationwide edged up about 1%. That marked just the second time since 1994 that the national caseloads showed a quarterly increase, according to the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington, D.C.

Even in states without welfare increases, the number of needy families is on the rise: Officials report surging demand for homeless shelters and food pantries. In some cities, shelters are so overcrowded that directors must turn away families, offering little more than a blanket and a prayer. Some food pantries are rationing their groceries.

“We can only hope that, because the economy is so much worse, Congress will recognize that they must take action,” said Deborah Weinstein of the Children’s Defense Fund.

“I’m not optimistic,” said Ellen Bravo of the Milwaukee group 9to5, which assists poor women. “But I do have hope.”

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Chen reported from Washington, Simon from St. Louis. Times staff writer Carla Rivera in Los Angeles contributed to this report.