As the new Republican majority in Congress begins its effort to slash Social Security's troubled $65 billion disability plan, there already are signs that political pressure is being felt that could jeopardize serious reform.
Two decades of rule changes ordered by Congress have turned a pair of modest programs for disabled workers and poor people into America's most generous welfare plan -- a cash handout that is expected to cost $96 billion by the year 2000. The most alarming growth has been among children, immigrants and drug addicts.
But Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr., chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee that opens hearings today, faces the kind of political quandary that could turn the proceedings into a test of his party's resolve to reform welfare within the first 100 days of taking power.
In an interview this week, the South Florida Republican said that while he supports deep cuts in aid to disabled drug addicts, alcoholics and children, he will oppose any wholesale cutbacks to one of the most controversial groups in the program: refugees.
"These people have fled tyranny and are deserving of having those benefits," he said. "Yes, there has been a fraud problem connected with them, but that's our fault for allowing the fraud to take place. That's shame on us -- not shame on them."
Refugees and immigrants are costing U.S. taxpayers $4 billion a year because of one sentence that went largely unnoticed by Congress when it passed the 1972 law creating the disability program, The Sun reported in a series of articles this week.
In the midst of one of the largest immigrant booms in U.S. history, it spawned an underground of "middle men" who steer the new arrivals onto the rolls for profit.
Mr. Shaw was not in Congress then, but political survival in his home state rests heavily on not upsetting South Florida's powerful immigrant lobby. And that is not the only group he must contend with.
Attention mounts
"I am finding advocacy groups I didn't even know existed," he said. "And they are militant and tough to deal with. But I don't think we in Congress should be representing special interests. We were sent here to represent the taxpayers."
Members of the subcommittee are finding themselves inundated with calls, letters and faxes from the elderly, handicapped and disabled. The attention has turned what was scheduled to be a one-day hearing with hand-picked witnesses calling for cuts into three days of proceedings.
Meanwhile, the subcommittee staff was scrambling this week to come up with more witnesses to provide a counterbalance.
"We are looking for a witness who will be willing to say that SSI furthered his addiction and made it possible for him to be an addict," Ways and Means staffer Matt Weidinger said. "Furthermore, we want him to say it would be a good idea for the cash benefits to be cut off to addicts."
Filling a hearing with friendly witnesses is an old Washington practice. But it is this kind of political maneuvering that has brought the disability aid program to its current crisis, said Susan Galbraith of the Legal Action Center in Washington.
"Democrats pulled that stunt for years -- and the Republicans hated it," she said. "It gives them a nice big smoke screen and gets them a lot of television coverage so they can ram something through that they don't want to spend a lot of time on. If the Republicans are serious about fixing this problem, they'll knock that off right now."
The first of the two programs, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), provides checks of up to $458 per month to poor people who are too old, disabled, ill or addicted to support themselves. Funded with taxes, its costs have doubled in five years and are expected to increase by another 50 percent by the turn of the century.
Similar growth is expected in the second program, known as Disability Insurance (DI). It lets workers draw money early from the Social Security retirement trust fund if they become too disabled to work -- and is undermining the cornerstone of retirement planning for most Americans.
Both programs are covered by the same generous rules that have allowed many people to draw benefits for marginal disabilities.
But while SSI has been the target of repeated congressional investigations and quick fixes since it was created in 1972, neither party in Congress has been willing to take on DI's problems for fear of backlash by workers claiming that they have "earned" their benefits.
As recently as last summer, Congress launched an election-year crackdown on addicts in the SSI program that was supposed to drive them off the rolls after three years. But it left a loophole that lets DI addicts receive benefits for at least three years after they are accepted into a treatment program -- at a time when there is a nationwide shortage of treatment.
Mr. Shaw and other members of the committee vow to go after the SSI addicts again by stopping benefits immediately to some 80,000 who are on the rolls solely because they are addicted.
"I've said it before and I'll say it again," he said. "I don't think the taxpayers want us to be giving money to addicts."
But the measure still would leave about 170,000 addicts and alcoholics on SSI and DI who are retarded, blind or otherwise too disabled to work, and there is nothing in the Republican proposal about providing treatment.
'Hidden facts'
Further, Social Security has been avoiding classifying addicts as such because of the criticism it has received in recent years for failing to stop them from using their checks to buy drugs and alcohol.
"It's one of the hidden facts about these programs," said Joe Manes, a policy analyst with the Bazelon Mental Health Center in Washington. "Wherever possible, Social Security has been classifying people as diabetics, mentally ill or some other disability.
"The bottom line is that you could cut off every one of the 250,000 addicts we know about today and you'll still have people drinking themselves to death on the taxpayers. If I had to guess, I'd say you're talking about double or triple the number that are classified as substance abusers."
And while Mr. Shaw backs cutting 80,000 addicts, he draws the line at cutting 166,000 refugees. He said they are worthy of continued special status in the SSI program because they "have been driven out of their countries."
The 517,000 immigrants on the rolls are another story. He said that he wants to restrict them from getting benefits until they have been in the United States for five years but he does not yet know how many people that might involve. Records show that it could be as few as 90,000 or as many as 260,000.
As for the children on SSI, relaxed mental disability rules passed by Congress in 1990 have fed explosive growth in their numbers. Today, 900,000 of them are costing taxpayers $5 billion a year. And teachers throughout the Deep South and elsewhere say young people are being "coached" to fake mental problems so their parents can qualify for what are popularly known as "crazy checks."
Rep. Jim McCrery, a Louisiana Republican on the subcommittee who has tutored himself on the children's program, wants to replace existing rules with a much more stringent standard and cut off cash to all but the most needy.
For the marginally disabled, he would give block grants to the states to provide whatever services they might need. If approved, his plan would cut off cash to thousands of his constituents.
Rep. Gerald D. Kleczka, a Wisconsin Democrat, has a similar proposal. But he would eliminate the cash handout, replacing it with goods and services, in an effort to curb abuse by parents seeking cash.
Potential consequences
Said Mr. McCrery, whom Speaker Newt Gingrich has made the Republican point man on children: "I realize that I might become a sacrificial lamb on this come election time," he said. "But nobody led me here. I have read up on this problem. I've studied it as well as I can. And the only alternative is to leave it the way it is, and I'm not going to do that."
To Dave Mason, an analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation, that sounds like advice that everyone in the new majority should heed.
"If every member takes the position that they don't want to cut their own constituents, then reform is destined to fail," he said.
"The trick is to make general, across-the-board cuts that affect everyone equally and then repair what's left at the end.
"If you get into a debate about specific cuts to specific populations, you're inviting criticism -- and you might just deserve it."