Washington. -- Call me naive, but I almost believed House Republicans when they pledged in their Contract with America to reform welfare through "a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements." Making welfare recipients work, after all, is wildly popular. If it weren't, it wouldn't be in the contract. I figured Newt Gingrich had talked so much about the need for a "mandatory requirement of work for everybody" that he might actually mean it, or at least would be too embarrassed to admit he didn't mean it. I underestimated him.
House Republicans unveiled their welfare reform plan February 10. Most welfare-watchers expected the new bill to dilute somewhat the contract's work provisions. But few expected the abject abandonment of any credible attempt to require work. Yet the new GOP bill, as unveiled by Rep. Clay Shaw, is not only weaker on the work issue than President Clinton's welfare proposal, it is in some respects weaker than the current welfare law Republicans deride.
It's certainly a long way from the Contract with America. The contract would have required work by those who had received welfare for 24 months. Work meant "an average of not fewer than 35 hours per week." No funny business. By 2003, 50 percent of the welfare caseload (which currently contains 5 million households) would be working.
The rationale behind these provisions was obvious: if potential welfare recipients (mainly young women) knew they were really going to have to work after two years, they might think twice before doing the things (mainly becoming single mothers) that put them on welfare in the first place.
But Republican governors, it turns out, don't like work requirements much -- in part because putting a welfare mother to work costs money (an extra $6,000 to pay for supervisors and day care, according to the Congressional Budget Office). Why raise state taxes to make welfare recipients work when you can cycle them through relatively cheap education and "job search" programs while claiming to be a great reformer? That's what Michigan's Republican governor John Engler has done, and when House Republicans decided to negotiate with GOP governors over the shape of welfare reform Mr. Engler led the charge to gut the contract's work requirements.
His mission was successful. Representative Shaw's new bill requires that, in 1996, states place 2 percent of the welfare caseload "in work activities." The requirement rises to 20 percent -- not the contract's 50 percent -- by 2003.
In meeting these requirements, governors could count the 6 percent of recipients who already work at least part-time. Another 5 percent are already required to work by a 1988 welfare reform. With a little creative bookkeeping -- say, by counting all those who work over the course of a year, even for a few days -- most governors could today meet even the 20 percent standard without doing anything they're not already doing.
But creative bookkeeping won't be necessary, because the Shaw bill lets the states decide what a "work activity" is. It needn't be actual work. Under the bill, a governor could declare, as Mr. Engler has, that checking a book out of a library counts as a "work activity." Leafing through the want ads might also qualify, or circulating a resume, or attending a "self-esteem" class.
Republicans criticized President Clinton's reform plan because it would have required only about 500,000 recipients, 10 percent of the caseload, to be in a work program by 2003. But at least they would really have to be working. The House Republicans say they will put "at least 1 million cash welfare recipients in work programs by 2003," but the "work" could be completely phony. Workfake, you might call it. It is all the more likely to be fake because the Shaw bill provides no money to make it real. (The contract had provided $9.9 billion.)
House Republicans don't even try very hard to pretend they haven't caved on the work issue. It was the price, they argue, of getting the governors to agree to a stingy "block grant," and to accept the contract's cutoff of aid to young unwed mothers. The price was too high for some conservatives. Robert Rector, the Heritage Foundation's welfare expert, called Mr. Shaw's work provisions a "major embarrassment."
Mr. Shaw now says he will try to shore up the work requirements -- specifying what counts as a "work activity," for example. But it may be difficult to convince the governors to endorse a major stiffening.
It also may be too late. The premise of the GOP's new state-based welfare bill, after all, is that the nation's governors are reformist tigers who need only to be unleashed by the bureaucrats in Washington. But the governors have now shown their hand, and it's obvious to all that they have no appetite for radical reform. With great effort, they have turned the contract's ambitious scheme into a bill that allows them to preserve the status quo. These days, the Republicans' welfare reform is looking less like a menace and more like a fraud.
TRB is a column of The New Republic, written this week by Mickey Kaus.