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The Welfare Experiments

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Figures......................................................................ixAcknowledgments......................................................................xi1. The Politics of Pilot Programs....................................................12. Hope and an Experimental Design...................................................233. The History of AFDC...............................................................514. Florida's Family Transition Program...............................................735. Street-Level Policymaking.........................................................1006. Revolution in the States..........................................................1347. The Rhetoric and Institutional Politics of Policy Experiments.....................159Afterword: "Superwaivers"............................................................181Appendix 1. Methodology..............................................................193Appendix 2. Who Was Compliant?.......................................................205Notes................................................................................211Bibliography.........................................................................231Index................................................................................243

Chapter One

I think it is fair to say the debate is over.... We now know that welfare reform works. President Bill Clinton, 1997

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) presents a riddle. For decades, substantial welfare reform had stalled at the federal level. The reform efforts that did pass, notably the Family Support Act of 1988, were watered down as they worked their way through the massive welfare bureaucracy. Efforts at reform had, at best, a slight impact on the majority of welfare recipients. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) seemed to be a large bureaucracy that would withstand the most virulent political attacks by virtue of its sheer size and age. Then something odd happened. The system crumbled in the span of a few years. The demise of welfare was a matter of fact. Time-limited welfare, a radical departure from AFDC, was taken for granted as an obvious solution to a failed policy just a few years after even minor alterations to AFDC seemed to be a political impossibility. How did this happen?

To address this question, we need to look beyond the traditional actors in policymaking-the interest groups, members of Congress, and presidential administrations. All of these actors were important in welfare reform, but they do not fully explain the dramatic restructuring of the American welfare state that took place in 1996. President Clinton's pledge to "end welfare as we know it" in his 1992 presidential campaign laid the groundwork for radical reform of the welfare system. The slogan "two years and you're off" famously, and unintentionally, paved the way for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 increased the momentum for welfare reform. In fact, welfare reform was one of the stated objectives in the Republican Contract with America, the platform on which many Republican members ran for office and won.

Yet even this constellation of factors fails to explain why such profound changes in the American welfare state passed with so little fanfare and why what had been an unthinkable policy idea became the obvious solution to reforming welfare in such a short period. To answer that question, we need to understand the political role of the experimental welfare pilot programs and how they became a part of the policy-making process.

The case of welfare reform in 1996 raises a set of larger questions: How is public policy made? How do we decide whether a new policy idea will work? Who determines which path to take when there are competing ideas? Historical institutional research has placed considerable emphasis on the role of overtly political actors-legislators and interest groups-in garnering support for favored policy ideas. In this book, I argue that there is a critical and largely unrecognized institutional channel in social policymaking-experimental pilot programs. Pilot programs are designed to test new policy ideas. They permit policy innovations to leave the realm of political debate and to come to life in programs that affect real people, programs that can be observed and whose results can be measured. They demonstrate to the public and policy elites whether or not a policy will work. Defining what works is a powerful political tool. It is particularly powerful if the definition of what works is framed as a scientific assessment objectively determined outside of the political realm.

Yet pilot programs, as this book demonstrates, are not neutral, and they are not outside of the political process. The very existence of a pilot program is often a part of a larger political strategy. Pilot programs can be used to send an idea "to committee" in order to placate advocates of a proposed policy even if the broader initiative is dead in the political waters. Similarly, pilot programs can postpone a political conflict, on the basis that "more research is needed," until a time when policy actors find more advantages. Political actors can use pilot programs to claim credit on a policy issue that is not moving through normal legislative channels and thus avoid the consequences of failing to act on a popular policy issue. In the early 1990s, experimental welfare pilot programs were used by both Democrats and Republicans to claim progress as the federal legislative process stalled. Evelyn Z. Brodkin and Alexander Kaufman have argued that pilot programs "have a tactical utility in the competition for space on the policy agenda." As Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson so brilliantly demonstrated with his highly visible welfare reform pilot programs, pilot programs can also define a policy idea and set the terms of a political debate.

Policy choices are about values and technical efficacy. Political rhetoric often emphasizes values. What do we want this country to do? What is the proper role of the government? What are America's fiscal and political priorities? The political realm is home to issues of values and priorities. Technical policy questions on the surface appear to be more concrete. Will a policy do what we want it to do? Will it work? Thus, policy questions are often understood to go through a process from the abstract, value-driven decision that the goal of a policy is desirable, to the specific, technical question of what means will attain that goal. Policy specialists ostensibly have the task of making sure that legislation is technically sound and will promote the values and priorities promised in the original debate. Administrators, in the final stage of bringing a policy to life, are charged with effectively implementing the policy and sorting out the ground-level technical details.

In American culture, however, efficiency and effectiveness are often raised to the level of values themselves. Given this reality, is it then possible to separate the technical from the political? In the quote that began this chapter, Clinton hailed...