WORKING OUT WELFARE

• Share

For the third time since President Clinton took office, the House of Representatives last week passed a bill that aims to make good on his 1992 promise to "end welfare as we know it." And this time, with the Senate poised to pass a similar bill, it will be hard for Clinton to veto the measure as he has done twice before. The President faces a problem largely of his own making: last Tuesday, in a broadcast address to Governors, he announced that he was prepared unilaterally to impose a two-year limit on welfare recipients. The promise sounded a lot tougher than it probably was. Administration aides hastened to add that while recalcitrant adults might lose Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits after two years, their children would probably keep theirs. Current law already has similar (if laxly enforced) work requirements, and many states, operating under waivers granted by the Administration, have even stiffer ones.

Still, the speech goaded Republicans in Congress to produce a new welfare bill of their own, since it could hardly help their election prospects--or Dole's--to let the President out-tough them on this issue. Congress has already made some important concessions to his earlier objections. The Medicaid block grants that Clinton called a "poison pill" have been removed, and many softeners sought by the Governors have been added: child-nutrition programs, extra aid for recession-hit states, money for child care, foster care and adoption, and medical benefits for working families.

So although Administration officials remain troubled by such tough features as a projected $60 billion cut in total federal spending for welfare and food stamps over the next six years and limits on aid to noncitizens, Clinton will be in a box if the bill in its present form hits his desk before the August recess. If he vetoes it--which is likely, according to senior adviser George Stephanopoulos--the G.O.P. can argue that he "talks right and negotiates left." If he signs it, he will face the wrath of party liberals at the convention.

But would this bill, in fact, end welfare as we know it? The truth is, nobody knows, because nothing close to reform on this scale has ever been attempted. The current draft gives official sanction to a national laboratory experiment, under way in many states, that tests the degree to which shifting incentives and sanctions can change people's behavior with respect to marriage, childbearing and work. States would receive a block grant for all welfare expenditures, set, in general, at this year's level, with added money promised only in the event of recession or unusual population growth. Federal money would no longer be paid to most recipients who stay on welfare longer than five years or to those who fail to meet work requirements within two years of coming on the rolls. Six years from now, states that fail to place half their welfare families in some sort of work activity would lose federal funds. States also will be free to stop payments to teenage mothers who aren't in school or living with an adult, and unless their legislatures voted otherwise, they would have to eliminate extra payments for children born to mothers already on welfare.