Conservative Approaches Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

The U.S. welfare state and its relation to domestic labor markets changed dramatically at the close of the 20th century. A new group of conservatives shifted the terms of welfare debate away from the logic of need and the logic of entitlement, promoted by Democratic politicians and the social movements of the 1950s and 1960s, to install a new social policy agenda that highlighted the obligations of citizenship. In 1996, after 20 years of political campaigning and policy advocacy, neoconservatives, supported by new conservative think tanks, succeeded in replacing the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program (AFDC), first enacted in 1935, with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program (TANF).

By crafting a synthetic reform program that would both buttress conservative social norms and limit access to public assistance that mitigated the pressures of labor market competition, the neoconservatives succeeded in mobilizing a powerful coalition of social conservatives and free-market proponents discontented with the welfare state expansions that had been enacted as part of the War on Poverty. In contrast to the Nixon administration, which had failed to pass a major welfare reform initiative because its Family Assistance Plan divided these two political factions, by uniting them behind a single reform agenda, neo-conservatives were able to pass the Family Support Act in 1988 and then the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996.

Neoconservative authors dubbed the first publication laying out their collective reform program the New Consensus, suggesting that by 1987 the nation was ready to reach a new agreement on social policy to replace the previous consensus institutionalized in the New Deal programs of the 1930s. The neoconservatives’ new consensus articulated an alternative vision of citizenship from that underlying the New Deal and the subsequent finding by the Supreme Court that the Social Security Act of 1935 had entitled poor, single mothers to public assistance. In contrast to the previous logic of citizenship, which considered entitlement to assistance necessary to protect individual freedom, the neoconservatives called on the state to use public programs to reinforce work and domestic norms that they reformulated as obligations of citizenship.

According to the “New Consensus,” social programs should discipline poor family members receiving public assistance to prepare them for incorporation within the polity. Poor single mothers should be required to assist government agencies to identify the biological fathers of their children, and fathers who do not pay child support should be subject to enforcement measures. To be eligible for assistance, poor parents should be required to attend school or to participate in work or work-preparation activities. Anticipating liberal objections to extending government regulation into areas of life that are protected from state intervention if citizens are not poor, neo-conservatives noted that once poor parents mastered the skills now considered prerequisite for citizenship, they, like other citizens, would be free to pursue their desires through the market. Neoconservatives also suggested that as the new paternalist poverty programs succeeded in preparing the poor for market entry and citizenship, the number of parents claiming public assistance would decline and the state would transfer fewer resources from taxpayers to poor families.

However, regulating family life and work activities in ways that satisfied both free-market proponents and social conservatives proved problematic. Unlike the Nixon administration’s Family Assistance Program, which promised to eliminate the financial incentive for family dissolution by extending benefits to poor families with working fathers, the “New Consensus” proposed eliminating the incentive to remain a single parent by requiring that poor single parents work to receive benefits. But this new policy direction conflicted with social conservatives’ aspirations of returning to a family model in which the mother stayed at home to care for the family. The conflict between the demands of capitalist labor markets for low-wage service workers and the caregiving needs of the traditional family posed a problem for the writers of the “New Consensus” that they were unable to resolve, except by prioritizing the needs of the market over those of the family. Unlike earlier Christian defenders of the family who had lobbied for a family wage at the beginning of the 20th century, neoconservative welfare reformers asserted that two wage earners working at the minimum wage were needed to keep working-class families above the poverty line. Because this solution and reliance on paid child care was unsatisfactory to some conservatives, the authors of the “New Consensus” remained silent on how the new “citizen-mothers” were to balance the demands of the market and domestic work, leaving the problem to be addressed by politicians, government bureaucrats, welfare case managers, and poor parents.

In contrast to matters of family care, the neoconservatives were explicit about how to foster economic self-reliance. The policy challenge, according to neo-conservative policy scholar Lawrence Mead, was to build a new institutional network that would replicate, for parents receiving public assistance, the same balance of support and expectation that other Americans face in supporting their families by participating in the labor market. This required conditioning the receipt of assistance on the completion of work or work-preparation activities much like an employment relationship. It also authorized a reorganization of the state and state-citizen interactions to conform to the norms and practices used to govern market interactions. In passing the Family Support Act of 1988, national policymakers created the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) program to engage parents enrolled in AFDC in work or job search activities. As part of the JOBS program, lawmakers suggested that states introduce new employability plans (similar to employment contracts), which specified the conditions parents had to meet to receive public assistance. However, unlike an employment contract that can be voided if an employee fails to meet the stipulated conditions, states could only sanction parents who did not participate; states could not deny financially eligible parents from enrolling in the program until Congress eliminated the entitlement to assistance in 1996. Freed by the PRWORA to develop state-specific TANF programs that no longer included an entitlement to assistance, some states, such as Wisconsin, reorganized their poverty programs to resemble more closely employment practices commonly used in low-wage labor markets, such as making benefit amounts insensitive to family size, issuing benefit payments only after several weeks of participation, and sanctioning parents for each hour of assigned activity they failed to complete at a rate equal to the federal minimum wage rate.

By revoking the entitlement to assistance, Congress authorized state and local agencies to exercise new forms of discretion. Eliminating policies and practices designed to guarantee equal treatment under the previous welfare program and creating new rules to regulate poor mothers’ domestic lives, lawmakers reorganized poverty policy to be more like private charitable giving. Under the new TANF policies, states can require poverty agency staff to make distinctions among parents, based on their perceptions of the applicants’ ability to work and parents’ domestic situations. In some states case managers use these evaluations to determine who can enroll in the program and what types of services and requirements will be incorporated within individualized participation agreements. The 1996 federal poverty legislation also limited the time parents could be eligible for federally subsidized assistance to a total of 5 years and allowed states to impose even shorter time limits.

In addition to recommending that lawmakers restructure government policies and practices to resemble norms and practices exercised by market actors and private charities, neoconservatives also recommended granting new regulatory authority to nongovernmental institutions to supplement the supervisory capacities of the governmental sector. Governments already contracted with for-profit firms and community-based organizations for other types of services, so federal guidelines were in place to regulate contracts with these types of organizations. However, federal and state lawmakers had to pass new legislation to allow state and local governments to contract with faith-based organizations to provide guidance to parents enrolled in the new poverty programs. In addition, some state governments went further in reorganizing the network of local agencies administering the state’s new TANF program, shifting from the standard fee-for-service contract arrangement to new market-like fixed-sum contracts or performance-based contracting.

Pursuing changes that remade agencies administering the new poverty programs more like market actors and private charities changed the boundaries between the state, civil society, the market, and the home. Eliminating the entitlement to assistance freed the state from the previous obligation to provide poor parents with cash assistance. This opened the way for new forms of discretion and for a new understanding of receiving assistance as a contractual act in which poor citizens voluntarily agree to new forms of state regulation in exchange for access to cash assistance and other services. However, because U.S. society currently holds public and private institutions accountable for different kinds of performance, the shift to market contracts with an array of governmental and nongovernmental organizations, in the context of new forms of discretion, also raises questions concerning the level of public representation in policy making, the degree of transparency in program implementation, and appropriate fiscal and employment practices.

Bibliography:

Mead, Lawrence. 2001. Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Free Press.
Novak, Michael et al. 1987. The New Consensus on Family and Welfare. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute.
Starr, Paul. 1988. “The Meaning of Privatization.” Yale Law and Policy Review 6:6-41.
Weaver, R. Kent. 2000. Ending Welfare as We Know It. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

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