welfare and the economy

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The data collected by The Times is the most recent available for every state and includes some similar programs financed solely by states, to give the broadest picture of cash aid. In a year when 1.1 million jobs disappeared, 18 states cut the rolls, 20 states expanded them, and caseloads in 12 states remained essentially flat, fluctuating less than 3 percent. (In addition, caseloads in the District of Columbia rose by nearly 5 percent.)

The rolls rose 7 percent in the West, stayed flat in the South, and fell in the Northeast by 4 percent and Midwest by 5 percent.

Seven states increased their rolls by double digits. Five states, including Texas and Michigan, made double-digit reductions. Of the 10 states with the highest child poverty rates, eight kept caseloads level or further reduced the rolls.

“This is evidence of a strikingly unresponsive system,” said Mark H. Greenberg, co-director of a poverty institute at the Georgetown University law school. Some administrators disagree.

“We’re still putting people to work,” said Larry Temple, who runs the job placement program for welfare recipients in Texas, where the rolls dropped 15 percent. “A lot of the occupations that historically we’ve been able to put the welfare people in are still hiring. Home health is a big one.”

Though some welfare recipients continue to find jobs, nationally their prospects have worsened. Joblessness among women ages 20 to 24 without a high school degree rose to 23.9 percent last year, from 17.9 percent the year before, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Some analysts offer a different reason for the Texas caseload declines: a policy that quickly halts all cash aid to recipients who fail to attend work programs.

“We’re really just pushing families off the program,” said Celia Hagert of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, a research and advocacy group in Austin, Tex.

Some officials predict the rolls will yet rise. “There’s typically a one- to two-year lag between an economic downturn and an uptick in the welfare rolls,” said David Hansell, who oversees the program in New York State, where the rolls fell 4 percent.

Indeed, as the recession has worsened in recent months, some states’ rolls have just started to grow. Georgia’s caseload fell until July 2008, but has since risen 5 percent. Still, as of October the national caseloads remained down 70 percent from their peak in the early 1990s under the predecessor program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

Nationally, caseloads fell every year from 1994 to 2007, to about 4.1 million people, a level last seen in 1964. The federal total for 2008 has not been published, but the Times analysis of state data suggests they remained essentially flat.

Some recent caseload reduction has been driven by a 2006 law that required states to place more recipients in work programs, which can be costly and difficult to run. It threatened states with stiff fines but eased the targets for states that simply cut the rolls.

“Some states decided they had to get tougher,” said Sharon Parrott of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington research and advocacy group.

Rhode Island was among them. Previously, the state had reduced but not eliminated grants to families in which an adult had hit a 60-month limit. Last year, it closed those cases, removing 2,200 children from the rolls.

Under the new federal accounting rules, that made it easier to meet statistical goals and protected the state from fines.

Michigan also imposed new restrictions, forcing applicants to spend a month in a job-search program before collecting benefits. Critics say the up-front requirement poses obstacles to the neediest applicants, like those with physical or mental illnesses.

“I think that’s a legitimate complaint,” said Ismael Ahmed, director of the Michigan Department of Human Services, though he blamed the federal rules. The program “was drawn for an economy that is not the economy most states are in.”

While food stamps usually grow faster than cash aid during recessions, the current contrast is stark. Many officials see cash aid in a negative light, as a form of dependency, while encouraging the use of food stamps and calling them nutritional support.

“Food assistance is not considered welfare,” said Donalda Carlson, a Rhode Island welfare administrator.

Nationally, the temporary assistance program gives states $16.8 billion a year — the same amount they received in the early 1990s, when caseloads were more than three times as high as they are now. Mr. Haskins, the program’s architect, said that obliged them to ensure the needy could return to the rolls. “States have plenty of money,” he said.

But most states have shifted the money into other programs — including child care and child welfare — and say they cannot shift it back without causing other problems.

Oregon expanded its cash caseload 19 percent last year, so far without major backlash. “That’s the purpose of the program — to be there for that need,” said Vic Todd, a senior state official. But California officials expressed ambivalence about a 6 percent rise in the cash welfare rolls in that state when it is facing a $40 billion deficit. “There’s some fine tuning of the program that needs to occur, to incentivize work,” said John Wagner, the state director of social services.

Among those sanguine about current caseload trends is Robert Rector, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington who is influential with conservative policy makers. He said the program had “reduced poverty beyond anyone’s expectations” and efforts to dilute its rigor would only harm the poor.

“We need to continue with the principle that you give assistance willingly, but you require the individual to prepare for self-sufficiency,” he said.