With smaller growth than previous decades, the House GOP eyes welfare reform. House GOP seeks welfare reform 2.0

When welfare reform was enacted in August 1996, the economy was growing at an annual rate of 2.8 percent and had added more than 1.67 million new jobs in the first seven months of that year.

Seventeen Augusts later, the landscape is very different even as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) pursues his version of welfare reform 2.0 — this time for food stamps.


Economic growth in the second quarter was only 1.7 percent. The pace of job creation is already lagging behind 1996 by over 300,000 jobs. Most striking, more than half the 11.5 million unemployed today are estimated to be no longer getting jobless benefits — making food stamps a last lifeline for many.

What these numbers most show is that Speaker John Boehner’s Republicans, like President Barack Obama himself, are up against an economy very different from past experience.

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“Boehner vs. Barack” will surely remain the political headline going into the showdown this fall over government funding and the debt. But it’s also Republicans vs. an economy that brings out contradictions in the GOP’s policies — as well as among its younger leaders.

This seems especially the case with the intellectual rivalry that’s grown between Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Cantor.

It’s not to be overstated — the two men are past allies. But each is a potential candidate for House speaker someday and together helped headline a recent gathering of Republican donors aligned with the billionaire Koch brothers so important to the GOP.

Ryan speaks to the Republican desire to cut government and gets credit for making Medicare reform something the rank and file can talk about. At the same time, Cantor has tried to carve out a policy wonk role with his “making life work” agenda. He began 2013 promising to focus on “what lives beyond these fiscal debates” — not incidentally dominated by Ryan.

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Looking back, two House votes last March, both partisan, closely fought and within days of one another, are telling.

The first vote, March 15, came on the SKILLS Act, a top priority for Cantor as part of his promise to rebrand the party and improve job training for low-income workers. The $6.2 billion annual authorization — approved 215-202 — was also a first step toward laying the groundwork for Cantor’s summer food stamp assault, which was already in the works.

Less than a week later, the House adopted Ryan’s 10-year balanced budget plan on March 21. To get votes from defense Republicans, Ryan promised to protect the Pentagon from sequestration and thus prevailed 221-207. Yet that decision set in motion an appropriations process that will demand deep cuts from the same SKILLS package promoted by Cantor.

Republicans went home for August without facing this music: The House Appropriations Committee postponed its markup of the 2014 budget for the Labor and Education departments. But the allocations already adopted by the panel require a 19 percent cut on top of the reductions already ordered under sequestration last March. And for the universe of programs that make up the SKILLS package, this could easily translate into a cut of more than $1 billion.

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Taken together, the March votes capture the conflicting impulses inside the GOP over how committed the party really is to helping the working poor. Months later, the votes echo too in the jockeying between Ryan and Cantor in this summer’s great morality play: food stamps and the farm bill.

To give Cantor his due, he is trying mightily to put some policy behind the vague savings claimed by Ryan in his budget. But food stamps — officially titled the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP — is also Cantor’s chosen canvas on which to paint his vision. The success of the farm bill often seems secondary to this mission.

Indeed, the first farm bill collapsed in June after Cantor insisted on new SNAP work requirements for the mothers of young children — an amendment that helped to drive off Democrats even as 62 Republicans, including Ryan, voted “no” on final passage.

That embarrassment came on the heels of an earlier floor vote in which Cantor surprisingly opposed a bipartisan amendment to save billions from crop insurance subsidies — an amendment Ryan favored.

Cantor bounced back in July behind a strategy of passing the farm bill after jettisoning the nutrition title. He had Ryan’s vote this time even though the revised bill made permanent the very same crop subsidies that Ryan had complained of weeks before. Most important, Cantor got the opportunity to write his own nutrition title, which is to come to the floor in September as a separate bill.

At this stage, the goal is to save as much as $40 billion over 10 years or twice what the initial House Agriculture Committee bill had proposed.

The biggest single change is a proposal to permanently do away with waivers that have allowed millions of able-bodied adults without dependents to get food stamps for more than three months — even if they are working less than 20 hours a week.

States would be permitted to exempt 15 percent of those on the rolls to help ease the impact. But the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities — a progressive nonprofit with a long history of expertise on food stamp policy — estimates that as many as 2 million to 4 million people could lose aid in the short term.

“The individuals in question are among the poorest people in the United States,” said the center in a six-page analysis released Wednesday. “On average, they will receive about $160 a month in SNAP benefits in fiscal 2014 … More than 40 percent are women. One third are over age 40. … About a third have less than a high school degree. Half have a high school diploma or GED, and just one in five have some college education.”

Cantor’s appearance this past Sunday on Fox News captures some of the conflicts here.

“Let’s think about the people out there that actually are out of work because they don’t have the proper skills and training,” he told Chris Wallace, alluding to the SKILLS Act. But minutes later, he seemed to be defending knocking many of the same people off the food stamp rolls.

“It’s an issue of fairness,” Cantor said, “If there are able-bodied people who can work, they ought to do that in order to receive a government benefit. That’s the proposal we’re bringing forward.”

The history behind the SNAP work requirement for able-bodied adults without dependents — so called ABAWDs — goes back to a highly partisan House vote in July 1996 in the midst of welfare reform.

Like much of the debate now, it arose from outside the Agriculture Committee, and the lead sponsors were two Ohio Republicans, former Reps. Bob Ney and John Kasich.

Ney later served time in prison after pleading guilty to criminal charges in the Jack Abramhoff lobbying scandal. Kasich also left Congress and is now governor of Ohio, one of many states that have opted to waive the very work requirement he authored.

Kasich’s remarks in the 1996 debate suggest that his whole premise was that any SNAP beneficiary who could not find employment would be given the option of a workfare slot or job training. “If you cannot find a job, then you do workfare,” the Ohio Republican said then. “Or you can be in job training.”

Yet the law itself never required states to provide this assistance in administering food stamps. The record shows that few governors have taken advantage of the limited SNAP funds available for this purpose. And persons familiar with the new nutrition title say that no specific requirement has yet been added now along these lines.

“Few states operate workfare or training programs for these individuals,” the center said in its report. “Only five states committed to providing a job training or workfare opportunity to all individuals subject to the cutoff in 2012.”

The more common response — as so often with SNAP — is to seek a waiver. In the course of the recession, well over 40 states followed this path.

The number of waivers will soon fall as unemployment drops and fewer states qualify. And economists would argue that striking the provision entirely now sacrifices what has been a useful economic stabilizer in the downturn.

Republican critics answer that too often one waiver seems to lead to another in the case of SNAP.

In the midst of the recession, governors freely took advantage of a so-called categorical eligibility process to expand eligibility for low-income families. SNAP has its own back-up monitor in that the level of monthly aid falls off significantly for anyone over 140 percent of poverty — about $31,000 for a family of four. But the share of households above the stricter gross income standard has doubled since 2008.

A recent draft paper at Harvard — “Explaining Trends in SNAP Enrollment” — offers some perspective. Using mathematical models, it attempts to break down the big explosion in the number of beneficiaries between July 2007 and July 2011, when enrollment jumped by 18.6 million in just four years.

The authors, Professor Jeffrey Liebman and Peter Ganong, a doctoral student, found that about 3.4 million or 18 percent of the increased enrollment could be explained by the waivers and expanded eligibility. But the changed employment conditions and the economy were far greater factors, accounting for close to 69 percent or more of the change.