Donovan Slack

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Speaker Paul Ryan on Tuesday started rolling out policy prescriptions that he says are part of a positive Republican vision that will show Americans what the party is for, rather than focusing on what it’s against.

At an event at a Washington charity, he unveiled recommendations drawn up by a task force of House Republicans to combat poverty.

"This is how you create opportunity, this is how you help people move onward and upward," Ryan said.

On Thursday, he will release recommendations for national security, and in the coming weeks, ideas to tackle other subject areas in the “Better GOP” plan will follow, including taxes, regulations, and health care.

Ryan is trying to unite the highly divided Republican Party around shared policies amid the cacophony of the presidential campaign. It’s unclear if the party’s presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, is ready to embrace the platform. Ryan said he has had "exhaustive" conversations with Trump and he is confident the real estate developer likely will embrace the policies. At the same time, Ryan was inundated with questions about Trump's suggestions that a judge is biased against him because of his Mexican heritage.

Ryan disavowed Trump's remarks as the "textbook definition of a racist comment" but said he still supports Trump because he is Republicans' best hope for getting their agenda enacted.

"At the end of the day, this is about ideas, this is about moving our agenda forward," Ryan said before pivoting back to discussion of the agenda.

The plan released Tuesday includes somewhat broad recommendations, rather than specific legislation, including:

• Instituting increased work requirements for welfare recipients and for recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, who are able to work but aren't;

• Consolidating or streamlining 18 federal food-assistance programs and myriad housing programs, such as the Rural Housing Service rental assistance program and HUD’s Housing Choice voucher program. The Government Accountability Office has identified making the myriad programs efficient as a challenge.

• Streamlining federal funding for at-risk youths and for 45 separate early childhood programs and giving states and local governments more flexibility to address their residents’ needs;

• Rolling back federal requirements and regulations for technical education programs and for colleges and universities, which one study commissioned by Vanderbilt University last year estimated cost schools $27 billion annually. The plan also recommends consolidating the nine federal-aid programs for higher education into three.

• Making it easier for businesses to team up and offer joint 401k retirement savings plans.

Overall, federal funding of social programs should be more focused on results, the task force concluded, and measuring them by whether they are making a difference in people’s lives — are they getting people back to work, for instance, or reducing poverty.

“Common sense says the federal government should fund only programs that have a track record of success,” the report says. “Yet the federal government frequently pays for well-intentioned programs and services that have no evidence of effectiveness — and in many cases, even when the program is proven not to work at all.”

The report cites statistics that show the poverty rate is roughly 15%, the same as it was in 1965, before many of the programs started. Those numbers have been criticized before as misleading. The White House issued a report in 2012 suggesting it went from 26% in 1967 to 16% in 2012.

In any case, the GOP task force says federal money should be spent on programs that “actually achieve results” and not those just “intended to help.” And it says more data should be shared between agencies to help make those evaluations, and also to reduce improper payments from social programs, the report says.

The federal government in fiscal 2015 wrongly paid out $10 billion for unemployment benefits, food stamps, rental assistance and school breakfast and lunch programs. Those payments accounted for between 4% and 23% of all payments made under those programs, according to federal figures.

“With such high error rates in many of our nation’s safety net programs, it is essential that agencies use all available tools to reduce improper payments and ensure benefits are going directly to those most in need,” the report concludes.

Democrats swiftly assailed the report with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., calling it a "half-hearted rebrand of their special interest priorities" that "will do nothing to distract from the radicalism of Republicans’ standard-bearer or House Republicans’ longstanding disdain for people in poverty.”

"Sadly, beneath the sugary rhetoric of the poverty proposal unveiled today, Republicans are advancing the same callous, trickle down policies they’ve been pushing for years," she said.

At the White House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest had said Monday that he was “bemused by this process.”

“He’s the Speaker of the House. He doesn’t just have to make policy proposals, he runs the House of Representatives,” Earnest said. “Put it in a bill. Put it on the floor. Run it through a committee. Have a debate. That’s the whole reason you presumably ran for the job in the first place. Let’s have that debate.”

Ryan has said the agenda is meant to be a starting point for legislation under a Republican president in 2017.

Paul Ryan rips Trump comments as 'textbook definition of racist'