Speaker Paul Ryan listens during a news conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters on May 24 in Washington, D.C. | Getty New House Republican 'anti-poverty plan' repackages GOP proposals Paul Ryan says different approach must be tried on systemic problems.

Speaker Paul Ryan and House Republicans rolled out a new plan on Tuesday to fight poverty and help Americans move up the economic ladder, yet much of this latest initiative is repackaged GOP proposals likely to win only limited support from Democrats.

The GOP proposal, however, is sweeping in scope and reflects Ryan’s own ambitions to tackle the issue — and it breaks some new ground in the process. For instance, Republicans suggest reforming how services are provided to children in households under the Supplemental Security Income program, which helps the aged, blind and disabled with little income. They also call for changes to the wildly popular Pell Grant program, which provides financial aid to college students.


Ryan and other House Republicans traveled to a drug rehab facility in Southeast Washington, D.C., to release a 35-page report from the GOP “Task Force on Poverty, Opportunity, and Upward Mobility.” Ryan and GOP leaders created six task forces early this year, and their recommendations will be publicly unveiled during the next three weeks. Ryan hopes these task-force reports will give Republican candidates and incumbents a platform to run on this fall even if GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump does not perform well at the top of the ticket.

“We think the way to fight poverty is to fight its symptoms,” Ryan said during a news conference at which the GOP plan was formally released. “We need to get to the root causes of poverty to fight the cycle of poverty.”

The Wisconsin lawmaker also reiterated his opposition to increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour, which is being pushed by Democrats.

The House Republican report includes a number of popular-sounding proposals and is clearly molded by Ryan’s own oft-stated desire to help poorer Americans build brighter economic futures.

Much of it is focused on reforming federal welfare programs. The GOP recommendations include: expanded work requirements for those receiving federal welfare, food or housing assistance; more “flexibility” for state and local governments to improve programs, although what that means isn’t always fully defined; consolidation of dozens of existing federal programs into fewer, better run efforts; improved accountability for federal programs while “rewarding” those that show the best results; more effectively target those Americans in greatest need of help; and reducing waste and duplication, a mantra for politicians in both parties every election year.

House Republicans call for the use of more “public-private partnerships” to fight poverty, better technology, and vastly improved metrics in measuring the effectiveness of federal programs, as well as more oversight by Congress into the hundreds of billions of dollars funneled to low-income Americans annually. “Altogether … total federal and state spending on programs for low-income people currently equals about $1 trillion per year,” the GOP report states.

“No amount of government intervention can replace the great drivers of American life: our families, friends, neighbors, churches, and charities,” the report says. “And Americans do not need more one-size-fits-all, top-down government programs that limit their ability to get ahead. Instead, they need opportunities to help them escape poverty and earn success. The federal government needs to build public-private partnerships to bring out the best of what each sector has to offer.”

The GOP plan would require states to ensure that those receiving help under the biggest federal welfare programs — such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — find work as soon as possible. States would be allowed to experiment with their unemployment insurance programs to help move recipients back into jobs faster. Reforms would be implemented to the earned income tax credit and other programs to help reduce tens of billions in “improper payments” annually.

Some of the language in the GOP report would likely win support from progressive groups, if they looked past the Republican policy recommendations. For instance, in a section on “Supporting At-risk Youth,” the report states: “Helping children reject a life of crime and violence requires more than a detention facility; helping children who are in foster care, who are homeless, or who come from disadvantaged backgrounds succeed requires more than a government program; these efforts require collaboration among parents, teachers, and community members to prevent criminal behavior and help support children who are vulnerable to or who have engaged in illegal activity, and it requires giving hope to all those children tempted to give in to despair.”

Yet House Republicans are also using their new anti-poverty plan to push proposals they know will get little — if any — support from Democrats and the Obama administration, or presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton if she wins the White House.

Republicans are calling for more “school choice” to open up the education system to competition, and they want less of a federal role overall in deciding what the nation’s children are taught. Federal college aid programs should be dramatically overhauled, and colleges and universities should face less red tape from the government.

“Congress should rein in the ability of the Secretary of Education to meddle with education and workforce development decisions best made at the state and local levels,” the reports asserts. “State and local leaders, rather than bureaucrats in Washington, are best equipped to determine how to meet the needs of their students. Limiting the ability of federal bureaucrats to intervene in state affairs will allow these leaders to spend less time meeting the demands of Washington and more time meeting the needs of their students.”

House Republicans also want to repeal the Labor Department’s controversial “fiduciary rule,” which covers financial advisers who provide retirement plan services. President Barack Obama has already warned he would veto any measure that included such a provision. And some of the federal regulations promulgated under the Dodd-Frank bank reform law are also targeted, as Republicans argue that these measures affect the ability of banks to offer services to the poor.

The Achilles’ heel for Ryan’s plan is his party’s record of underfunding some of the same job training and child development priorities he needs to meet his goals.

Adding work requirements to benefit programs for the poor is politically popular with conservatives, no doubt. But to be effective, past experience indicates it requires more public investment upfront to train and place low-income individuals in jobs.

Yet even after the budget deal last fall, the Employment and Training Administration in the Labor Department was left with fewer real dollars — adjusted for inflation — than it had in 2006 under former President George W. Bush and a Republican Congress. In the case of early child development, Head Start has enjoyed real growth in recent years with bipartisan support. But taken altogether, current discretionary spending for the Administration for Children and Families is less in real dollars than what ACF received in fiscal 2010, before the GOP captured the House.

Speaking on background, a House leadership aide said the proposals Tuesday were not designed to address “funding per se” but were intended to take a “budget neutral” approach — meaning future savings could be plowed back into training or child care programs to assist low income households meet the work requirements, for example.

The goal, he said, is to encourage new problem-solving approaches, including private capital akin to the “pay for success” models begun in Great Britain and of bipartisan interest in the U.S. Many specifics were necessarily left out in deference to legislative committees. And one ticklish issue will be how much waiver authority Congress will allow to individual states to customize federal benefits so that low-income families are not penalized unduly as they find work and their incomes increase.

Background documents accompanying the GOP plan suggest that employers can fill the gap with on-the-job training.

“The best type of skills training happens on the job,” reads one paper. “When employers provide, support, and direct training, workers are learning the exact skills they need for the job.” Citing a 2013 study, the same paper argues that “employers provide more than $160 billion—or more than $1000 per employee—in job training and educational development to help workers advance and earn higher wages.”

But no breakdown is provided on how much of this private investment is targeted to the very poor. And the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based nonprofit with expertise on anti-poverty programs, released its own paper Monday reviewing some 13 past studies of the long-term effectiveness of work requirements imposed under welfare reform.

“Work requirements encouraged recipients to enter the labor market sooner than they would have without them,” CBPP said. “However, this increased employment was often short-lived. Stable employment … was the exception, not the norm.”

“Even when work requirements led to a rise in stable employment, the increases were quite small. In Portland [Ore.], the site of the largest impact, stable employment rose only from 31.2 to 38.6 percent,” CBBP found.

“Two descriptive studies that examine the employment trajectories of recipients who left the welfare rolls arrive at similar conclusions. Researchers studying the employment and earnings trajectories in the late 1990s of parents who left welfare in Wisconsin found that only 19.2 percent were stably employed over a six-year period. In Maryland, researchers examining the employment and earnings paths of recipients who left [the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program] from December 2001 through March 2009 found that only 21.6 percent of leavers were stably employed over a five-year period.“

