In 1996, Congress and President Clinton agreed to “end welfare as we know it.” Families are now limited to sixty months of lifetime assistance, but even that promise is illusory in some states, as this journalist, who specializes in subsidies, found in Georgia.
When the economy crashed in 2008, millions of Americans lost their jobs. Applications for food stamps soared. So did attendance at emergency food providers—soup kitchens and food pantries—that help the estimated fifty million people, working and nonworking, who can’t afford enough groceries to get through the month.
Unlike past economic downturns, though, the welfare rolls barely budged. Where fifteen years ago 68 percent of poor Americans received cash via Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (as welfare was officially renamed in 1996), today only 27 percent of Americans with incomes low enough to qualify for cash benefits receive them. The resulting welfare gap has left at least four million families with neither jobs nor cash aid.
The size of the welfare gap, however, varies widely from state to state. In states like California and Maine, which have focused on getting their poor citizens into jobs programs, about two-thirds of the eligible still receive welfare.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Georgia, which over the past decade has set itself up as the poster child for the ongoing war on welfare. Even as unemployment has soared to 9 percent and 300,000 Georgia families now live below the poverty line—50 percent more than in 2000—the number receiving cash benefits has all but evaporated: barely 19,000 families receiving TANF remain, all but 3,400 of which were cases involving children only. That’s less than 7 percent, making Georgia one of the toughest places in the nation to get welfare assistance.
NO POINT IN APPLYING
What’s Georgia’s secret? According to government documents, interviews with poor Georgians, and those who work with them, it’s simple: combine an all-Republican state government out to make a name for itself as tough on freeloaders; a state welfare commissioner so zealous about slashing the rolls that workers say she handed out Zero candy bars to emphasize her goal of zero welfare; and federal rules that, regardless of who’s in the White House, give states the leeway to use the 1996 law’s requirement for “work activities” to slam the door in the face of their neediest. This has created a land that welfare forgot, where a collection of private charities struggle to fill the resulting holes.
For the Atlanta Community Food Bank, that means sending out more than three million pounds of canned goods, bread, and other groceries each month to churches in and around Atlanta to help feed the state’s growing number of poor and near poor. The food bank’s staff also helps arrange for free income tax preparation services, and helps the city’s poor apply for food stamps and Medicaid.
One thing the food bank staff and volunteers don’t discuss, though, is welfare. Says food bank advocacy and education director Laura Lester: “We don’t even send anybody in to apply, because there’s just no point.”
It’s a state of affairs that’s left an increasing number of Georgians with nowhere to turn. Teresa, a single mom of a two-year-old living in a domestic-violence shelter, tells of how she broke down and applied for cash benefits after fleeing an abusive relationship—only to be chastised by state welfare officers who asked, “Wouldn’t you rather work?” Eventually, Teresa says, “I was sitting there crying—I just didn’t know what else to do. I said, you’ve gone from letting people sit on their butt and collect money to the very opposite of that.”
Ultimately, it didn’t matter. In the end, she was rejected. The reason? Failing to fill out her paperwork correctly.
One of the common misconceptions about welfare reform is that under the grand bargain that Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton agreed to in 1996, a new regime was put in place: if you won’t work (or at least look for work), you’ll no longer get a government check. In fact, though, welfare reform is less a single law than fifty separate experiments, as Washington provided states with a broad framework under which they are free to set their own rules on time limits, grant levels, and work requirements for those seeking help.
Immediately after the new law was put in place, the welfare rolls plunged by two-thirds—though no one could say for certain whether this was because people were leaving the rolls for jobs or merely sinking deeper into poverty.
In Georgia, the number of Georgians receiving welfare in 2004 leveled off at about 54,000 families—roughly 30 percent of poor Georgia. That year Governor Sonny Perdue, the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, hired a new commissioner to head Georgia’s Department of Human Services. Beverly “B.J.” Walker, a fifty-four-year-old black woman from Chicago, had been an obscure school curriculum consultant best known as the wife of Chicago’s airport commissioner when Republicans chose her to run a pilot project in 1995 to streamline state government services. Soon she rose to run Chicago’s welfare programs as well.
Walker quickly gained a reputation for a get-tough attitude toward welfare recipients that rivaled other states. “What B.J. emphasized was that everybody who can work, should work,” says Joseph Antolin, who was an Illinois state welfare official when Walker arrived on the scene.
What that meant was that those who wouldn’t work—or preferred, say, to go back to school to increase their chances of landing a good job—would be quickly pushed off the rolls. One of her first steps, Antolin recalls, was to shoot down plans to expand GED classes and vocational college courses for the poor. Her philosophy, he says, was “you essentially have to throw them in the pool and let them learn how to swim.”
In Georgia, Walker seemed focused on a single goal: keeping people from getting benefits by any means necessary. New applicants soon found themselves being handed flyers emblazoned with slogans like “TANF is not good enough for any family,” “TANF = work now,” and “We believe welfare is not the best option for your family.” Allison Smith of the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence says the reality was that local welfare offices “were really taking a lot of steps to dissuade people from applying—or once they had applied, they were doing things to make the process really cumbersome and difficult.”
Smith’s colleagues began documenting reports of welfare applicants being discouraged from applying for benefits. Among the entries in their reports: making them go through sixty job searches a week or come to eight orientations. Ordering a woman in her seventh month of pregnancy to take a waitress job that would require her to be on her feet all day. Telling a mother living in a shelter that if she applied for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families her children would be taken away.
“They were trying to make me feel bad that I was trying to get money,” says Teresa of her experience seeking benefits. “They told me that taxpayers are paying for it—I used to pay my taxes, you know?”
Kelda O’Neal, a young grandmother currently caring for an extended family of fifteen in her DeKalb County home, had a similar experience. “They treat you like you’re in a jail facility,” she said. O’Neal received benefits until her husband, a truck driver, applied for disability after suffering a mental breakdown following the murder of his daughter. He was told he would have to first attend sixty to ninety days of a state work program. When he missed one appointment, the state not only rejected him, but ended her $133 in monthly benefits as well.
Missed appointments are a common reason for rejected TANF applications in Georgia. Failure to meet state job search rules—which require thirty days of job search before a first check will be cut—is another. Teresa says she was told that to have her welfare application processed she’d have to file twenty-four job applications per week. “That was really hard, because I couldn’t find any places that were hiring,” she says. She was approved for benefits, but only so long as she then performed twenty-four hours a week of community service, plus twelve hours of job search, which she struggled to do during the limited computer time available at the domestic-violence shelter.
Eventually, she had her benefits cut off. The reason? Failing to properly record the phone numbers of her job contacts.
The Georgia Department of Human Services has long insisted that it does not actively strive to deny benefits. (Walker departed in 2011, but her policies endure.) Indeed, there’s nothing in written state guidelines telling workers to focus on turning applicants away. But bureaucracies do not operate based only on written instructions. There are subtle ways to tell welfare workers what they must do to keep their jobs.
CANDY BARS SEND A MESSAGE
One of these unwritten measures involved Zero candy bars, according to Smith. Senior officials handed out the candy bars to staff as a not-so-subtle reminder that the goal was to have no one receiving welfare, she says. “That was the goal, workers were telling us. The message was ‘zero TANF.’ ” A DHS spokesperson replies that the state “has no information” on the distribution of candy bars by the department.
In any case, the share of approved welfare applications fell by half, from 40 percent to 20 percent, during Walker’s tenure, according to Liz Schott, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington nonprofit research organization that advocates for the poor. Two-thirds of denials were due to either withdrawal of the applications or failure to complete application procedures. That suggests not-so-subtle threats, like telling homeless mothers their children would be taken away, encouraged people to give up.
As for getting Georgia’s poor back to work—the ostensible goal of welfare reform—the numbers are unpromising. Georgia has bragged about its rising “work participation” rate—a key metric set down by Congress to ensure that states followed federal work rules by insisting that at least half of welfare recipients were engaged in “work activities,” which can include anything from actual employment to searching for a job. However, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that far fewer poor Georgians were engaged in “work activities” under Walker. The only reason the percentages had increased was that the number of people getting cash aid had plummeted even faster.
Asked whether having barely one in a hundred of the state’s poor receiving cash is an acceptable result, Ann Carter, the Georgia policy director for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, replies, “I don’t know that that’s a yes-or-no question.” If a dwindling number of people are successfully receiving benefits, she implies, that’s their decision, not the state’s: “Our withdrawal rate dictates whether they want to comply with the program, or they don’t.”
She adds that the state offers job seekers help getting to job interviews, such as a new car battery or transit passes, and now lets them conduct job searches at home—provided that they have a computer with Internet access.
And what of the hundreds of thousands who got welfare and then left? About 70 percent were employed during their first year after leaving the program, but more than 80 percent remained below the federal poverty level.
A 2006 state study found that one thing that did help get people off Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and into work was increased child-care assistance. That program is now threatened with funding cuts.
It shouldn’t be this way, says O’Neal, the young grandmother, as she prepares to file TANF paperwork yet again for her daughter, hopefully this time with a better result. “All of these people coming down here are not people just looking for handouts,” she says. “You got a lot of people who have worked hard pretty much all their lives and have paid taxes. And now they’re in need, and they can’t get what they need. And it’s so sad.”
A version of this chapter appeared in December 2012 on Slate.com and was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.