Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  The big changes, though, involved a push toward a reduction in the number of decision points used in determining benefit levels. Two main types of computations were involved—calculating need and then determining available resources. We simplified the need calculation first. Complexity was slashed away by eliminating the individual need items like clothes, utilities, and rent. When all those items were aggregated into an averaged lump sum, we were left with what was called a flat grant. If you had a family of a given size, then you got a grant of a certain amount. No consideration would be given to the actual needs of the family or any special circumstances. Under the old system you could get a special need payment if an appliance broke down or a car needed for work went kaput.

  Next, I focused on the rules governing the calculation of work expenses. As suggested above, workers were required to look at an array of expenditures associated with work which were then offset from earnings. The resulting net amount was then deducted from need to determine if they were still eligible and how much they would get for the month. In truth, it was a bit more complicated than that when you considered the so-called work incentive provisions built into the rules, but you get the drift.

  It did not take a rocket scientist to figure out that, with the calculation of need highly simplified, cases with working adults remained the most error-prone cases. Calculating net resources is where the remaining complexity was located. Now, being a witty and mischievous guy, my first instinct was to go in and argue we needed to stop all clients from working. While this was before the big “get recipients to work” push that would come around about a decade in the future, even I backed off that dubious idea.

  What I did do involved the following ingenious strategy. I grabbed a sample of working cases; and examined them closely, particularly the volatility of the employment-related expenses over time. Not surprisingly, these cases were an administrative nightmare. Then, I went a step further. I calculated the average expenses across these working cases. Let’s say this exercise came up with expenses totaling 35 percent of earnings, on average. I argued that we should just use that rate for all cases irrespective of the actual numbers…a kind of flat rate for what it costs to earn money. Not only did this become policy, but my haphazard analysis of a quite small sample of cases caught on and somehow even made it into the Congressional Record.

  Of course, more than reducing error rates went into the push for simplified rules and protocols. Caseloads kept growing. It was no longer feasible to micromanage each case. I still remember one longtime bureaucrat summarizing the general feeling as follows. “We simply cannot tend to each case as if it were some precious, exotic plant.” Increasingly, there was a growing consensus that we had to make welfare management way more efficient.

  It is a truism, however, that no (very few at least) new policy directions are unambiguously positive. True, simplified rules enhanced efficiency and lowered errors. They also took away from local workers the kind of discretion that could be abused in the wrong hands…punishing clients they don’t like while rewarding the ones they do. These were obvious positives.

  On the other hand, it is far from clear which approach optimized what is called horizontal equity (treating equals equally), another goal of your welfare guru. A flat grant seems fair and understandable. At the same time, it makes no pretense to meeting the actual needs of families that may look similar on the surface (for example, same family size) but whose circumstances differ dramatically in reality. The cost of living in the city, for example, might easily be higher than country living. Getting to a job in a rural area might involve more work expenses since public transportation would not be available.

  The real problems associated with simplified grant calculations lay elsewhere and would not be realized for several years. Flat grants, it turns out, proved much easier to cut than those based on the actual needs of families. As welfare grew more unpopular and as welfare-motivated migration concerns increased, grant levels began to fall, slowly at first and then ever more quickly. The connection between benefit guarantees and what it took to survive had been severed. Later, I would work on conceptualizing a basic needs study that would systemically address the need issue, but even back then norms and values were superseding science in policymaking. By the time I went to D.C. to work on Clinton’s Reform Bill in 1993, I oft repeated one of my standard quips, “Damn, we better reform AFDC soon or there will be nothing left to reform.” The real value of welfare guarantees had been falling since the early 1970s.

  Even with all this going on, I was quickly getting bored and looking for other mischief to get into. I was like the new puppy in the house. Just where was the next pair of shoes for me to rip apart? I am not sure why I was bored. I sometimes went to QC meetings with other states that the feds sponsored. I was stunned to see that some of these states had several people doing what I handled on my own. Perhaps I should have relaxed. But I suspect I already sensed that most of the counters of my imaginary policy candy store were still bare and needed filling up. I didn’t realize just how challenging the next counter would be.

  Probably without fully appreciating it at the time, I felt a lot of cross currents going on in my bureaucratic environment. The department I worked in was a new so-called “super” agency that housed formerly separate programs. It was hoped that more collaboration might take place if these distinct programs were physically collocated. So, welfare and social services were now supposed to talk to one another, maybe even work together. In the words of that great Roman wit, Cicero, that would be a mirabilis dictu; roughly translated as a marvelous sight to behold. Or, in my words, not bloody likely!

  As raw as I was, I sensed that this institutional marriage was doomed. The cultural gap between officials from the welfare and service sides of the new agency simply was too wide. Many years in the future, my separate work with several colleagues, Karen Bogenschneider, Larry Mead, Jennifer Noyes, and Michael Wiseman would lead me to refine the concept of an “institutional cultural disconnect.” Put in its simplest terms, people functioning in different organizational milieus over time experience increasing difficulty understanding one another though they cannot always see this disconnect on a conscious level.

  Unfortunately, the feds were simultaneously pushing the separation of aids and services at the local or operational level, thereby severing the tie between the giving out of income support benefits and any efforts to habilitate these families so that they might function better. Might it be that the left and right hands (the feds and the states) were working at cross-purposes? Shocking!

  The reasons for this separation at the agency or local level were many. There was a growing sense that welfare was an entitlement and that client sovereignty was to be respected. You know, keep those meddling social workers away. Besides, there was still a chance we would get what was called a Negative Income Tax. If enacted, this would establish an income floor under all Americans, federalize cash assistance, and likely eliminate a whole bunch of touchy-feely service programs purportedly designed to help poor people cope.

  The next counter in my candy store touched indirectly on these cross-currents. Ever since the Kennedy amendments to the Social Security Act in the early 1960s, the feds supported a host of service strategies oriented toward helping welfare clients toward independence. When I started in the department, funding for these services was sum-sufficient. The feds would supplement whatever the states spent under rather loose guidelines, and at quite generous levels. Over time, the feds expanded which groups the states could help. The original focus had been on current welfare families, but the funding spigot gradually expanded to encompass help to former clients and even to persons who might become clients in the future. Hell, by those loose criteria, I desperately needed counseling (probably still do). My lack of command over basic life skills has always put me at risk of a future on public aid or, much more likely, a stint in an assisted living facility. Under the rules at the time, we could argue that my counseling ought to be paid f
or by Washington.

  Again, it is not rocket science to see that states would manipulate the system to maximize the flow of federal dollars. The exploitation race was heating up, alarming federal officials. They first tried tightening up the purposes for which services could be provided, and next sought to push states to document or justify that these resources were being appropriately spent. The Goal-Oriented Social Services (G.O.S.S.) concept briefly emerged. Nothing burns those who hand out money more than not knowing what they are getting for it. This is especially true when they are dubious about the program in the first place. Here is where I come in to at least try to save the day.

  If I knew nothing about welfare when I started, I knew less about human services. And yet, I was asked to put together a system for collecting data from public (State and County) social workers across Wisconsin so that the State might demonstrate the prudent and effective use of federal dollars. If not that, were the dollars at least being spent on the right stuff? This should be fun, I thought. It turned out I was wrong about the fun part. On the other hand, it was the start of another adventure, and the filling up of yet another candy counter!

  Initially, I had to do some quick study cramming to get an inkling of what these social services were all about. What the hell do social workers do? It was in that process that I stumbled upon one of my enduring strengths. It turns out that I was able to develop a decent conceptual framework for collecting and organizing the data describing service activities. The basic challenge associated with this task was to capture activities related to a discrete set of larger tasks that, in turn, were being delivered to achieve overall program purposes, sort of a tiered approach to thinking about the provision of services. The data was to be collected at the case level but then aggregated all the way up to the state level. I worked long and hard with the computer nerds to make it all come together. Well, the framework seemed coherent to me. Then again, I often fall in love with my own ideas. In truth, I almost always love them even when they are not appreciated by mere plebeians.

  That was the easy part. Shirley, my direct supervisor, then told me to go out and train all these social workers around the state in how to record what they were doing on this form I had designed. Now, it had not been that long since I had fallen off the turnip truck but even I sensed a problem. “I don’t know,” I recall suggesting, “some of them may be kind of ticked off at doing all this paperwork.” She brushed off my concerns by instructing me to tell complainers that “I represented the state and that they would simply have to do this.” I was dubious but, as the old poem goes, “Ours is not to question why, ours is but to do and die.” In fact, my demise turned out to be a close-run thing.

  They gave me some help, a new hire by the name of Peter Albert. Here we were, two veteran bureaucrats with about a year’s worth of experience between us. We were heading out to demand that social workers do something that they loathed and thought superfluous at best, utterly ridiculous at the worst. Even more reprehensible, we were asking them to collapse what they considered to be a therapeutic treatment regimen into a set of preformed categories that would be boiled down to numbers to be inserted into a bunch of boxes on a single sheet of paper for each case. They saw their world as infinitely complex and one demanding considerable professional judgment. Now, we waltz in asking them to oversimplify their professional work. Anyone see a problem here? But at least Peter had a masters level degree in Social Work, even if he earned it only two months earlier.

  At the first training session, I saw that it would be far worse than I imagined. Up to this point in my life, I had survived exactly two near-death experiences involving rabid mobs. The first was in my college days at Clark University in Worcester Massachusetts. My very close friend, Carol Simon (who in later life would serve as Dean of the Department of Education at Rutgers University) and I decided to join an anti-Vietnam war rally in front of City Hall. This was early in the anti-war movement, and the first such event in the Worcester area. Probably about a 100 or so fellow protesters carried signs and such in a circle gathered in front of City Hall. We were surrounded by what seemed like thousands of enraged patriots who thought we were Commie pigs and traitors getting our directions straight from Moscow.

  But I sucked it up and held to my convictions at least until our circular movement ground to a halt. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Hell’s Angels devotees wearing their best biker outfits. The hate in their eyes was palpable. Eggs and other debris rained down on us. My remaining conviction drained away as I heard one of them say, “Let’s beat the shit out of the tall one with glasses.” My first reaction was to check to see if I had wet myself. Satisfied that I was okay in that department, I whispered to Carol, “I think we only have seconds left, maybe we should make the most of it.” She might have taken pity on me, but the line started moving again and the prospects of my immediate death receded for the moment though I read the next day that one or two other protestors did later fall into harm’s way.

  My second near-death experience happened during my training for the Peace Corps in the mid-1960s. We spent a brief time in Houston, Texas, not exactly the citadel of enlightenment. One night, we found out that some of our fellow Black trainees had been denied access to a club where you could purchase alcoholic drinks. Apparently, Houston was dry (alcohol prohibited) back then except for “private” establishments where you could conveniently buy a nightly membership for a nominal fee. Well, we huffed, they can’t get away with that; and off we marched to confront this injustice. While noble in intent, this turned out to be a “back-forty” idea. A “back-forty” idea is one so stupid that you ought to brought-out to the back-forty acres of the farm and shot since you were obviously too dense to continue breathing on your own.

  Anyways, we arrive at the club! Some of my white Peace Corps colleagues paid the fee and made it into the establishment. I stood next to the first Black trainee to reach the door. I saw the eyes of the burly gatekeeper narrow menacingly as he said to the young man next to me, “The fee for you is twenty dollars.” An outrageous sum back then. When the volunteer made a move to pay this transparently fabricated sum, the bouncer snarled, “No, for you it is a million dollars.” The message was clear. No Blacks were getting in that club. This soon led to much shoving and shouting as we were herded out onto the street. A crowd of patrons poured out of the club to confront us. I finally realized where the term redneck comes from—their necks were red with pure vitriol.

  While I desperately tried to remember that Perfect Act of Contrition that might get even a lapsed Catholic like me into heaven, I saw a patrol car cruise down the street. I desperately waived it over thinking that we were saved. “Officer,” I gravely intoned, “there has been a violation of the Civil Rights Act here.” His response is yet burned into my memory. He looked at me as if I had just dropped out of an alien space craft, and said with ill-disguised contempt, “I don’t give a fuck about civil rights,” before rolling up his window and cruising off up the street. Once again, though, I managed to survive an early and tragic demise. Perhaps, though, I would have gotten a statue in front of the Peace Corps building in D.C., a fitting tribute to that martyred trainee stupid enough to get himself killed even before going overseas.

  And yet, nothing in my past prepared me for what I now faced. In that first training session for our new whizz bang concept for reducing social work practice to a one-page form filled with tiny boxes, I looked out over a sea of hate unlike any I had encountered before. Nothing I said seemed to be working—the need for accountability, the possible loss of federal funds, feedback to be used to improve services. None of these compelling and coherent arguments worked. You really can’t please all the people all the time.

  They kept throwing out impossible real-life situations which, while probably rare, did undoubtedly happen. “Okay, Mr. Madison expert, just how would you code the following case on your stupid form?” As my colleague, Peter Albert, and I stumbled for responses that made sense, the tension i
n the room grew. Wishing that I had left the car running to make a quick dash to safety, I felt we had precious little time left. The real problem was, as I saw it, that all their hatred was directed at me. I had made the rookie mistake of appearing to be in charge.

  I then knew what had to be done. “Okay,” I said with conviction, “when my colleague Peter here brought this scheme to me, I pointed out all these problems. But he insisted on going ahead with this anyways.” Immediately, all the hateful stares turned away from me and toward him. There is a valuable lesson here for all would-be policy wonks: “When the going gets tough…the spineless blame the other guy.” Yes, I really did say all that but then quickly tried to turn it into a weak joke before they lunged from their chairs to rip out his throat.

  Well, we did survive the tour and got better at it as we went. I never did use Shirley’s fallback line about “we are the state, so shut up and do it!” Surprisingly, the data eventually poured in, and we dutifully filled out the required federal reports. There was no stomach for a second run, so I concocted some brilliant way of updating the information for future reports. No one complained even though I had some sleepless nights thinking about the federal data police sweeping in to take me off to some penitentiary for submitting reports so transparently stupid that they could not pass the most primitive smell test.

  In the end, sum-sufficient funding was doomed…no one could have saved it. A sum-certain formula was adopted which is also known as a block grant. In effect, the feds were saying forget about Goal-Oriented Social Service schemes and accountability-driven approaches to helping families. Here is a lump sum of money, have fun. While this flexibility seemed good in the moment, there is always a price to pay. The catch was that the given sum would never be increased. It simply would decline in value over time even as need increased. This is just like the flat grants for welfare guarantees. Both are easy to cut (in real or nominal terms) when the amounts are not tied to anything related to reality.