Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

The pushback was immediate. The central computer nerds do that kind of work. Program staff does not, and certainly they do not need any esoteric computer technology. All such work must go through the nerds located somewhere up on the sixth floor which, in truth, was closer to heaven than the QC unit. It was worse where my wife worked at the time. There was a very simple tabulating tool called WISTAB which could be used to create tables and do simple calculations. Even a moron like me could learn how to use it in twenty minutes or less. But the computer gods refused to let program staff in her department even see the manual. I did give my spouse a contraband copy I had purloined and, once again, waited for the data police to pounce.

  What kind of crap is this, I thought as I reflected on the stance of the technical wizards. The typical drill might go something like this. You send up some simple analytical task. Three weeks later, you get a printout back. You look at it and then say, oh shit. I should have run this a slightly different way. Or maybe the first pass suggests a second pass. Up into technology heaven one more time and another three-week wait. Okay, I probably am exaggerating the wait times involved, but you get my drift.

  It struck me what the problem was. I believe the technology wizards thought that if they let go of complete control, they would run out of work. Maybe they would lose their jobs. I was astounded. Even a technical moron like myself could easily see the future. Computer-related work would continue to expand exponentially. Centralized staff could never keep up with the increasing demand. Unacceptable bottlenecks would ensue along with outraged mobs attacking the citadel of technology looking for their technical output. I was offering them an out from a terrible fate, and likely a horrible demise. Just before I left, I won my battle. We got a terminal, the first in any program unit. It was not long that I would walk into that building and see terminals on every desk. Apparently, once the dam was breeched, the onrushing waters could not be turned back. I would just smile.

  Another counter involved the expansion of the QC methodology into the Food Stamp program. If the system worked for the AFDC program, it should work for this other assistance system. So, officials in the Department of Agriculture (DOA), the federal bureaucracy responsible for Food Stamps, simply borrowed what was being done by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW as it was labelled at the time) for cash welfare assistance. Seemed simple enough! It was not. It seldom is.

  As they launched the new initiative, the responsible feds brought to Washington representatives from as many states as they could lure to the big city. They wanted high-level people. From Wisconsin, they got me instead. You could see the disappointment written on their faces. Perhaps their desire for high-level officials was strategically self-serving. People that high up might not have enough detailed knowledge about reality on the ground. They would not notice problems as I would.

  As I sat there listening to what they were proposing, I was appalled. The Food Stamp program was incredibly complicated. In addition to the usual complications, the process of establishing the household unit was bizarre. You put together groups that shared eating facilities and bought food together irrespective of familial relationships. Then you had need assessments and earnings considerations and what was called a purchase requirement. Based on your net income, you were expected to pay a certain amount for your stamps. It was so complicated that federal rules allowed states to average need and income and purchase requirements over reasonable time periods. That made sense even though the circumstances for a given month might deviate from the average used.

  I assumed that the FS-QC system would be tweaked to accommodate the conceptual and structural differences between AFDC and FS. But such was not the case. The reviewers were expected to go in and use the AFDC monthly accounting period. If need or income or the purchase requirement varied from the average used by the caseworker for the QC review month, the case would be in error. They used the same five-dollar fudge factor as AFDC, and the same error tolerance levels—3 percent for eligibility errors and 5 percent for over and underpayments.

  The longer they talked, the closer my chin got to the floor. Finally, losing my patience, I spoke up, “Look, I pointed out. Your methodology is very flawed. Even well-run programs will have extraordinarily high error rates that have nothing to do with fraud and not that much to do with management deficiencies. When these rates are reported in the press, however, Congress and the public will read fraud, not inconsequential deviations due to a faulty method for assessing error. This will taint the program and cause much unnecessary grief for state program administrators, for clients already under public suspicion and, I might add, for you.” I pleaded, “Get the methodology right before launching what will surely be a disaster.”

  I recall that a few federal officials rushed up to me at the break and praised me for my great insights. Insights! I thought to myself. A retarded chimpanzee should have been able to figure this out. Alas, there were no chimps in the room…retarded or not. Unfortunately, this train simply was too far down the tracks to be stopped. It was launched as planned. The disaster occurred as any reasonable observer would have guessed. There were error rates of 50 and 60 percent and more in the early going, and the press used the words fraud and abuse as was their want. After the fact, one Ag official from the regional office privately confided to me that he was suspicious of any case review in which an error was not found.

  One more humorous memory remains. The man who headed our QC unit was very nice but not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Sometime after the Food Stamp review system was launched, the expected intolerable error rates were found, as expected. The press found this man at home and asked for a statement. Apparently, they woke him from a nap, and he responded to their sharp questions about the bad Wisconsin numbers (they were bad everywhere) without thinking. Now, all he could remember was calling the Dept. of Agriculture a nickel-and-dime operation. He was moaning and groaning the next morning at work, convinced he would be fired as soon as the top managers found his sorry ass. When they did, they congratulated him on calling as it is. They feds running Food Stamps were a nickel-and-dime operation. Why this program was located within the Department of Agriculture and not with the other need-tested income assistance programs raised many questions.

  My days of State service were running out, however. Why did I leave amid such fun? It started with another phone call, this one from Irving Piliavin, a professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin. He was also an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP). He asked if I would come to IRP and help him run a large project that would look closely at discretion in the patterns of decision making by welfare caseworkers. He needed someone with an inside perspective who knew how things worked in state government.

  I had gotten several unsolicited offers of employment in the first half of the 1970s, both from consulting firms and from other states. In fact, in no other comparable period over the rest of my career did I experience such a flattering demand for my services. This offer from Irv was different, however. The others required relocating to other states and my wife giving up her job. When I told one of the consulting firms that my wife’s career was an impediment to a move, they immediately offered her a position without even an interview. That would have been like getting quarterback Aaron Rogers as a throw in for failed QB in a trade package, Tim Tebow. She was the talent in the family.

  This offer to work at the university was not totally out of the blue. Weeks earlier, Irv had approached the state about a research proposal he was developing. The federal source of funds required that a state agency submit the proposal. He made the argument that his research would help the state better manage its welfare programs. I suspect this promise was met with general skepticism by the powers that be. Most of the managers could not conceive that any egghead could tell them anything of use.

  Though the distance between the state bureaucracy and the university is only one mile on the map, it is much further in reality…thus the pervasive skepticis
m on the part of State officials. So, they assigned a low-level schlep like me to work with him. After all, I was expendable. I am sure they hoped that Irv would eventually just go away. In any case, I set about working with him and his graduate student, Tom Macdonald. Together, we turned the proposal into something that could sound useful to the sponsoring federal agency and to State officials.

  Then I forgot about it until the call. The university! Hmmm, that sounds better than working for a living. So, I did what I usually do in making a big decision. I thought about it for four or five seconds and said, “Sure, why not.” Big decisions were always the easiest. In buying our first home, my spouse and I looked at one house on a rainy winter evening when we could not see anything. We returned to our apartment with the real estate agent. My wife and I looked at one another and I casually said, “What the hell, let’s buy it.” We did.

  I continued to work with the state of Wisconsin off and on over the succeeding decades but my full-time employment as a state worker was over. I think back on those days fondly. I worked with some very smart and dedicated people. Public service was respected back then, at least for the most part. And Wisconsin was looked upon as a model for honest, competent government. Good people still work for the state, but our respect for what public workers do is largely gone. Much of the best talent from the earlier days left, it is hard to do good work in a highly political atmosphere. The demise of public service in Wisconsin brings me great sadness.

  In September of 1975, exactly four years after getting the shocking news that I was to be a research analyst-social services, I took that one mile walk down State Street. I was now house broken as a policy wonk. I looked forward to the beginning of a new professional life working in the academy with a bit of anticipation and a whole lot of trepidation.

  We now fast forward to 1977. The error project I managed for Irv Piliavin was coming to an end, at least the data collection phase was. I felt a little bad for Irv. He really wanted to research the use and abuse of discretion in the welfare system. To do so, we collected data on everything that moved from frontline workers all the way through the bureaucracy to the top people in Madison. We reviewed case files and created measures tapping a host of organizational factors and on and on. At the beginning of the project I used all that I had learned about project planning and management to lay out a plan. I taped pages of circles and diamonds and squares lengthwise across two walls of my office. This effort was a management nightmare, but we pulled it off.

  Unfortunately, the primary dependent measure was flawed. I and others had been successful in rooting out most ways that workers could exercise discretion. This is exactly what I had spent a good deal of my tenure in the state bureaucracy doing. It would have been a great study a decade earlier. Still, I learned a lot about running a large project. I will touch on Irv’s project later in the book so will skip over it here.

  The late 1970s is also the period when I decided to go for my doctorate in social welfare at UW. It was clear to me by now that staying in the academy was far preferable to working for a living. Of course, it would be easier to stay if I had the proper union card, a Ph.D. Moreover, a terminal degree in social welfare sounded perfect since no one knew what that meant. Hell, I could pass myself as an expert in so many areas. Given my usual short attention span, it took me over a decade to get the darn thing, and then only by ginning up some scam conceived by then IRP director Sheldon Danziger to kick me out of the program with a degree. I must have become an embarrassment to them. Sadly, I am one of those pathetic creatures that would never allow my schooling to interfere with my lifelong education. In any case, let us not dally too long here. Rather, let us return to my policy candy store so that we can begin our journey through the welfare wars.

  CHAPTER 3

  WELFARE WARS: STORM CLOUDS RISING

  If you cannot make it good, at least make it look good.

  —Bill Gates

  What I call the “welfare wars,” at least as I experienced them, started in 1977 with a call from Mary Ann Cook, a relatively high-ranking Wisconsin state official. Mary Ann knew me socially through my wife, who also worked for the state. For some unfathomable reason, she thought I would be a good starting place for an important project she had been handed. The Wisconsin Legislature had authorized the creation of a Welfare Study Committee to examine state public assistance programs, and to recommend any reforms deemed appropriate. The committee would have two years to do its work.

  Mary Ann had two requests. First, would I consider shepherding the staff that would be assigned to the committee? Second, would I recommend an IRP affiliate who might serve as committee chair? To the first I said with conviction and emphasis…no can do! For once in my life, I was determined to be a serious student as I started out for my doctorate. To the second request I suggested Irv Garfinkel, current IRP director; or Bob Haveman, the former director. Either would have been wonderful for the role, and I gave my assessment of their comparative strengths. For whatever reason, they tapped Bob for the honor; perhaps because he evinced an avuncular air of wise authority. Their request for his services did not exactly make his day. Public service is not prized in the academy, even if done at the federal level. Doing a favor for state government would garner him little credit among his academic peers. He worried this would be a no-win assignment for him. I had to work on Bob a bit before he signed on. I was already a schmoozer.

  It is not surprising that the state would turn its attention to welfare at this point. Caseloads had begun to rise in the 1960s, which caused local officials to look on with increasing alarm. Reform fever, however, was held at bay by the promise of federal action. In the early years of the 1970s, the Nixon administration sponsored the Family Assistance Plan (FAP); which purportedly would solve all the state’s problems. During my state employment days, I vividly recall Wilbur Schmidt, then secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services (HFS), assert to a large audience of state and local officials that federal relief was on the way. It was a guarantee coming directly from Wilbur Cohen, a long-time power on the Washington scene who had graduated from UW sometime in the 1930s. Apparently, this fact enhanced the credibility of his prognostication. It was treated as inside information that Wilbur was sharing with a few hundred intimate friends.

  Funny thing, Wilbur turned out to be dead wrong. FAP, a kind of negative income tax or guaranteed income floor, came close but didn’t quite make it. When President Carter assumed office, he launched another major reform initiative, the Program for Better Jobs and Income (PBJI). But this time around, there was more skepticism at the local level about any possible federal rescue. The feeling emerged that the state should probably save itself rather than wait any longer for outside help. Thus, the study committee was authorized; the one that I was absolutely, positively, without question, not going to get sucked into no matter how sumptuous those delights might look in my candy store.

  You guessed it. I folded like a cheap suit. If I had been born in the Philippines, my nickname surely would have been the manila folder. In my defense, I did hold out a bit, a very little bit. It took some more pleading from Mary Ann and three calls from Terry Wilkom, the deputy secretary of the department. Terry had been the majority leader in the Wisconsin State Assembly before moving to a top administrative position in the state bureaucracy. He had also been my spouse’s supervisor in state government for a while, so I knew him socially as well. If Terry was anything, he was persuasive. Softened by a mixture of flattery and appeals to doing the public good, my dedication to the scholarly life wilted, and I signed on the dotted line. It was sign of things to come in my struggle for a professional identity. Good thing, it was a better learning environment than most of the classes I would try to squeeze in at the same time.

  The committee was small. In addition to Bob, the other members of note were a close aide to the governor, a rising member of the State Assembly (Tom Loftus), and a welfare advocate. I was able to slip out of the top staff job but d
id supervise the work of two Economics research assistants at the U.W. The state-located staff included Susan McGovern, the daughter of George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate. With the structure in place, the fun began.

  As the work got underway, there were no clear instructions about how to proceed. Peter Tropman was a high-ranking official in the department. Trained as a social worker, he represented a portion of Milwaukee in the legislature before moving into the executive branch of government, and thus had formed strong opinions about what was wrong with welfare. As I recall, he pushed for much stronger work requirements, perhaps anticipating themes that would emerge with considerable strength in a few years. He did not seem to do so with great conviction, however. The work theme was only gaining strength, and he might have held concerns that he was straying a bit from his Democratic roots. There were occasional murmurs from conservatives about the rising dependency crisis, and the need to get tough on the so-called welfare crisis; but their grumblings had not yet coalesced into a coherent or organized attack. Storm clouds were rising but were not yet ominous.

  In general, it appeared we would be given a relatively free hand. I can recall checking with Mary Ann on more than one occasion to confirm that we really were free to consider radical changes. She kept giving me a green light, repeatedly noting that she went after me so hard because I was considered an idea man. I guess that meant I was to come up with some ideas. This was clearly a “beware of what you ask for” moment. Warning to all current and future managers: never let the lunatics take over the asylum.

  Don Percy was the secretary of the department at the time. He had been a vice president in the U.W. system, a position he achieved without a doctorate…an almost inconceivable achievement in any classist university system. Having gone as far as he could in that system, his move to an executive agency made sense.