The problem with welfare caseworkers

This week was the 20th anniversary of welfare reform. And Republicans — led by House Speaker Paul Ryan — have argued for a broader remaking of the nation's safety net along similar lines.

There are a lot of moving parts to this debate. But one interesting corner is what it's like for less fortunate Americans to interact with the safety net on a day-to-day level. Put simply: It can often be a byzantine and dehumanizing experience.

In some poignant pieces at Family Studies, David and Amber Lapp spoke with several financially struggling Americans in Ohio, who all had similar stories to tell: Being randomly kicked off aid without warning; navigating a hodgepodge of different programs from Head Start to food stamps to Medicaid; being thwarted by bureaucracies that are overly complex and under-resourced; not even knowing that programs they need exist; and just generally having no idea what's going on with a system ostensibly designed to help them.

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One possible solution the Lapps suggest is an idea Paul Ryan pitched in 2014: Create an army of caseworkers who serve as liaisons between households receiving benefits and the programs that provide those benefits. Not only would this create a "one-stop shop" for people to navigate the safety net, it would give beneficiaries a personal touch: A human being they would get to know and trust, and who could get to know them. "[T]o make welfare better," David Lapp writes, "we should make it small and personal — more like a visit to your personal financial planner, and less like the DMV."

It's a similar idea to other suggestions by conservative thinkers for a more personalized safety net. Ohio's own governor, John Kasich, is exploring a pilot program that does this for low-income young people and wants to expand it. It's not hard to see why both Lapp and many of the people he interviewed were very enthusiastic about the idea.

There is, however, a giant problem. Amber Lapp's piece acknowledges it, but it's worth drilling down on just why it's such a massive hurdle: The idea is enormously expensive.

Over at Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer ran the numbers at the time: Just taking food stamps as an example, providing everyone on the program with a caseworker with a reasonable load of clients would cost something in the range of $30 billion annually — a 40 percent increase on the food stamp budget for 2015.

You can see why this would be a problem for a Republican-held Congress that holds as an article of faith that safety net spending must be cut.

In fact, Ryan and the GOP spent 2016 pushing a reduction in the food stamp budget. That they would abandon this commitment simply because they were bowled over by the idea of personalized caseworkers seems unlikely. Indeed, Ryan's larger proposal — in which the caseworker idea was embedded — was to consolidate spending on a whole raft of safety net programs into one lump-sum "opportunity grant" that would be sent to the states to experiment with. The caseworker model was one example of experiments states could try.

The implication was unspoken but clear: The money for these caseworkers would come out of what's currently spent on benefits. So aid recipients would get more personalized human-to-human help, but they'd also get way less help — and from an American safety net that's already quite skimpy.

The caseworker idea exposes other contradictions in conservative thinking as well. The confusing miasma of rules and rigid unthinking formulas that Ryan and the Lapps and others decry is often the direct result of making people jump through hoops to qualify for aid: Is your income low enough to qualify? What assets or payments count as that income? Do you still qualify if you marry? Etc. Those hoops were put there because of the widespread impulse to separate the "deserving" poor from the "undeserving" poor — the persnickety need to make sure everyone we deign to help is the hardest of hard cases, and to kick them off the moment they're no longer at rock bottom.

Indeed, the Lapps' own reporting shows how means-testing fractures communities: Poorer people are stigmatized by their neighbors for receiving benefits, because those neighbors struggle themselves but make just enough to not receive the same kind of assistance.

An alternative approach would be to remove means-testing and other qualifications from government aid programs. That would certainly increase spending, but it would also improve social solidarity and empathy by making the programs fairer in the eyes of many Americans.

One final point: Much of the enthusiasm around the caseworker idea is rather abstract. Mencimer also reported that similar ideas have actually been tried with very mixed results. And that's because being a caseworker is hard. It requires lots of knowledge and experience and patience dealing with people who are often vulnerable, stressed, confused, and already stretched to the limit emotionally. Much of the time, the caseworkers in these programs were reduced to mechanically relying on the very formulas the human touch is meant to avoid. This doesn't mean the caseworker idea is impossible, just that it would be exceedingly tough to do properly. And attracting truly qualified caseworkers would probably send costs for the program even higher than Mencimer estimates.

Really, Ryan of all people should appreciate this point: He's a fan of "subsidiarity" — the principle that the power to deal with problems ought to be given to those closest to the problems and best positioned to understand them. And no one is better positioned to understand the challenges and needs of the poor than the poor themselves.

Which, ironically, leads to the very un-conservative conclusion that we should just give people more money with fewer strings attached.