Team de Blasio is quietly gutting welfare reform
Rudy Giuliani was right: There’s a relationship between crime and welfare. When people work, they’re less likely to commit crime. Yet, as Joe Scarborough recently observed on MSNBC, what was universally known as the “New York miracle” appears to be steadily eroding.
We’re aware of the increasing murder rates, and we see rising homelessness. But changes in welfare policy come into view more slowly.
For 20 years, the Human Resources Administration, NYC’s behemoth welfare agency, oversaw the largest drop in welfare dependency in the United States: from 1.1 million New Yorkers on welfare in 1993, when Mayor Dinkins left office, down to 380,000, when Mayor de Blasio, Dinkins’ intellectual heir, assumed office in 2014.
How was this remarkable transformation achieved? By little more than requiring the able-bodied to seek work and accept reasonable job opportunities. Before Giuliani became mayor, New York City’s welfare rolls swelled as welfare recipients were placed in training programs, as well as in GED and CUNY-college classes.
In those bad old days, the Human Resource Administration typically instructed welfare recipients that they needed more training to be hired — and that job offers that were secured were not good enough. Back then, many on the dole would undertake four training programs or more with no job to show for it.
Under Giuliani, this all changed. Suddenly, HRA assumed that welfare recipients not only could work, but also desired to work. Today, the city, under new HRA Commissioner Steven Banks, is slowly but surely reinstituting the failed welfare policies of decades past.
To whom do New Yorkers owe this stroke of inspiration? In part, they can thank Community Voices Heard, the city’s offshoot branch of the notorious nonprofit ACORN — yes, the same one exposed by undercover investigators in 2009 for teaching people how to organize underage prostitution rings and avoid taxes and a group whose anti-work, “welfare-rights” agenda finds an increasingly receptive audience at HRA.
Indeed, Commissioner Banks has introduced a dizzying array of new initiatives, such as “career advance,” “career bridge,” “career compass,” and “youth pathways” to make the old (NYC’s failed emphasis on job training) appear new. For example, youth pathways is expected to serve at least 18,000 young New Yorkers with nine separate grants.
Little matter that it was not evaluated for effectiveness before being scaled-up; or that self-reported, participant data from similar programs elsewhere reveal that such efforts are overwhelmingly unsuccessful, despite costing thousands of dollars per participant.
In HRA’s grand new welfare vision, city bureaucrats, via so-called bridge programs, will evaluate welfare recipients’ progress toward entering the workforce. Further bureaucratic evaluations will decide what career pathway and bridge programs to place welfare recipients into.
Securing actual jobs for welfare recipients is now barely mentioned, but HRA’s strategy certainly will keep social-service professionals fully employed. All the while, Work First contracts, the proven best way to reduce welfare dependency, will be terminated.
Banks says he wants HRA to be a “kinder, more gentle” welfare agency. In practice, this means showing up for HRA appointments and looking for work is suggested, not required. As a result, participation levels are dropping at the HRA’s Back 2 Work programs.
As the city moves in the wrong direction, Congress is moving the other way, as it seeks to tie federal welfare funding to stronger work requirements. Indeed, should the city’s new emphasis on training over work lead to big drops in work-participation rates, Gotham can expect substantial financial penalties for failing to meet federal work-participation requirements.
Today, New York already has one of the country’s most costly welfare systems. The costs of further increasing its welfare rolls will be considerable.
But Commissioner Banks and his ACORN allies welcome the rise in public dependency to right the supposed wrongs inflicted by previous administrations.
In the next 12 months, the de Blasio administration is on course to dismantle one of urban America’s greatest public-policy achievements of recent decades. What a shame: The bad old days are on the horizon.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post