WIN II signaled two additional trends, both of which prefigured the conservative position in the policy debates of the 1980s and 1990s. Programmatically, the measure took a decisive step toward equating the aim of encouraging self-support with being “tough” on work requirements. Among other things, this meant elevating “work-first” approaches over those designed to strengthen the long-term employability and earning power of jobless recipients. WIN I had been designed in part to encourage recipients to pursue formal education and training to improve their prospects for employment. In some cases, for example, it included support for recipients to attend college. In a move that foreshadowed the dominant approach to workfare reform in the 1990s, WIN II changed the emphasis from boosting the long-term employability and skills of welfare recipients, to immediate referral to available jobs (“work-first” plans). The shift was in part a response to studies indicating that immediate placement and on-the-job training were more effective at reducing AFDC caseloads. Under WIN II, states were to spend at least one-third of WIN funds on on-the-job training and public service employment.52
The passage of the Talmadge amendments also marked a trend toward escalating work requirements even in the face of policy failure. This would emerge as a defining pattern in the politics of welfare and work. Faced with evidence that previous attempts (such as WIN I) were failing to move recipients into the workforce, policymakers responded not by reassessing the strategy but by escalating it, imposing more and tougher requirements. As evidence mounted of WIN I’s failures, members of Congress from both parties were largely silent on the obstacles posed by the weaknesses in the low-wage labor market and the characteristics of the recipient pool, electing instead simply to tighten the rules. Studies of WIN I showed, for example, that only a fraction of recipients were judged appropriate for work by local authorities. The remainder were ill, needed at home, without childcare, or considered otherwise inappropriate for training. Lawmakers’ response in WIN II, however, was to impose further restrictions, in part by eliminating state and local discretion to determine whether recipients were appropriate for referral. Similarly, policymakers were confronted with discouraging evidence on training and placement rates. Some 400,000 people were enrolled in WIN I by mid-1972, when WIN II took effect; only about 25 percent of these finished training. In the end, only 52,000, less than 2 percent of the total pool, actually held jobs. Faced with this evidence, the response of lawmakers was to sidestep the challenge of training and education, and shift the emphasis and expectations to immediate job placement.53
WIN II thus put into place the first piece of the new workfare regime by strengthening work requirements for AFDC recipients, and established significant political precedents. The measure promoted self-support by being “tough on work” and elevated “work-first” approaches over those designed to strengthen recipients’ employability and earning power. With the two WIN amendments, the central measure of AFDC’s success began to shift decidedly from the welfarist aim of reducing family poverty through income support to the workfarist aim of moving recipients from welfare to work—and policymakers began to chart the program’s less-than-impressive record in doing so.
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The next major policy initiative pulled from the administration’s FAP proposal and passed independently was an expanded program of assistance for the poor elderly, disabled, and blind. Approved in October 1972, the new Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program would appear, at first glance, to have little to do with a turn to workfare in public assistance or with the retrenchment of AFDC decades later. But SSI was essential for whom it excluded. The program broke apart the “trio” of New Deal public assistance programs and more narrowly defined which poor Americans should receive income assistance without work obligations. SSI wrote into law the conservative answer to the question of which Americans are poor because they cannot work and erased the New Deal definition.
Under New Deal welfarism, programs for the categories of needy Americans deemed “unemployable”—the elderly, the blind (and later the disabled), and mothers with dependent children—were inscribed in the Social Security Act.54 The institutional relationship between these programs provided a measure of political protection for AFDC by linking the fate of its recipients to those of the aged and disabled poor. Federal administrators routinely developed reforms, rules, and expansions that would apply to all of these programs in the decades after the New Deal.55
SSI reconfigured public assistance by creating a new program for only two of the three original recipient categories, those physically unable to work due to age or disability. Poor families were left out.56 SSI marked a significant expansion of the welfare state: the new program served greater numbers of needy within its specific categories, was federally administered, and provided a floor of assistance. But it also marked an exclusion of the largest and most controversial group of unemployables, dependent children and their caregivers.57 Politically, this set SSI on the path of institutional growth in subsequent years—and AFDC on the road to contraction.
Conservative Southern Democrats in Congress again provided the primary impetus and strategy for “hiving off” of FAP the provisions that became SSI, as Jennifer Erkulwater’s historical study of the program de-scribed.58 Congressional support for the Nixon administration’s provisions for the elderly and disabled poor emerged early, in both House and Senate responses to FAP.59 Leaders of poor Southern states had a long-standing interest in increased federal assistance for these needy populations. As Mills observed in the 1970 FAP debates, “I think we would all agree … that the adult public assistance recipients, the old, the halt, the blind, are most deserving of any additional help that we can give them.”60 Mills and Long differed in their approaches—Mills had consistently argued that aid to the elderly poor through social insurance was preferable to the traditional public assistance increases championed by Long—but both repeatedly pressed for additional support for the elderly and disabled poor, and Southerners backed the initial FAP provisions for these groups.61
From the outset, Mills’s position in the FAP debate departed from that of many of his Southern colleagues. In principle, Mills advocated states’ rights, limited federal government, the free market, and the work ethic. FAP’s proposal to provide an income guarantee for the working poor troubled him, as it did other Southerners. He worried that it “would create tremendous disincentives to work in some states, like mine for example, where the wages are low.”62 All the same, Mills supported FAP and its proposed federalization of public assistance. He felt that these programs, and particularly AFDC, had been “sadly and badly administered” by the states.63 It bothered Mills enormously that although the federal government picked up the bill for more than half of public assistance costs, it was constrained in its ability to control federal welfare spending because of the existing cost-sharing system. The New Deal structure of divided authority (championed by many Southern lawmakers) also made it too easy for states to evade federal rules—including the 1967 WIN work requirements. Mills sought to persuade skeptical conservatives that reducing state discretion would address WIN’s failures and rein in costs.64 His Republican counterpart Byrnes echoed Mills’s concern, pointing to low state participation in WIN, and asserting, “Hell, we can’t trust the states…. Look at what has happened to the WIN program.”65 In a Rules Committee hearing on FAP, Byrnes argued that “this new system has much better administrative potential than the present system … [for] getting people into the economic system and going to work.”66
Though Mills’s main concern was with state administration of AFDC, he extended the logic to the “adult categories.” For these programs, Mills proposed not only federal administration of matching grant programs, but also an increase in the income floor.67 This concept became the basis for the provisions in FAP that would become SSI. It would not be easy, however, to convince other Southern leaders to support the federalization of public assistance for the elderly and disabled, as proposed in the 1971 version of FAP. For decades, the Southern position on public assistance had been to accept federal dollars but maintain state control over administration. In deliberations in the heavily Southern and
