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CHAPTER 3

Building Workfare: WIN II, SSI, and EITC

Senator Russell Long had headed home to Louisiana victorious when Congress adjourned in December 1967. He had regaled a crowd in Shreveport with the story of how his eleventh-hour maneuver on the Senate floor had foiled a filibuster planned by liberal Democrats, securing passage of the WIN amendments authored by his fellow Southerner Wilbur Mills and sealing the fate of the welfare measure proposed by President Johnson and Senate liberals. “That group of young turks,” he concluded, “has a lot to learn” about how to run a filibuster.¹ Four years later, he was back before crowds in his home state to celebrate an even greater victory in blocking another president’s liberal welfare reform proposal. This time it was Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP). Hand-scrawled in the margins of Long’s March 1971 speech was his conclusion: “Last year FAP failed. Finance Committee and I as the chairman in particular was blamed…. Good thing.”² Long would later call the defeat of FAP the crowning achievement of his legislative career.

With FAP’s collapse, the campaign by conservative Southern Democrats against liberal welfare reform measures seemed to draw to a close. As it turned out, they were just getting warmed up. In the early 1970s, emboldened by their victories on WIN and FAP, Southern Democratic leaders in Congress shifted from a strategy of blocking liberal reform initiatives to crafting their own model of federal income assistance. They quietly spearheaded three legislative initiatives in quick succession that changed the landscape of public assistance: the Talmadge Work Incentive amendments (WIN II) were approved in 1971, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) passed in 1972, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) became law in 1975. Though not conceived or executed as a coordinated conservative assault on the New Deal system, the piecemeal reforms fundamentally altered much of the existing structure of public assistance. Their combined impact was to steer the ends and means of federal income assistance toward the principle of rewarding and enforcing work.

The three reforms are often overlooked in accounts of welfare policy change, or treated as distinct, unrelated developments. Many accounts move quickly from the (largely expansionary) 1960s to the (largely contractionary) 1980s. The 1970s were, in the words of one historian, years of “stalemate” in poverty politics, sandwiched between the liberal and conservative welfare state projects.³ The Talmadge amendments are often raised only in passing, as a tightening of the original 1967 WIN work requirements. SSI is typically tacked onto the social welfare expansions of the Great Society period, mentioned as a consolation prize after the disintegration of FAP, or treated as a mere administrative change. And despite increasing recognition of the EITC’s importance as an antipoverty measure, the politics of its passage are rarely incorporated into the larger story of welfare policy.⁴

Far from years of stalemate, the early 1970s saw a distinct phase of welfare state development led by antiwelfare Southerners, one that disrupts the neat demarcations between expansion and contraction, and between the respective roles of liberal Democratic welfare state “builders” and conservative Republican “retrenchers.” It marked a conservative turn, but it was not an episode of retrenchment: it was a period of welfare-state building, and, in fact, it produced an expansion of programs for the elderly, disabled, and working poor. Far from a series of minor and unrelated initiatives, moreover, the three 1970s initiatives recast public assistance policies—to require work from those on AFDC, to reward work among low-wage workers, and to exempt from work only those too old or ill to earn wages.

Three conclusions emerge from a close study of the legislative and political history. First, the initiatives reflected a political response by Southern congressional Democrats to Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, which threatened to expand the welfarist model of public assistance. As this chapter will show, FAP triggered a counterreaction by Southern Democratic lawmakers, and these programs were its leading edge. To create the three programs, Southern Democrats moved to “hive off” favored elements of the Nixon FAP proposal, modify them as necessary, and secure passage through independent legislative vehicles. This had the immediate political effect of undercutting moderate and conservative support for FAP, carefully cultivated by the administration on the basis of precisely these provisions.

Second, although Southern Democratic leaders had many reasons to oppose the Republican administration’s plan, their statements and strategies reveal that a core concern was the challenge FAP posed to social, political, and economic arrangements in the South. Key Southern leaders were convinced that Nixon’s proposal threatened to destabilize local low-wage labor markets: by directing federal cash assistance to current and potential workers, FAP would provide those workers with an alternative means of livelihood and the ability to refuse low-wage jobs or reduce work hours. Each of their three favored legislative alternatives, in contrast, promised to leave labor market relations largely intact by ensuring that the able-bodied poor were compelled to enter the workforce and by subsidizing—rather than disrupting—low-wage labor markets. The initiatives were in this sense profoundly conservative, even though they marked expansions, and they protected traditional Southern economic and political interests.

Third, these initiatives, taken together, reoriented the purposes of federally supported income assistance. The struggle over public assistance has long been a debate over whether and how to aid three categories of poor Americans: (a) those who are poor because they cannot work, (b) those who are poor because they will not work, and (c) those who are poor even though they are working.⁵ The New Deal framework sought to direct assistance to the first category and to withhold aid from the second category; those in the third category (working but poor) received no public assistance, though they benefited from other New Deal legislation.⁶ FAP proposed to erase these distinctions by installing an income floor under all poor families. The Southern conservative counterreaction assertively redrew its own distinctions. The piecemeal reforms introduced by leading Southern legislators—such as Senate Finance Committee chair Russell Long (D-La.), House Ways and Means Committee chair Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.), and Senator Herman Talmadge (D-Ga.)—created a new public assistance model. It provided aid to a much smaller population judged to be physically unable to work, through SSI; imposed work requirements on those judged able but unwilling to work, through WIN II; and offered a new entitlement to those who were poor even though they were working, through the EITC. This established the foundation of the workfare approach. By the mid-1970s, programs for the poor had been expanded, but in ways that accorded new priority to the criteria and imperative of work.⁷ This chapter opens with an analysis of the role of Southern politics in the rise of work-fare, then examines the political developments leading to the creation of the three programs in the 1970s.

The Fight to Control Welfare in the South

Why would conservative Southern lawmakers, who were generally opposed to both a large federal role in public assistance and the creation of new programs for the poor, spearhead an expansion of the federal welfare state? Southern leaders’ motives and interests in public assistance policy were neither uniform nor unchanging.⁸ Their role in building a new workfare regime is best understood in the context of relief’s place in the region’s social and economic order, and of Southern leaders’ reaction to FAP.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, Southern political leaders were largely successful in defending the prerogatives of state authority in public assistance programs. But by the late 1960s, Southerners were beginning to lose many of their traditional assistance-related means of control over their disproportionately black low-wage labor forces and the size and costs of state welfare rolls. The Civil Rights Act had banned discrimination in distribution of federal funds, limiting local and state discretion, and Supreme Court rulings had explicitly struck down several favored tactics for controlling welfare eligibility and benefits.⁹ Welfare rolls rose quickly as eligibility restrictions were lifted. Many conservatives were feeling besieged and disarmed, and congressional leaders such as Long condemned court decisions that limited their states’ capacities to restrict welfare.¹⁰ The new cohort of younger leaders elected in the wake of the civil rights battles and hailed as representatives of the “New South,” meanwhile, largely tracked the positions of political elders such as Long, Talmadge, and Mills on federal public assistance.¹¹ Even as the region’s social order was transformed by black migration, economic expansion, and the extension of voting rights, welfare in the South remained controversial, tied to struggles over the region’s low-wage labor force and persistent racial hierarchies.

When Richard Nixon unveiled his expensive new social welfare initiative in a televised address in August 1969, therefore, Southerners were watching closely, and other leaders were watching the South. As the Nixon administration awaited Congress’s reaction, “the major question,” recalled Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of FAP’s architects in the administration, “was how the South would respond.” Moynihan was banking on Southern support. The South had changed, he reasoned, and political leaders might see FAP as an opportunity to bring billions in federal resources to address Southern poverty, and to bridge divides of race and region through an agenda of “economic liberalism.”¹² Indeed, Moynihan had made the case within the Nixon administration that FAP could defuse racial tensions over public assistance. AFDC was losing public support in part because it was increasingly identified with African American recipients, he argued; FAP would change the equation by bringing millions of the mostly white working poor into the nation’s aid system.¹³ Robert Finch, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, advanced the same argument in the administration’s initial bid for support from Congress.¹⁴

But the administration’s hopes for Southern support were never realized. The overwhelming majority of Southern lawmakers opposed FAP. Two aspects of the plan drew repeated fire. The first was the principle of a federally guaranteed income. The promise of federal aid to families on the basis of income levels would mean an enormous infusion of cash assistance to the region’s poor through the federal social welfare system. The second was the principle that most family members would receive some aid whether or not the family head was working. Southern leaders worried that this would lead workers in low-paid sectors to work less—or not at all.¹⁵ “Bluntly put,” wrote analyst Kevin Phillips in a July 1970 column, as FAP sat in the Senate Finance Committee, “the program would strike at the rural socioeconomic and political power base of Dixie’s conservative Democrats.”¹⁶

If the stakes seemed high, it is because the numbers were striking. One-half of all poor families in the nation lived in the South, and two-thirds of poor black families did. Wages and working conditions for those at the bottom of the labor market were the worst in the nation, particularly for blacks. According to the Labor Department, the percentage of black workers forced to accept part-time jobs, poorly paid and irregular, was twice as high in the South as elsewhere in the United States.¹⁷

In this economic context, even the low benefit levels promised under FAP would have a sweeping impact. Of the nearly four million households that would receive FAP payments, more than two million were in the South: under FAP, the percentage of families with incomes less than $2,000 in the South would approach that of other parts of the country for the first time.¹⁸ Estimates from the Nixon administration and members of Congress suggested that FAP would make more than one-third of Mississippi’s population eligible for public assistance, along with one-quarter of Kentuckians and Louisianans and roughly one-fifth of the populations of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina.¹⁹ FAP would triple the welfare rolls in thirteen states, railed Senator Harry Byrd, Jr. (D-Va.).²⁰

As Southern elites recognized immediately, providing welfare assistance to six to seven million additional Southerners, primarily in working-poor families, would alter the economic choices available to workers, changing the character of the low-wage labor market.²¹ In correspondence to Southern lawmakers, local business leaders reported difficulties in finding and retaining “unskilled labor,” especially in food and service industries. They worried, as a business leader in Little Rock wrote, that “our inability to employ our labor needs” may be due not to “a shortage in the potential work force but perhaps an unwillingness on the part of many people to work, preferring instead to receive benefits from various places such as welfare, unemployment compensation, food stamps and the like.”²²

FAP also threatened to upset the balance of political power in the South by providing a new base of economic security for blacks. A majority of FAP benefits would continue to go to white families, according to administration estimates.²³ But, as an official of the anti-integration Citizens’ Councils stated, FAP “would enormously increase the voting power of the poor people, and in the South an awful lot of poor people are Negroes.”²⁴ Among other things, FAP’s income guarantee would limit the effectiveness of economic reprisals—such as reductions in pay or loss of employment—that many employers used to intimidate blacks from voting. This meant, wrote Steve Van Evera in New South in the fall of 1971, that FAP could give black political power “the greatest boost … in the rural South since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”²⁵ When a 1970 survey of Southern opinion on FAP was published in the Wall Street Journal, the vast majority, the paper reported, “agree[d] with Senator Herman Talmadge, the Georgia Democrat, that the bill ‘would undermine the best qualities of this nation’” and “bring significant changes in the Southern way of life.”²⁶

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers argued that increased access to public assistance would be a disincentive to work. Representative Phil Landrum (D-Ga.) told a reporter, “There’s not going to be anybody left to toll these wheelbarrows and press these shirts. They’re all going to be on welfare.”²⁷ Long and others also worried about the larger labor market implications of FAP’s guaranteed income, including potential upward wage pressures. Arguing for his own alternative to FAP, Long emphasized to fellow conservatives that unlike FAP, his plan would not disrupt the existing wage structure in the low-wage sector. He carefully listed forty-one distinct jobs in which a person might continue to earn less than the federal minimum wage under his plan, including in public sector positions, “small retail stores,” “small service establishments,” “agricultural pursuits,” and “domestic service.”²⁸

In the face of FAP’s challenge to the existing order, its modest work requirement appeared to be little more than a cruel joke to Southern conservatives. They saw quickly what Nixon aide Patrick Moynihan was unable to convey to Northern liberals who opposed FAP’s work mandate as too tough: under the FAP requirement, guaranteed assistance would continue to flow to other family members even if the head of the family refused to take an available job.²⁹ The only penalty for refusing work was the loss of the breadwinner’s share of the family grant. After decades of local work rules, Southerners were accustomed to more stringent controls on welfare recipients’ labor.

Some in the Nixon administration believed Southern leaders’ interest in maintaining cheap labor supplies fueled their dogged attempts to tighten work requirements. One exasperated HEW official questioned whether Long’s devotion to the idea of imposing strict work obligations on welfare recipients had less to do with the alleged erosion of the work ethic among poor mothers—and more to do with the availability of domestic labor for the Southern elite. Regardless of costs or family circumstances, he emphasized, “[Long] will reply, ‘That’s okay, you can’t put a value on those children seeing a mother get up at 5:30 to go to work.’ Doing what? Picking armadillos off the highway? … I think that … what Long and others are really concerned about [is] that if this bill goes through they won’t be able to get a maid down in Louisiana.”³⁰

Southerners’ concerns about FAP’s impact on employment helped fuel the protracted legislative tug-of-war over work provisions described in the previous chapter. Southern Democrats joined Republicans in stripping the caveat from FAP’s work requirement that recipients were only obliged to accept “suitable” employment. Representative Joel Broyhill of Virginia drew the line in the sand, telling reporters: “I will insist that no one receive any assistance through the welfare program who is physically able to do work but refuses to do so. I don’t want any provision limiting the requirement to ‘suitable’ employment. Any type of work should be considered suitable or reasonable to a person seeking public assistance.”³¹

The Southern contingent lost a battle, however, when the Nixon administration reworked the original FAP bill (after it died in the Senate in 1970) and reintroduced it as H.R. 1 in 1971. The original bill had stipulated that FAP recipients could be assigned to any job paying the “prevailing wage” and permitted states to administer the program. This provided latitude to Southern administrators seeking to preserve the existing hierarchies in the region’s labor market, where the “prevailing wage” for domestic work in Mississippi was $4 a day.³² But in an appeal to labor and Northern liberals, the revised bill mandated federal rather than state administration and asserted that family breadwinners had the right to reject any job paying less than $1.20 an hour (the federal minimum was $1.60 at the time).³³ These income levels would significantly force wages up throughout the rural South, which had the lowest average hourly earnings ($1.08) in the nation.³⁴ FAP would provide a federal income to a poor family, even if a parent rejected many of the jobs then available—unless local employers boosted wages for farmhands, dishwashers, domestics, and other positions not covered by the federal minimum wage, to reach the FAP minimum of $1.20.³⁵

Table 3.1 House Votes on Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, 1970 and 1971

Source: Author’s calculations based on vote totals reported in Congressional Quarterly Almanac 26 (1970): 16H; and Congressional Quarterly Almanac 27 (1971): 35H.

Note: On the two key FAP-related votes in the House, Northern Democrats were overwhelmingly in favor, Southern Democrats were overwhelmingly opposed, and Republicans were split. The first vote was on final passage of H.R. 16311, which passed 243–155 on April 16, 1970. The second vote was on a motion by Representative Al Ullman (D-Ore.) to delete the FAP provisions from the 1971 Social Security Amendments (H.R. 1). The Ullman motion was rejected 187–234 on June 22, 1971.

Despite numerous attempts by the Nixon administration to address Southerners’ concerns, opposition remained strong. On the two direct votes on FAP in the House, Southern Democrats voted against the plan by large margins, with 81 and 70 percent opposed. Northern Democrats were 86 and 72 percent in favor; Republicans were nearly evenly split. In the Senate, the pattern was similar, though there were no direct up-or-down votes on the measure: on FAP-related votes, over 90 percent of Southern Senate Democrats cast votes that opposed the measure.³⁶

Table 3.2 Senate Votes on Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, 1972

Source: Calculations based on vote totals reported in Congressional Quarterly Almanac 28 (1972): 72S–73S.

Note: Key Senate votes on FAP in 1972 reflected divisions between Northern and Southern Democrats, and the fact that Southern Democrats often held the balance of votes in the Senate. The first vote was on a motion by Senator Long (D-La.) to table (kill) Senator Ribicoff’s (D-Conn.) liberal version of FAP; the vote to table passed 52–34 on October 3, 1972. The second was on a Long motion to table a Ribicoff amendment to remove workfare provisions from a Social Security bill passed by the Finance Committee. Long’s motion passed 44–41 on October 4, 1972. The third vote was on a motion by Senator Roth (R-Del.) to pilot-test competing welfare reform proposals rather than enact FAP or other alternatives; the motion passed 46–41 on October 4, 1972.

Only a small percentage of Southern members of the president’s own party, meanwhile, was willing to support him. Cast largely out of party loyalty, these Republican votes were costly to party stalwarts such as Representative George H. W. Bush of Texas, who made a bid for a Senate seat in the November 1970 election—and lost. True to the Southern Democratic position, his opponent Lloyd Bentsen produced ads that criticized Bush’s pro-FAP vote and the prospect of “14 million more on welfare,” and described a vote for Bentsen as a “vote against big welfare” and higher taxes.³⁷ President Nixon wrote to Bush in late October: “I understand that you have been attacked by your opponent for your support of the Family Assistance Plan on the grounds that it is a ‘guaranteed annual income.’ This is a very serious misinterpretation of the goals of our plan.”³⁸

But, of course, it was not a serious misinterpretation, and Southern leaders knew it. Many feared, in short, “that FAP’s guaranteed income would shrink the supply of cheap labor, bankrupt marginal industry, boost the cost of locally produced goods and services, increase taxes, and put more blacks into political office,” concluded journalists Vince and Vee Burke in their 1974 study of FAP.³⁹ Little wonder, with these perceived stakes for his region, that Senator Long waged a pitched battle against FAP from his pivotal position as chair of the Finance Committee. FAP, he said with no trace of irony, made him “tremble in fear for the fate of this Republic.”⁴⁰

As it became clear that FAP was not simply going to go away after its initial setbacks, however, opponents realized that they needed to counter with their own alternative proposals. The twin commitments to defeating FAP and defending Southern political and economic arrangements created a powerful incentive to craft conservative—if expansionary—reforms.

Building Workfare Through Piecemeal Policymaking

Beginning in 1971, with the nation riveted on the legislative battle over the Nixon proposal, conservative Southern leaders in Congress began quietly passing legislation that would usher in a new era in public assistance. The three legislative initiatives shared several features. Each reflected elements of the conservative vision and regional interests of key Southern leaders. And each helped redefine the terms of public assistance for a distinct category of poor Americans. The Talmadge amendments targeted current welfare recipients, many of whom, in the view of conservative workfarists, were poor because they would not work. SSI restructured assistance for elderly and disabled adults, whom conservatives believed were poor because they could not work. And the EITC extended aid to families who, conservatives recognized, were poor even though they were working. In altering the terms of assistance, each of the initiatives advanced the core premises of workfarist public assistance—namely, require work from single mothers on AFDC, exempt from work only those too old or infirm to earn wages, and reward work among low-wage workers. Ultimately, each of the initiatives would facilitate compromises and coalitions in the 1980s and 1990s that helped erode and then dismantle the core wel-farist entitlement for poor families.

The first move was made by Democratic Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia. It took aim at the welfare poor, and in particular, at AFDC recipients. Under the New Deal model of public assistance, federal policy considered these recipients poor because caregiving obligations made them unable to work at sufficient levels to support their families.⁴¹ Beginning with the push by Wilbur Mills to add a new federal work mandate to AFDC through the initial 1967 WIN amendments, conservative reformers began to assert, instead, that these recipients were too often simply unwilling to work, and therefore should be evaluated for referral to state work programs.

Talmadge was one of the harshest congressional critics of FAP. He shared the concerns of other Southerners about the sheer numbers that would be brought into the system of federal cash assistance under the plan.⁴² And he believed that FAP did far too little to require work of all who were able. In hearings before the Senate Finance Committee in the spring of 1970, Talmadge grilled HEW Secretary Robert Finch and Undersecretary John Veneman.⁴³ He concluded that in many parts of Georgia, “we might have over half the people in individual counties on welfare.”⁴⁴ Under Talmadge’s questioning, Veneman acknowledged the low cash penalty a FAP family would pay if a family head refused work, confirming conservatives’ worst fears about FAP.⁴⁵

After the first version of FAP collapsed in 1970, Talmadge took action. He led conservatives in pulling the work requirement out of the FAP proposal and passing a version of it in separate Social Security legislation. The aim, in his view, must be a workfarist one—namely, to “make productive citizens out of nonproductive citizens.”⁴⁶ Dubbed “WIN II” because they revised the initial WIN rules, the Talmadge amendments were signed into law in December 1971.⁴⁷

As a political maneuver, the amendments had an immediate effect on the balance of forces in the FAP struggle. Passing the work requirement independently of the other elements of the FAP package significantly reduced FAP’s appeal to conservatives when the administration came back with a revised version of the bill. The work requirement, as Representative John Byrnes (R-Wisc.) explained, was “what some consider the sweetener.”⁴⁸ With WIN II, conservatives got the “sweetener” without having to swallow the rest of the package. Scheduled to take effect on July 1, 1972, WIN II was on the books during the Senate’s final deliberations on FAP.

As a policy initiative, WIN II had a deeper and enduring impact on the politics of welfare. Work obligations of various forms had been imposed on welfare recipients at the state level for decades. But federal policy from the New Deal to the Great Society had not formally conditioned assistance on a work requirement.⁴⁹ WIN I had imposed the first federal mandate that states create work and training programs, and refer any “appropriate persons” to them. WIN II established a more sweeping standard, requiring all adult recipients, except those explicitly exempted, to register for work, under penalty of loss of benefits. By removing the reference to “appropriate persons” and eliminating state officials’ discretion in determining who met this qualification, the law significantly widened the categories of recipients considered eligible for work and included mothers of school-age children.⁵⁰

The new law also had greater enforcement power: states would lose a portion of their federal funds if they failed to refer at least 15 percent of their adult recipients to the program by mid-1974. Exemptions, loopholes, and lack of funding would limit the reach and impact of the Talmadge amendments, as they had with WIN I. Nonetheless, WIN II was markedly tougher than existing law, and its passage signaled the rising frustration in Congress over the performance of WIN I.⁵¹ In the long run, WIN II would help facilitate the shift to workfare by affirming a new evaluative measure for AFDC’s success: moving recipients from welfare to work. Once virtually all adult recipients were judged work-appropriate, and once states were expected to establish programs that moved recipients from welfare to work, policymakers began to focus increasingly on how well AFDC was meeting this aim.

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.

* * *

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 Western Senate Finance Committee in the fall of 1972, members balked. The Committee wanted the adult programs to remain under state administration, and voted accordingly. “This motion was advocated by the ‘states’ rights types’ on the Committee,” explained a Senate staffer. “It took a big lobbying job by HEW to get the federal program approved by the House back into the Senate bill.”⁶⁸

In fact, it took more than “a big lobbying job” to win Southern conservative support. It took a shift in the political and economic interests of Southern elites, and the persistent pressure of one of their leaders in the Senate, Russell Long. By the early 1970s, demographic shifts had changed the logic of public assistance in the South, and Long understood this. Waves of migration beginning in the 1940s had brought primarily young African American workers and their families to the North. This was spurred in part, Long noted, by “mechanization of the farm,” which had “cut back drastically on the availability of jobs.”⁶⁹ Large numbers of elderly blacks remained behind, most of whom were no longer able to work for wages. Rural Southern counties were increasingly saddled with the twin burdens of a diminishing tax base and a growing public assistance burden. One Mississippi county, for example, saw its elderly population expand from 5 to 11 percent between 1940 and 1970.⁷⁰ In Long’s state of Louisiana, roughly one-third of the elderly population received Old Age Assistance for the poor, and Louisiana’s OAA program had grown to the third largest in the nation.⁷¹ Indeed, of the thirteen largest OAA programs, eight were in the South.⁷²

By the time SSI was considered in Congress, therefore, Southern leaders faced a new reality. Concerns over local control of assistance for the elderly and disabled poor had diminished or been superseded by the burden of increased payments. But if these demographic changes led some policymakers to see the proposed SSI reform as less of a threat, it required the political savvy of Russell Long to see in SSI an opportunity to advance the interests of conservative Southerners in defeating FAP and promoting workfare.

For two years, Long had used his power as Finance Committee chair to block FAP. During this protracted struggle, Long developed a parallel strategy to that of delay. He would defeat FAP by proposing a sizable expansion of funding for the two categories of poor he believed should receive public assistance: those physically unable to work, and the working poor.⁷³ The first would eventually become SSI; the second would become the EITC.

By 1972, with FAP languishing but not yet defeated, Long made a critical move. In September, his committee announced its support for the House proposal to federalize aid to the elderly and disabled—reversing its previous position and paving the way for approval of SSI.⁷⁴ As Long later explained to his biographer, he believed that supporting federalization of the so-called adult programs for the elderly and disabled would eliminate any chance that the “family support” provisions of FAP would ever be enacted: “To keep them from coming back with something that was going to make the whole nation into a welfare state, I felt that the way to spike their guns on that would be to take all the money they estimated spending on this family program and apply that to the aged.”⁷⁵

With Long and his committee no longer an obstacle, SSI was included in the omnibus Social Security legislation passed later that year. The creation of a major new federal assistance program, SSI, was thus due in no small measure to the divergent workfare campaigns of two conservative Southern leaders who had long been protective of states’ rights: Mills’s drive to impose work requirements on AFDC recipients, and Long’s persistent attempts to scuttle the Family Assistance Plan.