'F' or not, Utah is right on track with pioneer welfare-reform efforts

For many years, Utah has been widely recognized for its welfare reform accomplishments. In nominating former Gov. Michael O. Leavitt as the next federal Health and Human Services Secretary, President Bush cited the governor's leadership in welfare reform. However, as the Deseret Morning News has reported, the Washington-based Cato Institute gave Utah an "F" for welfare reform. How did this happen? The answer is simple. For Utah, a key welfare reform goal has been to help people get jobs, increase their incomes, and reach the point where they don't need welfare. For Cato, the goal is to eliminate welfare. Utah's vision is the better one.

We began hearing about Utah's efforts in the early 1990s, when the state was among the first to put forward the goal of transforming welfare into an employment program. Utah's program was guided by the premise that when a family first entered a welfare office, the focus should be on figuring out what the parent needed to do to get stable employment, and what kinds of assistance would help families get and keep jobs. The state pioneered the concept that with a little upfront assistance (e.g., money for repairs to a car that is necessary to get to work), some families could avoid welfare altogether. The state also pioneered the idea that every family should have an individualized self-sufficiency plan.

Under Leavitt, Utah became the first state in the country to completely merge its welfare program into its workforce system, so that any parent needing help goes to an employment center, where workers can get help finding jobs and accessing job training and other services. Creating a single system for all workers — whether unemployed, employed, on welfare, or not — is viewed by many as a promising way to help workers and be more responsive to local businesses.

Why did Utah get an "F" from Cato? The main reason is that Cato didn't grade states on innovations or success in promoting employment. Instead, Cato describes its goal by saying, "The greatest result welfare reform could produce would be the elimination of the welfare system." Cato used a grading scale that gave states the most points for having policies that made it hardest for poor families to get help. So, states with shorter welfare time limits got more points than states with longer time limits. Cutting off all assistance to children if a parent misses an appointment got a state more points, but efforts to keep working with the family got fewer points. Including job training in a state's program resulted in fewer points. Having a large welfare caseload decline got more points, even if the caseload fell simply because the state cut off assistance to families needing help.