Officials Say Welfare Cap Is Impossible To Enforce

Although Congress has passed a law to “end welfare as we know it,” experts say it will be difficult if not impossible to enforce its central provision: restricting welfare payments to a lifetime limit of five years.

The clock starts ticking in July for millions of welfare recipients, who up to now have been able to receive benefits for as long as they live. But Congress did not figure out beforehand whether it would be possible to set up a system to keep track of how long recipients have been on welfare.

County officials worry that enforcing the five-year limit will require establishing a massive data gathering system far larger than anything that currently exists.

“Anyone who looks at this issue objectively realizes that the federal government has imposed an unenforceable mandate,” said Frank Mecca, director of the County Welfare Directors Association of California, representing welfare chiefs in all 58 counties in California. “It will be a long time before states will have the ability to track people across state lines and enforce the five-year limit.”

To keep track of welfare recipients, counties must be able to store and exchange information with each other - and then share that information with 49 other states.

“There is no way a national tracking system could possibly be in place (by the July 1997 deadline),” said Henry Brady, director of the University of California Data Archive and Technical Assistance program.

Brady was commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences to conduct the first analysis of the statistical challenges and computer programs that will be needed to put in place a computerized tracking system. He presented his findings at a crowded NAS meeting in Washington last month attended by some of the nation’s leading statisticians.

Brady compared the task to establishing a new social security system - smaller but much more complex than the one that tracks the work histories of all U.S. citizens. Beyond the technical implementation of the law, Brady worried that a failure to enforce the five-year limit will simply add to widespread cynicism about the political process.

“The real question is whether it will be a rhetorical limit or a real limit,” said Brady. “We promised the American people that we’re going to set time limits on welfare. What is going to happen five years from now when we find we haven’t done it because the systems won’t be in place?”