New Orleans   Conservatives always complain about bureaucrats and the vast governmental bureaucracy. It is painful to realize how paperwork and bureaucracy are used as not-so-secret weapons to deny mandated benefits designed to help families and children from eligible, fully qualified families. Success is defined by the ability to put barriers in the way of families already challenged and often desperate in order to deny them benefits that effect the education, health, and nutrition of their children and of course their quality of life. It is a policy weapon that is fully understood and used deliberately.

This isn’t a new problem. ACORN ran effective programs and campaigns designed to achieve what we called, maximum eligible participation. My book Citizen Wealth made the case for the huge difference it would make to low-and-moderate income families if barriers were removed so that families received the full benefits of entitlements even in political and economic environments that were unwilling to improve or expand benefits. The Reagan era crackdown on welfare recipients even before the so-called Clinton “reform” was all about using the bureaucracy to deny welfare and food stamp benefits. The Obama administration’s eliminating barriers in the wake of the Great Recession led to soaring rates of participation in food stamp programs as well as the health and education benefits of expanding benefits during the crisis.

A piece in the New York Times underscored the cynicism of punitive paperwork as public policy. The reporter cited one example after another. Washington State in 2003 required people to reestablish eligibility twice a year rather than annually, and it successfully knocked 40,000 children off of Medicaid in one year. Around the same time Louisiana wanted to increase the number of eligible children covered, “so officials simplified the sign-up process…and enrollment surged, and the number of administrative cancellations fell by 20 percentage points.” Citizenship verification using birth certificates mandated by Congress in 2006 dropped children’s Medicaid coverage until the requirement was eliminated by the Affordable Care Act in 2010. When Wisconsin started using data from other programs to determine Medicaid eligibility, similar to what ACORN’s Service Centers did when enrolling people based on data from EITC and income tax filings, they added 100,000 children in one day. The knife cuts both ways, unfortunately in this political climate it is mainly being used to cut people off.

All of this has the affect of opening and closing the dam, not of catching deadbeats or scofflaws, and politicians and governmental bureaucrats know this like they know their own names. The Trump administration’s signal that it will approve mandatory work requirements proposed by Kentucky already, and likely to be followed by another dozen states, is categorically NOT about making sure that more able-bodied are working – or volunteering – or whatever, but about slimming the rolls, saving money, and starving and killing lower income families and their children.

Making poverty a punishment is a despicable public policy.