American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  Turner’s second belief was that work—even tedious, low-wage work—had the power to save the soul. The idea that work would serve as a spiritual balm was one theme among many in the Washington debate; for Turner, it was a matter of lifelong faith. “Work is one’s own gift to others,” he said. “Work fulfills a basic human need.” Without it, people suffer “spiritual harm.” Once they became steady workers, Turner predicted, women like Angie would become happier, more self-fulfilled people, with more orderly homes, inspired children, healthier romantic relationships, and fewer problems with depression or drugs. Fumbling to make his point on television, Turner once exclaimed, “It’s work that sets you free!” not realizing that he was quoting the motto on the gate to Auschwitz. He worked so late, he kept a bedroll in his office and often spent the night on the floor. The notion that, for some people, a job is just a job would not have occurred to him.

  Turner’s fascination with welfare began in a place where it didn’t exist—the leafy precincts of Darien, Connecticut, where he grew up as the son of an advertising executive. Twelve years old in 1965, Turner was thumbing through U.S. News & World Report when he spotted an article on the welfare explosion. The news left him unsettled. “It hadn’t occurred to me that there were whole classes of people who didn’t work and who basically existed on government charity,” he said. What if everyone tried that? Part of what fueled Turner’s shock was his reverence for his grandfather, John Tufel, an orphan who had worked his way out of poverty and into a job as a Wall Street bond salesman; when he lost it in the Depression, he put on his suit and sold brushes door-to-door. In the moral universe of Turner’s youth, nonwork was just a nonoption. While prep-school friends sat in class doodling football plays, Turner sketched workfare plans, blueprints of factories where welfare recipients would run the assembly lines. By his undergraduate years at Columbia University, he was sending them off to President Ford, hoping an over-the-transom plan to rescue the underclass might galvanize interest at the top. “One of the things that sustained me was I believed I had a solution: ‘Hey guys, this is it!’ ”

  Despite his fervor, it took Turner years to land his first welfare job. That may have been a blessing in disguise, for he used the delay in part to gain some exposure to the streets. In college, he drove a cab, mostly in the South Bronx, where he whisked around a captivating mix of drug dealers, hookers, grandmas, and kids. He also got robbed at gunpoint, twice—barely escaping the second time with his life. Having a gun stuck in his face reinforced his sense that social order was a fragile thing, not to be left untended. But it also quickened his curiosity: why run the risk of robbing someone, when a few hours of driving could earn just as much?

  A second encounter with street life proved punishing in a different way. As a volunteer in the 1980 Reagan campaign, Turner had hoped to parlay his contacts into a welfare job but languished for years in the backwaters of the federal housing department. Deciding that if he - couldn’t save the poor, he would try to get rich, Turner cashed out his retirement plan, bought eleven cheap apartment buildings in the District of Columbia, and lost everything but his untucked shirt. The turning point came when he rented to a man who prepaid in cash and drove off in a new Bronco. Someone with a keener sense of property management might have spotted a drug dealer setting up shop. A few months later, half his tenants were smoking crack. Turner couldn’t collect his rents, and District law made evictions nearly impossible. After three years of daily combat, Turner lost the buildings to foreclosure. “I got beaten,” he said.

  Life as a slumlord reinforced Turner’s instinctive hostility toward welfare. But oddly enough, it also fortified his faith in the very people who had done him in. For all their problems, Turner regarded his tenants as a resilient lot. In a pinch, money would simply appear, from relatives, boyfriends, or God knows where. “There was nothing inherent in the people themselves that suggested they couldn’t cope,” he said. “They were able to support their families in a dysfunctional system. They’d do what they had to do to take care of their needs.” Doing what they had to do is a phrase the Trio often use. That is, the man who was about to become their antagonist saw them much as they saw themselves; he saw them as “survivors,” too.

  Returning to Republican politics, Turner finally landed a welfare job, as a senior official under the first President Bush. But the Bush administration was no place for radical welfare schemes, and Turner departed four years later with his plans still on the shelf. Wisconsin offered him a second-tier post that most top feds would have found an affront. Even the title was opaque: director of capacity building. But his duties would include an overhaul of the Milwaukee program, meaning that at age forty, Turner would finally get his hands on a big-city welfare machine. He ignored the injury to bureaucratic pride and drove seventeen hours to the western shore of Lake Michigan. “I wanted to run an urban welfare-to-work program in the worst sort of way,” he said.

  Turner’s timing was perfect. He got to Wisconsin in the spring of 1993, shortly before Tommy Thompson’s showdown with the legislature’s Democrats. First the governor accepted their dare to abolish AFDC. Then he had Turner lead a group to design its replacement—to do for real what he had been doing in his head since junior high school. The plan Turner proposed—Wisconsin Works, or “W-2”—was so radical that when Gerry Whitburn, the state welfare secretary, read it in his deer stand, he nearly fell out of the tree. Everyone would be forced to work in order to get a check: no exemptions, no exceptions, no delays. And work, not just join a job-search program. For those who couldn’t find private employment, the state would create thousands of community service jobs. And it would offer subsidized child care and health care, not just to people on welfare but to a much broader class of needy workers. With its expansion of “opportunity” (child care, health care, and subsidized jobs) and “responsibility” (strict work rules), W-2 was a big, bold, serious plan, and in its broadest sense similar to what Clinton originally had in mind. Thompson, evolving from grandstander to innovator, signed off with surprisingly few changes, and Turner was as amazed as anyone in early 1996 when the proposal made it through the legislature intact. The obstacle of federal approval loomed, but when Clinton signed the welfare bill a few months later, handing authority to the states, Wisconsin was free to proceed. What started as a game of legislative chicken turned into what was, on paper at least, the boldest alternative to cash assistance since the WPA.

  W-2 brought Wisconsin renown. But it is not really how the state ended welfare. By the time the program started in September 1997, the statewide caseload had already fallen nearly 60 percent, with Angie and Jewell among the first to tumble off the rolls. Indeed, Turner’s success in cutting caseloads under AFDC is what made its expensive replacement affordable. In effect, he took a voluntary program that emphasized education and made it a mandatory program that emphasized work. Had someone done that to AFDC earlier, there wouldn’t have been such fervor to end it.

  Turner’s first target wasn’t the poor but the job-search bureaucracy. While the state set overall policy, and county caseworkers processed the checks, the motivation classes were mostly run by private contractors, like Goodwill Industries or the YWCA. And they got paid whether anyone got motivated or not. With a rudimentary form of performance-based contracting, Turner tied a small part of each group’s pay to the number of people placed in jobs. The notion that they were supposed to be putting clients to work struck some of the groups as news. “I thought they wanted us to get people GEDs,” the head of one agency said. As Turner put it: “Even though the program was called J-O-B-S, the message hadn’t been absorbed, even by the chief executive.” In each year from 1994 to 1996, the number of recipients placed in jobs rose by more than 30 percent. Since the baseline was low, and job loss high, the effect on the caseload was small. But Turner drew a lesson: “You can mobilize the bureaucracy a lot more than I had thought.”

  Focusing next on applicants, Turner swiped an idea from a hamlet two time zones away. He
was making small talk at a conference one day when an Oregon official mentioned the news from an out-of-the-way place called LaGrande. Before opening a case, LaGrande made applicants meet with a “financial planner” to discuss alternatives: Could they move in with Mom? Had they looked for a job? New cases had plunged. “It turns out that people who apply for welfare have a lot more options than we think,” the Oregon official said. The story was relayed as a curious backwoods development, not the makings of major new policy. But a light went on in Turner’s head: the idea that the poor have other options was both an article of faith and the lesson of his days as a rent collector. Back in Wisconsin, Turner dialed up the “financial planner” herself, a former restaurant hostess named Sandy Steele, who was chosen for her welcoming persona; LaGrande wasn’t at all trying to drive people away. Still, nearly a third of the applicants withdrew their forms rather than sit through the session. Never mind an hour of counseling, Turner thought: why not require every applicant to spend a few weeks looking for a job?

  The idea clashed with the reigning administrative premise—that eligible families ought to get aid—and legislators wouldn’t go along. But Turner found a loophole that allowed a pilot project. And to persuade local officials, he drove around Wisconsin with a giant speakerphone, piping in upbeat Sandy Steele to explain how she had done it. By the time he won permission to go statewide in March 1996, Turner required every applicant to spend a few weeks sitting in motivation class and filling out employer logs. Someone could always fake it, of course, but the more the hassle factor rose, the more the rolls went down; as soon as “Self-Sufficiency First” began, case openings fell by a third. Over time, the concept gained a new name—“diversion”—and variations were launched, amid significant controversy, in thirty states. In some cases, diversion did become a tool for driving the needy away; some of the most serious problems arose under a program later run by Turner himself as welfare commissioner in New York City.

  Despite the ebbing applications, Turner still needed a program for those already on the rolls. For them came Turner’s third initiative and his most potent: for the first time in the history of AFDC, he established a real work program in the heart of a major city. While the idea was one he had mulled all his life, he once again grabbed the details from an eccentric westerner, a Utah liberal named Bill Biggs, whose work had won a curious following on the Right. The Biggs story began in 1981, when Utah abolished the small, optional part of AFDC that served married couples. When the next year’s recession left families sleeping in their cars, the legislature created a state relief program, but imposed a work requirement. Biggs took charge. The Emergency Work Program, as he designed it, had two distinctive features. One, it really involved work; Biggs had recipients cleaning the highways, not sitting in motivation class. Even more unusual, it only paid people for the hours they logged on the job. This feature, known as “Pay for Performance,” sounds exceedingly routine: you work, then you get paid. But most welfare-to-work programs took the opposite tack, sending recipients their monthly grants and threatening to reduce them later if they broke the rules. Reduce, not eliminate: on the rare occasions when penalties were imposed, they didn’t amount to much. In practice, as Jewell had discovered, you got paid whether you showed up or not.

  Biggs wasn’t trying to cut the rolls. He was trying to help people get jobs, so he wanted to imitate a real workweek. Nonetheless, the caseload fell nearly 90 percent from the levels of the previous program; rather than work for welfare, most people quickly found regular jobs, even in Utah’s down economy. Turner was trying to cut the rolls, and he proceeded in Milwaukee along similar lines. Through the county government and nonprofit groups, he lined up thousands of community service positions, where recipients could be sent to sweep floors, answer phones, or sort the mail. And he reduced their checks for every hour they missed. Wisconsin’s version of Pay for Performance was even stricter than Utah’s. The beleaguered Clinton administration, eager to look tough in the welfare wars of 1995, let Wisconsin punish those who didn’t comply by taking away their food stamps, too. Under the old system, Jewell could ignore her work notices and still collect a cash and food stamp package worth more than $800 a month. Now if she failed to appear, $10 of food stamps was all she would have left. With the welfare world focused on the national bill, the experiment initially got little attention. But flying in below the radar in welfare’s final hour, Turner put the whole safety net in play.

  Turner launched Pay for Performance in March 1996, five months before Clinton signed the new federal law. With that, the city’s caseloads collapsed. They fell 24 percent in the program’s first year. They fell 66 percent in the two years until the transition to W-2 was complete. During that time, about twenty-two thousand Milwaukee families stopped getting welfare, meaning that about one city resident in ten was someone Turner had removed from the rolls. Nothing like it had ever been seen in a big-city welfare program. Outside Milwaukee, the rolls fell even faster, 93 percent over the two-year run-up to W-2. It didn’t take a time limit to cut the rolls. It didn’t take a surge in the economy. It simply took a work requirement, strictly enforced. “The numbers just blew me away,” Turner said.

  Why would so many ostensibly destitute people decline to work for welfare? One reason is that, as with Angie and Jewell, many were already working. Covert work is by definition hard to measure, but a Milwaukee researcher named John Pawasarat got a glimpse by comparing two state databases. One identified every city resident on welfare. The other showed everyone with earnings. Although only 12 percent of the recipients had said they were working, 31 percent appeared on the quarterly wage earners list—nearly a third had jobs. Over the course of a year, more than half of the people on welfare worked. And even that understates the amount of hidden work since the wage file omitted jobs in other states and informal jobs like babysitting or doing friends’ hair. Many people didn’t show up at the work program because they couldn’t be in two places at once. For those who didn’t already have a job, the work rules were a goad to get one. Working off her cash and food stamps, a woman on welfare would be earning the equivalent of the minimum wage—$5.15 an hour. Most entry-level jobs paid at least $6, and state and federal tax credits effectively raised that to about $9—offering at least the surface hopes of getting ahead. Plus, some of the jobs that Turner set up were transparently dull or dumb. In the most notorious case, women were sent to sort coin-sized toys called “pogs” into piles of different colors. When they finished, a supervisor dumped them, and the next crew started again. Faced with tedious or demeaning tasks, thousands of Milwaukee women had the same thought as Jewell: “I ain’t gonna be doing that! I’ll work and get my own money!”

  Even those who piled the pogs weren’t sure to get their checks. In his zeal to ferret out the guilty, Turner created a system that often punished the innocent, too, through an obscure change in the state’s check-writing software. Let’s say Jewell was assigned to work at a food bank but overslept. In the past, no penalties were imposed unless proof of her absence made a cumbersome trek—from the food bank to a work-program case manager (typically at a nonprofit agency like Goodwill) and then to a county eligibility worker, who had to go into the computer system and request a payment reduction. As long as the paperwork was missing, Jewell got her full check. Turner reversed the default mechanism. Now it was proof of Jewell’s attendance that had to navigate the traffic jam. Until her eligibility worker got a time sheet and entered the hours she had actually worked, the computer - wouldn’t issue her payment. With that, the number of families penalized each month rose a dozenfold, to more than four thousand. This solved the problem that Turner had in mind: women who ignored the work rules no longer got paid. But thousands of women who did comply didn’t get paid, either, simply because their paperwork was missing. Congressional investigators later found that 44 percent of the penalties were imposed in error. While the lost income was typically restored, it could take weeks just to get a caseworker on the line—and pr
esumably the people who had agreed to work especially needed the cash. Unrepentant, Turner eventually retreated on tactical grounds, reverting to the old software. (“It just wasn’t worth the advocates running around with a case of someone not getting their check,” he said.) But in the collective mind of the city’s poor, one thought seemed to be forming: Why mess with these people?

  Not everyone who left, left for a job. Some turned to relatives, some to boyfriends. Some were too sick, depressed, or addicted to navigate the bureaucratic chaos. Even seeking a medical exemption demands an ability to function that some people didn’t possess. One of the saddest sights I encountered in Milwaukee was that of Amber Peck, a fiftyish woman who lost her check, her apartment, and after a drug binge, her spot in a homeless shelter. We met on a snowy February night, and I gave her a ride to a cross-town church that had opened its floors to the dispossessed. She said that while she had understood the work rules, she couldn’t bring herself to comply. “I stay depressed all the time.” Then gripping two shopping bags filled with old clothes, she picked her way across an icy church lawn to lie on the hard, lonely floor.

  In prosecuting his war, Turner was fully prepared to see such abject destitution rise. One of the failures of welfare, he argued, was that it papered over recipients’ problems. By paying the rent, it let drug addicts ignore their addictions and the mentally ill postpone seeking help. “You want to get people into a situation where they have to resolve their issues,” he said, a process he called “thrusting them into the public square.” Whether much issue-resolution occurred is a matter of some doubt. A few years later, I went looking for Amber Peck, wondering whatever had become of her impossibly sad silhouette. The trail led to a low-income Samaritan named Eula Edwards, who answered the door in a torn housecoat and talked of having raised three dozen foster kids. She had taken in Amber after meeting her at a place called Power House Delivery Church. By the time I arrived, Amber was locked up on a drug charge, and Edwards was relieved. Before her arrest, Amber had been beaten on the streets and all but left for dead. “I used to be worried ’bout her all night,” Edwards said. “At least now we know where she’s at.”