Dismantling the Federal Safety Net: Fictions Versus Realities

Abstract

Since 1981, Republican office holders in the White House and in Congress have been trying to dismantle the fiftyto sixty-year old constellation of federal grants giving financial aid to poor people and poor cities. The Reagan and Bush administrations did succeed in actually eliminating some grant programs to city governments that helped poor people indirectly -general revenue-sharing and urban development action grants. And they cut others community development block grants, economic assistance grants and loans, mass transit grantssome drastically in constant dollars. ' But neither the Reagan nor Bush administration was able to cut out the social safety net programs that provided benefits to poor people directly or even to keep spending on those programs from rising. With the purported objective of both balancing the federal budget and giving an income tax cut of $245 billion over seven years, the new 1995-1996 Republican congressional majorities have been trying to eliminate the federal social safety net that has guaranteed some minimum floor below which the living conditions of poor people including mostly poor children would not be allowed to fall anywhere in the United States. In place of that safety net, the Republican majorities would substitute capped block grants of money to each state for the purpose of covering the needs now addressed by safety net programs like welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, and school lunches and leave to state governments the defining of eligibility for benefits and what kinds of benefits to provide.2 The new congres-