On April 10, 2018, President Trump signed the euphemistically titled “Executive Order Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility.” The executive order highlights “principles that are central to the American spirit — work, free enterprise, and safeguarding human and economic resources” but notably leaves out other principles, such as charity, kindness, and concern for children that are—or should be—central to the country. There are exciting developments in our understanding of poverty and how government can best support the needy. But rather than use what we now know, this executive order only recycles outdated and disastrous ideas that will devastate the poor.
In many ways, the executive order is nothing new. In 1996, President Clinton signed welfare reform into law. Pushed along by popular, and often racist, anger directed against the poor, the so-called “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act” imposed both work requirements and a five-year lifetime eligibility cap on welfare recipients. It also converted welfare from a federal right to a state-administered program “not [to] be interpreted to entitle any individual or family to assistance” and funded by federal block grants. The popular memory of welfare reform is that it worked. Buoyed by the strong economy of the second half of the Clinton years, welfare rolls declined and large numbers of former welfare recipients started working.
But more than two decades after welfare reform, we now have a better understanding of what happens when we shred the social safety net, when state-administered block grants replace federal programs, and of the very nature of poverty. Reporters and scholars in recent years have shown the cost of gutting welfare for the poorest of the poor. Jason DeParle connected the pledge of President Clinton to “end welfare as we know it” with the suffering of families during the great recession and with a rise in the number of people for whom food stamps (SNAP) is their only form of income. In many states, despite the continuing rhetoric about welfare dependency, traditional cash welfare reaches so few families that it is practically dead-letter law.
But just because people are not getting welfare does not mean they are not poor. As highlighted in two scholarly books, Peter Edelman’s So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America and Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer’s $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, extreme poverty, defined as less than half the official poverty line, is on the rise. In theory and in Republican rhetoric, converting welfare into state-administered block grants allows states to tackle poverty through locally appropriate means. But in practice, as Daniel L. Hatcher unpacks in The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens, states diverted block grant funding to their general funds, filling budget holes unrelated to the poor. Rather than using the added flexibility to address barriers to employment, for example, states simply stole the money from the poor, which the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act” permitted.
Trump’s executive order is a transparent attempt to extend welfare reform across the board. Starting with the familiar conservative complaint that “many of the programs designed to help families have instead delayed economic independence, perpetuated poverty, and weakened family bonds,” the executive order is largely a work of imagination. It takes a page from Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, published in 1984, ignoring all that has changed since—both in poverty research and the structure of the U.S. economy. Following a path worn down by countless conservative academics, the executive order pushes the idea that well-meaning social policies are harming the very people they are designed to help by giving them too much and by not attaching behavioral strings. This notion disappeared from conservative ideology when it was time to pass tax reform in 2017 benefiting the rich, but reappears with bite when it comes to the poor.
The executive order conjures the familiar demons of the right. The first two planks of the order’s “Principles of Economic Mobility” are work and family. In order to “[i]mprove employment outcomes and economic independence,” the executive order first calls for “strengthening existing work requirements for work-capable people and introducing new work requirements when legally permissible.” It then requires the federal government “[p]romote strong social networks as a way of sustainably escaping poverty,” explaining that “work and marriage” are central parts of this effort. A lot of ink has been spilled in academic journals detailing all the problems with the assumption that work and marriage are the way for people to escape poverty. Blanket work requirements not only fail to take into account market conditions and individual limitations, but they also imagine that the poor do not want to work or are not working.
The truth is that while most poor people who can work do so, inequality in the labor market means that work is not necessarily a path out of poverty. The working poor, even the homeless working poor, are all around us. In part because of rising inequality over the last four decades, a job does not guarantee entrance to the middle class. Inequality has also reshaped the institution of marriage, as June Carbone and Naomi Cahn describe in their book, Marriage Markets: How Inequality Is Remaking the American Family. Even if we overlook the hypocrisy of President Trump promoting stable marriages and the troubling degree to which marriage promotion by the state arguably intrudes on personal liberty, the relationship between poverty and marriage is, to put it gently, far more complicated and subject to debate than imagined by Trump’s executive order.
Finally, just as was the case in 1996, the executive order pushes the idea that poverty and economic mobility are best dealt with at the state and local level. Devolution to states and localities by granting them additional “[f]lexibility” supposedly will allow them to “tailor their public assistance programs to the unique needs of their communities.” Unfortunately, we already have glimpses of what “flexibility” will mean in practice: harsh policies designed to kick people off public assistance and further isolate them from the larger community.
The executive order is not the first salvo in Trump’s war against the poor. The administration pushed for work requirements as part of the budget proposal process last year. Budget director Mick Mulvaney, in classic Washington doublespeak, argued that “[w]e believe in the social safety net” at the same time that he pushed for linking food stamps with work requirements. And in February of this year, Kentucky became the first of many conservatives states to condition Medicaid on work. This was done with the encouragement of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which issued new guidance in January allowing for such measures. As the Kentucky example shows, states can hardly be trusted to prioritize the interests of the poor. Much the same can be said when the focus shifts from the state to the local level. As part of a truly path-breaking series on poverty, the Guardian showed the extent to which cities rely on sending homeless to other parts of the country as a significant part of their approach to homelessness. Rather than tackle the myriad challenges of homelessness and affordable housing, cities give the homeless one-way bus and plane tickets and — problem “solved.” Sadly, the executive order seems to create a one-way ratchet, directing states and localities to further weaken the social safety net with little concern for those, especially children, likely to be harmed.
The lengthy period of wage stagnation for most workers despite steady productivity gains since the 1970s push the country into an economic and social moment that practically demands that the leaders of both political parties focus more attention on matters of poverty, inequality, and economic mobility. An executive order could provide the spark needed to help further that national dialogue, but this this is not such an order. There is increasing awareness, across the political spectrum, that America is not only deeply divided economically but also has a rigid class structure.
Though you would not know it based on the executive order, this is actually an exciting time to be thinking about poverty and inequality in America. The Occupy Movement in 2011 proved that activists, particularly millennials, could sustain an inequality-based protest movement. Work by the Economic Mobility Project, a joint project of leading conservative and progressive think tanks, showed in 2013 that those born poor have little chance of advancing even to the middle of the income distribution. This year, Raj Chetty and co-authors revealed once again just how heavy a hand race plays in limiting the upward mobility of black and Native American males. And just this month, Matthew Desmond, continuing the work begun in his 2017 Pulitzer-prize winning book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, released a massive eviction records data set that is sure to be a source of inspiration and insight for scores of social scientists. All this is to say that while the executive order seems stuck in the mid-1990s, research since then shows the importance of structural forces and could be used to meaningfully address poverty, inequality, and economic mobility.
There can be little doubt that the country stands at an inflection point when it comes to the safety net. In December 2017, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, issued a damning statement about poverty in the United States. As Alston observed, “caricatured narratives about the purported innate differences between rich and poor have been sold to the electorate by some politicians and media, and have been allowed to define the debate.” The central pernicious idea underlying Trump’s executive order—that the poor are lazy and do not want to work—sadly continues to drive a wedge between those receiving public assistance and those struggling at the bottom edge of the middle class. The worn-out notion that the poor should be divided into two categories, deserving and undeserving, continues to resonate politically, despite the fact that “18% of children – some 13.3 million – were living in poverty” in 2016 (emphasis mine) according to Alston.
The question for anti-poverty advocates today is not whether Trump’s executive order is a bad thing, which it certainly is, but: how can debates about poverty, inequality, and economic mobility move beyond blaming those at the bottom of the economic system for their own poverty? One possible answer is to remind ourselves and the public that we are better as a nation than efforts to demonize the poor suggest. To borrow from Pope Francis, when it comes to providing for basic needs such as food, shelter, and health care, we should give freely and without judgment. We are a wealthy enough nation to support the most needy and have enough resources to care even about the “undeserving” poor. At some point our very humanity demands to move beyond the divisive way poverty has been framed since the early 1980s — and beyond this executive order.