For those who care about the scope and effectiveness of America’s federal safety net, the last two years have been disappointing. To be frank, it’s always been disappointing, but this time we were naïve enough to get our hopes up. In the wake of the pandemic we saw, and loudly celebrated, significant expansions and reforms. Even more loudly, we touted the harms prevented, and the surely incontrovertible good that resulted for poor families and poor children and called for many of those reforms to become permanent. First among many, in this category, was the brief restructuring and expansion of Child Tax Credit, which significantly broadened both the size and reach of this benefit, reducing child poverty down to historic lows. That change, along with significant expansions to unemployment benefits, Medicaid, and housing and food assistance, dramatically altered and expanded the reach of the federal safety net. There were flaws, mistakes, and holes no doubt, but overall, the extent and effect of assistance reform was breathtaking. Despite the clear positive effect of these policies and despite significant political investment by center/left policy organizations and the Biden administration, in large part attempts to make these changes permanent failed.
The authors of the article celebrated in this jot, Andrew Hammond, Ariel Jurow Kleiman and Gabriel Scheffler, have written previously in 2020 in How the Covid-19 Pandemic Has and Should Reshape the American Safety Net. In their latest piece, the authors engage in a crucial post-mortem analysis, and identify and propose a potentially highly effective solution to a key post-failure question: “the next time there is an opportunity to strengthen anti-poverty programs, what should Congress do?” Their answer, while perhaps not as lofty as the sweeping vision of those who hoped that the pandemic reforms would translate into a far broader and more universally-oriented system of support, provides a workable, effective, responsive and, potentially more resilient set of mechanisms for reform the next time opportunity calls.
In short, the authors propose that when future and sadly inevitable economic crises create an opportunity for safety net reform, legislators should focus on incorporating automatic triggers into relevant legislation. These trigger provisions, principally for these authors, legislative triggers and indexing, are statutory mechanisms that change policy automatically in response to external events. Their great appeal is that, once enacted, they require no congressional action to enact benefit changes or rule adjustments. So, for example, a trigger might automatically expand benefits or lift a restriction (say work requirements) when unemployment goes above a specific rate. It would also, of course, go back down (in the case of a benefit) or be reinstated (in the event of an eligibility rule shift) once the triggering event subsided, but at least triggers could be designed to actually respond at the beginning and last the length of the crisis. Of all the good things one can say about the pandemic era reforms, as the authors show, many failed on both those tests. Benefits did not always arrive soon enough, and they often went away far before the crisis had concluded.
Indexing, while slightly different, automatically links benefit amounts to an external index or rate, adjusting benefit levels to account for the external shift. As the authors point out, indexes are fairly common in the federal safety net (for example SSDI, SSI, SNAP and the EITC are all indexed to inflation) but many other programs that support low-income Americans (for example the SSI asset limit and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit amount and phase out) are not.
The authors freely admit that these proposals are not designed to make the safety net more generous per se. Instead, they argue persuasively that triggers and indices can make the safety net “less politicized, more responsive, and more protective of vulnerable Americans.” They carefully analyze a wide range of other, softer legislative triggers (e.g. sunset provisions and prompting legislation) and demonstrate that their proposals are more likely to be effective. They also carefully analyze the problems endemic to cyclical, crisis-induced legislating and easily persuade their readers that their proposals will effectively mitigate harmful policy drift, make the safety net more responsive to non-economic “disasters,” address state level variation, and improve the relationship between data and policy. These authors wield their deep technical expertise to provide a sound roadmap for those working now to craft legislative proposals that might, at a future political moment, more effectively and permanently respond to crisis and make the safety net stronger over time. In an era of disappointment, that is no small thing.
