The Other Welfare: Supplemental Security Income and U.S. Social Policy by Edward D. Berkowitz and Larry DeWitt (review)

To fix a patchwork of benefits, the federal government created a nationwide, standardized program. Rules called for states to operate their own program or to transfer administration to a federal agency. The proposal worked its way through Congress during the president’s first term, and started enrolling people early in his second. The introduction of the program brought one snafu after another: Confused beneficiaries were angry about the loss of previous benefits. Digitization of paper records yielded mixed results, and officials were quick to blame computer resources that proved balky and unproductive. Eventually, the feds straightened out their procedures, and. . . . Although this sketch might appear to depict the trajectory of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, it actually describes the creation of Supplemental Security Income (ssi), the development of which is the subject of The Other Welfare.

The Other Welfare is a clear and compelling history of policy making and implementation inside the beltway by two masters of the genre. Although the main instigators of the program remained in Washington, consequences of their decisions rippled outward and influenced the material well-being of many Americans. The legislative and bureaucratic history of the federal ssi program, which was intended to unify disparate but similar programs around the country, has obvious resonance in the present day.

This history of ssi begins with meditations on welfare reform by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1969 and continues through Clinton-era welfare reform. Berkowitz and DeWitt perform a particularly deft analysis of the composition of beneficiaries. Initially created to aid the elderly, the blind, and the more or less permanently disabled, ssi quickly evolved into a program primarily for the disabled and, in particular, the mentally ill and mentally retarded—a development, according to the authors that no one foresaw. Furthermore, to the extent that de-institutionalization of the mentally ill in the mid-1970s happened willy-nilly, the availability of ssi for emancipated inmates offers a positive example of the law of unexpected consequences. Indeed, the ambiguity of disability made ssi a target of welfare reform under President Clinton, after its alleged generosity to those who were disabled by alcoholism and drug addiction. The book concludes with the term of Michael Astrue as Commissioner of Social Security, which ended in 2013. The chronological breadth of coverage from the beginning of the program to the present is most satisfying.

The patchwork of benefits consisted of state programs that dated to the New Deal. Some states provided a high and others a low level of benefits. One goal of ssi was to raise the minimum benefit nationwide, but this study provides no estimate of what a proper level of benefits should have been. Nor does it provide the standards employed by the states or the federal government to reach the eventual benefit levels—just a vague sense that more was better. After standardization, the Social Security Administration allowed states that offered substantial benefits to continue paying extra, but in some of these states, unified benefit levels threatened to reduce payments. In this case, write the authors, the feds twisted state-level arms to make sure they “did the right thing,” which meant continuing the higher benefit level. But what was the “right” benefit level?

The Other Welfare is an excellent and insightful contribution to the study of federal and state interactions in social-welfare policy making and execution. In a few years its readers will want to return to it to trace the parallels between ssi and Obamacare.