New Push on Welfare

No one has worked longer or harder for Senate passage of President Nixon's welfare-reform legislation than Connecticut's Democratic Senator Abraham Ribicoff--even though Ribicoff had drawn up a somewhat different bill of his own.* As Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in the Kennedy Administration, Ribicoff developed expertise on the subject that is respected by his colleagues, and his leadership seemed vital to the bill's slim chances for favorable action this year. Amazingly, however, until last week no important White House official had even talked to Ribicoff about the matter. Instead, HEW offended him by releasing what he considered inflated statistics on the cost of an amendment he had suggested.

Irked, Ribicoff announced that he was no longer going to lead the fight for the bill, charging that the Administration did not seem interested in its own program. Aware that Ribicoff might well be the key to passage, Nixon quickly telephoned the Senator to assure him that he did indeed want it passed. HEW Secretary Elliot Richardson and Presidential Adviser John Ehrlichman called on Ribicoff to seek a compromise on their different approaches to reform, whereupon a pleased Ribicoff announced that "I'm enlisted in this fight for the duration."

Fumble. Under the compromise, Ribicoff won Administration support for a trial of one of the bill's key provisions: a minimum income for working poor. Ribicoff had begun to wonder some time ago whether a vast program of supplementing the pay of low-income families should be put into effect without being tested first on a substantial scale. The White House opposed massive testing because it might cause delay. The Administration's fumble gave Ribicoff the opportunity to insist on a test. The trial would be held in sites still to be selected, and the full plan would be in effect in 1974--about seven months later than HEW had planned--unless Congress finds the trial unsatisfactory and vetoes that part of the program.

"This can't be passed in the Senate unless the President pushes and shoves," said Ribicoff. "There has been a world of change in that now." Ribicoff says he would like to take credit for a clever maneuver that coaxed the President and his men to push. Actually, he was surprised--and pleased --that it worked out that way.

* Ribicoff's plan is more generous than the Administration's bill. He would set the basic support level for a jobless family of four at $3,000, compared with the bill's $2,400; he would also raise the maximum income at which working families would remain eligible for welfare aid from the bill's $4,200 to $5,720.

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