The Other Welfare: Supplemental Security Income and U.S. Social Policy

Preface

This book reflects a collaboration between an academic and a public historian. Since collaboration on a historical monograph is relatively rare, it might help orient the reader to explain this one. Ed Berkowitz is an academic historian. His attraction to the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program stems from the ways the program intersects with much of his previous work. In particular, he has written about disability policy, Social Security, and the seventies—all things that inform this book. He has also had experience in the realm of welfare reform, both writing about the topic and, briefly, working on the topic in Washington settings.¹

Larry DeWitt is a public historian. Although trained in the history and philosophy of science, he has spent almost all of his adult life working for the Social Security Administration. As a fieldworker in Los Angeles and Phoenix, he has actually served on the front lines of the SSI program, taking applications and determining benefits. Called to central headquarters, he has observed the executive leadership of the agency at close range. His main project has involved his work as the agency’s chief historian, creating an in-house Social Security archive, curating a Social Security museum, and establishing a large and widely used website on Social Security’s history.

Larry’s position as chief historian has enabled us to utilize the many archival files and agency publications that are part of the historical collections in the Social Security Administration’s history office. These records complement research into two other types of primary sources. One is the formal record created by Congress through such things as committee reports, hearings, and floor debates, as well as all of the supporting reports by committee staffs, the General Accounting Office, and the other agencies under Congressional control. The other is the account left behind by newspapers and other periodicals that report on national politics and local affairs. The book makes extensive use of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, all neatly collected in easy to search digital editions.²

What emerges from the sources is a historical narrative that chronicles the development of the Supplemental Security Income program from its creation in 1972 into the twenty-first century. Even though the book was written in Baltimore, it is an inside the Beltway endeavor, one that reflects the action from the top down rather than social history that describes events from the bottom up. The book looks at political struggles that have often taken place inside the Ways and Means Committee and the Social Security Administration. The agents of change tend to be subcommittee chairmen, federal judges, television producers, or Social Security Commissioners rather than, say, welfare rights activists.³ In this sense, the book represents an exercise in what might be described as formal policy history. We nonetheless hope that the reader’s eyes will not glaze over, since, as we try to show, all of these political and bureaucratic decisions have important human consequences.

In this collaboration, therefore, we have sought to create a book that is in touch with the sources, that reflects the bureaucratic realities of running a large and complex program, and that succeeds, at least in places, in getting beyond the details of one program to observe larger historical patterns.

Like any book, this one has benefited from the support, help, and advice from many other collaborators. Our list of debts begins at home, and we would like to thank our wives—Emily Frank and Gabriela DeWitt—for tolerating weekend meetings and other distractions. At Cornell University Press, Michael McGandy has supported this project from its very beginnings. At George Washington University, Michael Weeks, the patron saint of the history department, has, as always, been both thoughtful and helpful, as have colleagues Bill Becker, Leo Ribuffo, Richard Stott, Cynthia Harrison, Kimberly Morgan, Kathy Newcomer, and Marcy Norton. The University also provided direct financial support that made publication of this volume possible.

At the Social Security Administration, Richard Gabryszewski and Eric DeLisle of the history office provided aid and support. Tamber’s Restaurant in Baltimore catered the collaboration. Finally, many friends and colleagues inside and outside of academia, including Chris Howard, Chris Foreman, Pamela Larson, Virginia Reno, Eric Kingson, Kim McQuaid, Daniel Beland, Jennifer Erkulwater, Molly Michelmore, Felicia Kornbluh, Jennifer Bertolet, Martha Derthick, Allen Jensen, Brian Balogh, Gareth Davies, and Christina Dempsey Chronister, have come to our aid. Although Robert Ball and Monroe Berkowitz died before the appearance of this book, their insights and example remained with us as we wrote it. We are grateful to each of these individuals and institutions.

Introduction

In 1972 Congress, with the active support of the Nixon administration, created a new welfare program to replace three older programs. The older welfare programs depended on federal grants to the states, and much of the policy action in terms of benefit levels and administrative rules took place on the state level. Known as Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the new program relied upon federal administration to provide, in the official language of the House Committee on Ways and Means, monthly cash payments in accordance with uniform, nationwide eligibility requirements to needy aged, blind, and disabled persons.¹

SSI created nationwide benefit standards for welfare in what insiders called the adult welfare categories. This audacious effort at welfare reform marked the high tide of the expansive welfare state of the postwar and Great Society eras. The Social Security Administration (SSA), which ran the SSI program for the entire nation, maintained the same basic benefit rate everywhere in the United States. A person who sought aid from SSI filed an application in a Social Security office, rather than in an office of the local or state welfare agency. Those aged, blind, or disabled people who qualified received U.S. government checks every month and were free of much of the oversight and supervision that social workers exercised over other welfare recipients.

What happened after 1972? Did the audacious effort at welfare reform succeed? Between then and now, the program developed in three unexpected ways. Over time, it became a disability program, rather than a program that primarily served the elderly. Expected to erase the stigma from the receipt of government benefits in the manner of Social Security, it instead drew the criticism from politicians who accused SSI recipients of corrupting children and exploiting the nation’s immigration laws for personal gain. Created with the hope of making the federal government the primary provider of cash welfare benefits, it nonetheless contained wide variations among the states.

The basic argument of this book is that, contrary to the predictions of policymakers in 1972 and the historians who subsequently wrote about the program, SSI failed to meet its initial objectives. Instead it became a typical federal welfare program of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Two quotations set the tone of the book. The first comes from Senator Russell Long, an enthusiastic SSI supporter, who told his Senate colleagues in 1972 when SSI was under discussion, One of the most ambitious things in this measure is the proposal of the Finance Committee for a program that would provide $3.1 billion additional income for the aged, blind, and disabled. We would not call it a welfare program in the future, he said, because the benefits this would provide would be so far beyond that which is being provided…that we think this should not be regarded as a welfare program hereafter.² The second quotation comes from Jay Eisen, a California lawyer charged with investigating the program after its implementation: You remember those early missiles, the ones that got two or three feet off the pad and crashed? That was SSI.³

Like the space program, SSI eventually got off the ground. It then followed an unexpected trajectory. The first part of this book deals with the creation and implementation of the SSI program. The second part concerns the effect of the disability crisis on the program and the problems of running a disability program for children. The third part tells the story of SSI’s role in the 1996 welfare reform. The conclusion briefly examines the aftermath of the 1996 law and considers the policy lessons of SSI’s history.

The Old System—Aid to the Elderly, Blind, and Permanently and Totally Disabled

SSI started large and became larger. When the program went into operation in 1974, it already served nearly four million people, most of whom had been beneficiaries of the adult category welfare programs for the elderly, blind, and disabled that SSI replaced. Elderly recipients provided the preponderance of the initial SSI beneficiaries. Growth continued after 1974, even though those years marked what historians have called a turn to the right in American politics that made the climate less hospitable for liberal social programs and for welfare programs in particular. In December 2010, for example, SSI served some 9.1 million recipients, who received benefits worth about $48.1 billion. A substantial change had occurred in the nature of the SSI caseload as well. In 2010, the number of disabled people outnumbered the elderly people on the rolls by a factor of more than four to one.⁴

SSI replaced a welfare system created by the 1935 Social Security Act that reflected a New Deal revision of Progressive Era public policies. In this founding legislation for the modern welfare state, the federal government made grants to the states for programs in aid of indigent dependent children, the elderly, and the blind. The specific categories chosen in 1935 reflected previously established state programs that shifted welfare provision away from institutional care of the poorhouse variety and toward cash payments for special classes of needy individuals. The aid to the blind category, unlike the other two, owed its existence to serendipitous events that took place in Congress.

Beginning in the Progressive Era and continuing through the twenties, states established programs to aid needy dependent children in the form of widows’ pension laws. The modern Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program (later the Temporary Aid to Needy Families law) developed from these state programs.⁵ States also adopted old age pension laws, and these became the basis for the aid to the elderly category in the Social Security Act.⁶ By 1934, some twenty-eight states operated old age pension laws that, more often than not, provided meager benefits. Even Massachusetts, a wealthy state known for high social welfare benefits, paid an average of only $25 a month, with local governments having to come up with two-thirds of the cost. But that figure compared favorably with Mississippi, which had no old age pension program at all.⁷ The Social Security Act of 1935 added federal funds to defray some of the costs and increase the benefit levels of these programs, created incentives for all states to start such programs, and induced the states to run welfare programs that operated everywhere in that state, rather than in particular counties.

The committee of cabinet-level officials that wrote the 1935 Social Security Act, assisted by a large staff recruited specifically for that purpose, decided against establishing a welfare category for the blind in the omnibus social welfare law that launched the modern welfare, Social Security, and unemployment insurance programs.⁸ It did not seem sensible to single out the blind for special treatment when other people with disabilities, such as the deaf and people with mobility impairments, suffered equal if not greater hardship. That view prevailed throughout the lengthy consideration of the legislation by the House Ways and Means Committee. The Senate Finance Committee, however, invited representatives of private organizations who worked with the blind to testify. Robert B. Irwin, the Executive Director of the American Foundation for the Blind, appeared in this capacity and offered legislative language that would have extended aid to the elderly to blind individuals who were fifty years of age or older.⁹ S. Merwin Sinclair, President of Executives of State Commissions and State Agencies for the Blind, argued that the handicap of blindness on top of the handicap of age in a great majority of cases makes it a practical impossibility for even an employable blind person of 50 years or older to secure employment.¹⁰

The Senate Finance Committee proved receptive to these pleas. When Senator Pat Harrison (D-Mississippi) presented the bill to his colleagues on the Senate floor, he mentioned that his committee had added pensions for the blind to the bill already passed by the House.¹¹ The blind would have their own welfare category in which pensions could be paid to any needy blind person. That meant that the Senate even went beyond the request of the agencies representing the blind, which had hoped for a program that began at age fifty. Harrison hinted at the reasons for this largesse when he told his colleagues that he did not know when any committee was ever moved more than was the Senate Finance Committee when several old gentlemen, who were totally blind, were led into the committee room by their dogs and presented their case for aid to the blind in this country. Harrison pointed to the low employment rate among the blind—only an estimated 15 percent had jobs and very few were self-supporting—as a reason for encouraging and financially assisting state pensions for the blind.¹²

The federal government tried to supervise the new state welfare programs created by the Social Security Act, so that, for example, local officials did not link the receipt of benefits to a beneficiary’s political party. Congress did its best, however, to tie the hands of the federal administrators in establishing national benefit standards. Even after 1935, therefore, states remained the primary players in the public assistance field, and variations in benefit levels in different regions of an individual state persisted.¹³ Even though New York had to offer welfare benefits in the designated categories in every county, the benefit levels in New York City were higher than the benefit level in the rural upstate town of Malone. The benefits in Malone, in turn, were higher than those paid anywhere in Mississippi.

The 1950 amendments to the Social Security Act added a new and final category to the list of federally aided state welfare programs. The new category owed its existence to a political fight that showed how the politics of welfare could not be separated from the politics of Social Security in the postwar era. The fight concerned whether to add disability insurance to the Social Security program. As matters stood in 1950, the Social Security program paid benefits to the elderly, their dependents, and their survivors. Advocates of an expanded Social Security program wanted the program also to provide benefits to people who had to drop out of the labor force, short of the normal retirement age, because of a physical or mental disability that prevented them from working. The House supported disability insurance, and the Senate opposed it. As a fallback position, Congress agreed to a new public assistance program for the permanently and totally disabled as part of a large legislative package that made up the 1950 Social Security amendments.¹⁴

The distinctions in this debate, which might look on the surface to be quite technical and arcane, actually mattered. Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) would have functioned as a benefit payable as a matter of right to people who met the definition of disabled. Provided they were covered by the Social Security program, they would not have to prove they were poor in order to qualify. If they received benefits, they would take the form of a monthly check issued by the United States Treasury. Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled (APTD), the choice of legislators in 1950, functioned as a welfare program. That meant beneficiaries needed to pass a means test—prove they were poor and not merely physically or mentally impaired—to qualify for benefits. Successful applicants would receive checks from state or local welfare departments and in all probability need to check in periodically with local caseworkers or social workers.

The 1950 creation of APTD—the last of the building blocks for SSI—illustrated how legislators layered new programs on top of old ones without concern for the pile of programs—often with contradictory or overlapping missions—that remained in place. In this case, few if any people questioned whether the new Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled category should in effect supersede the old Aid to the Blind program, since presumably the blind were also disabled. Instead, in a pattern that was typical of American political development, Congress created Aid to the Blind in a casual manner in 1935 and left it in place as newer programs, such as Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled, came along.

In this way, the American social welfare system often amounted to a historical catalog of categorical programs representing different approaches to solving the problems of social policy. Supplemental Security Income was unique because it replaced the older aid to the elderly, aid to the blind, and aid to the permanently and totally disabled welfare programs. It substituted one federal program for many state and local programs, and SSI moved welfare for the aged, blind, and disabled from the state and local levels to the federal level of government, with the basic rules the same across the nation.

SSI, therefore, provides a test case of modern welfare reform. Its proponents sold it as both a simplification and an improvement over existing welfare programs. If these proponents had a model of a successful social welfare program in mind, it was Social Security, which appeared to operate more efficiently than other social welfare programs and to engender far less political controversy. SSI would be like Social Security. It would be run by the same agency, and it would operate at the national level. Welfare beneficiaries would be treated with the same dignity as Social Security beneficiaries. Indeed, many SSI recipients would also be getting Social Security. The new program would provide the elderly and the disabled with a modest, but nonetheless significant, supplement to their Social Security benefits that would ensure that they did not live in poverty.

Despite this grand ambition, SSI has not provoked much comment from historians and political scientists in part because historians misunderstand the events that led to SSI’s creation. SSI was part of a great bundle of programs and reform proposals that Congress considered between 1969 and 1972. The one that has received the most attention is President Nixon’s proposed reform of the Aid to Dependent Children program, known as the Family Assistance Plan (FAP). This plan would have created a new, federally administered welfare category for poor families with children. Instead of limiting welfare to single mothers and their children, it would have extended welfare to two-parent families with children, even if one of the parents was working. The program failed to pass for fear that it would be costly, add many people to the nation’s welfare rolls, and not provide sufficient incentives for people to enter or remain in the labor force.¹⁵

If the Family Assistance Plan failed, however, other key proposals in the same legislative package succeeded. In particular, Congress created SSI, raised Social Security benefits significantly, and added a feature to Social Security that assured that benefit levels would increase with the cost of living. Nixon’s social welfare proposals of this period were not legislative failures. On the contrary, they resulted by 1972 in a major expansion of the welfare state. We should remember not just the failure of FAP but the great success of Social Security and SSI.

Unimpressed by these accomplishments, some historians argue that the social welfare politics of the period between 1969 and 1972 reinforced old gender and racial patterns. The adult welfare categories and Social Security fared well, and the Aid to Dependent Children program fared badly. Linda Gordon, a leading feminist scholar of welfare and modern social policy, writes that, "In 1974 OAA {Old Age Assistance} and Aid to the Blind and Disabled were folded into the social insurance system under the Supplemental Security Income program. This left only AFDC as a maligned ‘welfare’ program."¹⁶ In other words, Congress rewarded the elderly and the disabled but punished single mothers, a disproportionate number of whom were black. That replicated a long-standing pattern, according to another recent scholar, in which benefits were more generous to the elderly and infirm than to able-bodied adults. And able-bodied adult recipients were much more likely to be nonwhite, so that SSI reinforced an enduring pattern of discrimination against poor, Black families. SSI, the program that went disproportionately to whites, represented a comparatively good deal. Its beneficiaries received the same federal funding, federal administration, and automatic cost of living adjustments afforded recipients of Social Security.¹⁷

These accounts of SSI mistake the wish for the deed. In an effort to show that programs for women and racial minorities were shortchanged in the Nixon era, historians paint too sharp a contrast between AFDC—the old program for mothers with dependent children—and SSI—the new program for the elderly, blind, and disabled. In particular, SSI was never folded into the social insurance system. It started and remained a means-tested welfare program.

In SSI individuals receive benefits according to what the program defines as their countable income. The more countable income they have, the less they receive in SSI benefits. Individuals who have resources in excess of $2,000 do not qualify for the program at all.¹⁸ These conditions do not apply to Social Security, since Social Security contains no means test.¹⁹ Furthermore, Social Security benefits include features not found in SSI. For example, a person covered by Social Security can elect to retire and begin receiving monthly benefits at age sixty-two, but elderly SSI recipients do not have a similar option. A married Social Security recipient can receive a benefit for his spouse and his dependents in ways that have no clear analogue in SSI. Social Security, a social insurance program, remains a much better deal than SSI, a welfare program.

If SSI has not been folded into Social Security, as historians claim and its creators hoped, what did happen to it from the era of its creation in the early seventies to the present day? This book pursues that historical question, mindful of how the American welfare state after 1972 differs from the ones that preceded it. Political scientists have enriched our understanding of the recent American welfare state by demonstrating that it is not just small and underdeveloped compared to more advanced welfare states in other countries. In this spirit political scientists have brought attention to America’s hidden, misunderstood, submerged, and delegated welfare state. America, it seems, carries out its social policy in unique ways, using such methods, models, and techniques as tax expenditures, federalism, and giving responsibility for administering important social policies to private, rather than public, entities.²⁰ SSI functions as a more visible part of the welfare state than, say, the features in the tax code that support private health plans. It nonetheless shares some hidden or misunderstood features with other social programs.

SSI’s history shows that, because of the way the contest over President Nixon’s social welfare proposals was framed, a radical welfare program appeared conservative. Considered in isolation, SSI would have engendered considerable political controversy. As part of a package that also included the Family Assistance Plan, SSI looked to be a prudent expansion of America’s welfare state. In this manner, it was not unlike the 1935 Social Security program—a sharp departure from past precedent that nonetheless gained political respectability in the context of the radical policy proposals that were current at the time.²¹

SSI covered the adult welfare categories. FAP, the proposed replacement for AFDC, would have gone to less respectable single mothers, a disproportionate number of whom were African Americans. (Its proponents failed to sell the notion that its real beneficiaries would be the working, deserving poor and that a program that rewarded work and intact families would replace a stigmatized welfare program.) Because of that political positioning, conservatives with influence over the policy process such as Senate Finance Committee chairman and Louisiana Senator Russell Long supported SSI and opposed FAP. As always, the historical context mattered.

The Social Security Administration received responsibility for running SSI because of its reputation for competence and its proven record as an agency that served large numbers of people efficiently. It tried to apply the most advanced public administration procedures, as they were understood in 1972, to the new program. That meant an emphasis on mechanized operations and, in particular, on the computer as a tool for collecting data, determining benefits, and sending out checks to the right people in the right amounts.

Contrary to the hopes of the Social Security Administration, the new program got off to a bad start in 1974. Created at the end of the long run of postwar prosperity, the program opened for business in the stagflation era of the seventies.²² It therefore faced a form of future shock. The bad economy helped fuel a rise in applications for benefits and put pressure on both state and federal budgets. Inflation, a particular feature of the bad economy, led to rising benefit levels, because SSI, in a special feature added to the program after 1972, linked the consumer price index and the benefit level.

The flawed implementation of SSI stripped away some of the Social Security Administration’s previous reputation for competence. In a declining economy, people’s situations necessitated frequent adjustments in benefit levels because SSI was a welfare program that reflected a person’s shifting income and resources. Frequent adjustments strained the capacity of the SSA computers. Checks went out to the wrong people in the wrong amounts or failed to go out to the right people in the right amounts.

Unplanned Policy Shifts

After the start-up glitches, SSI entered another phase of its history that featured a shift in the program’s identity from one intended primarily for the elderly to one that served mainly people with disabilities. The fact that SSI emerged as a disability program created its own complications. Disability, whether in Social Security or welfare programs, was a difficult concept to define and hence to control. Disability was a much less secure and stable benefit category than old age. Differing from notions of old age, sickness, or functional limitation, it involved a subjective judgment about whether someone was capable of working.²³ Adding to the complications, the SSI program contained the unique feature of paying benefits to children who were disabled. If disability meant an inability to work, what, exactly, did it mean for a newborn, a toddler, or an adolescent to be disabled?

SSI inherited institutional structures from existing programs, and in particular the Social Security Disability Insurance program. Without giving the matter a great deal of thought in 1972, Congress allowed the SSA to process SSI disability claims using the same administrative and bureaucratic apparatus that already applied to Social Security Disability Insurance. The states, not the federal government, ran the disability determination offices. The states decided whether a person was disabled, according to a law passed by Congress and regulations formulated by the Social Security Administration. This feature added the problem of variation by state to a public administration task that was inherently difficult.²⁴

Uncertainty about whether the people on the SSI rolls were really disabled meant that the program faced skeptical critics who worried that the disability category could be easily manipulated by applicants. Doubts about whether the applicants truly deserved the benefits undercut political support for the program. Therefore, SSI encountered problems merely because it was a disability program, something that its creators, who thought they were creating a program for the elderly, failed to foresee.

SSI became embroiled in controversies surrounding disability policy in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. The 1980 legislation attempted to create incentives for disabled SSI recipients to leave the rolls and enter the labor force. The Reagan administration’s implementation of these 1980 amendments produced a firestorm of protest that deserving people were being cut from the rolls. Congress reacted by passing new legislation in 1984 that made it easier for people already on the disability rolls to remain there. The courts responded in 1991 with a major decision that loosened the requirements for disabled children to get SSI. In 1996 Congress overturned the 1991 Supreme Court decision through legislation.

The Policymaking System for SSI

Martha Derthick’s 1979 classic, Policymaking for Social Security, provides a model for this book. In the manner of Derthick, we want to describe policymaking for Supplemental Security Income. Writing from the Brookings Institution for an audience of policymakers, political scientists, and political historians, Derthick analyzed how a small group of program executives and Congressional insiders made policy for Social Security.²⁵ She devoted chapters to the program executives at the Social Security Administration and the political figures in the White House, Congress, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. All of these figures remained important in SSI but with some significant differences in what intellectual historian Daniel Rogers has called the age of fracture.²⁶ In particular, program executives, who enjoyed considerable autonomy over the development of the Social Security program before the seventies, exercised much less control over SSI. Some of this control went to the President and other executive branch officials who determined policy and made initial decisions about spending levels. Some went to Congress, with its expanded system of subcommittees and the increased turnover in the leadership produced by transitions from one political party to the other. Wilbur Mills and Robert Ball, the legendary leader of the Ways and Means Committee and the long-serving and widely respected head of the Social Security Administration, respectively, had few counterparts in the policymaking system that applied to SSI.

Derthick rounded out her list of policy influences with the conservatives who opposed the expansion of Social Security, expert critics who framed the intellectual debate over Social Security, and public opinion. Conservatives and expert critics played a larger role in SSI than in Social Security. The conservative critique of the program led to major program modifications that accompanied welfare reform in 1996. In that year SSI faced the same sorts of criticisms and many of the same legislative outcomes as the supposedly unique AFDC program. Intellectuals helped shape this critique in significant ways. By way of contrast, the intellectual commentary on Social Security came mainly from program executives and program insiders close to the executives.

Concerned with Social Security, Derthick omitted policy actors and forces that were crucial to the development of SSI.²⁷ The federal courts, for example, played an active role in the history of SSI. One could easily omit the AFL-CIO from a history of SSI, but it would be impossible to exclude the federal courts.

Derthick, in her 1979 book, did not think to mention the media. If Social Security policy before 1979 consisted largely of inside maneuvers by bureaucrats and Congressional committees, SSI policy after 1972 repeatedly responded to what Commissioner Michael Astrue called sound bite and anecdote.²⁸ These bites and anecdotes came from the newspapers, television stations, and other members of the modern media. Flexible in its choice of subjects, the media spread stories about children who were coached to act crazy in order to receive benefits, immigrants who exploited the generosity of Americans, and substance abusers who fed their habits with SSI dollars. The media did more than report on current events. It also produced stories in ways that influenced popular opinion. In the days of Social Security’s great expansion, the media often played the role of cheerleader, putting the press releases from the Social Security Administration into print. In the post-Watergate days of SSI’s growth, the media strived to uncover the story behind the story. That often meant exposing the inadequacies of government programs or injustices done to the people on the programs’ rolls.

The Stigma of Welfare

So the late twentieth-century policymaking system for SSI differed from the system that produced the great expansion of Social Security from 1950 to 1972. Furthermore, SSI beneficiaries did not become the prototypical Americans who contributed to and benefited from the Social Security program. Instead, each of the major categories of program recipients developed a politically sensitive connection to perceived welfare cheats and other unsavory characters whose presence undermined the public’s support for SSI.

The disabled category in SSI harbored the substance abusers. Substance abusers presented the public with many of the same quandaries as did the appearance of a drunk who was panhandling on the street. Although the person asking for money was in obvious need, some worried that their spare change would go toward more alcohol. Benevolence in this case only made the problem, which many people saw as self-inflicted, worse. The media played its part through stories such as the one about the Denver liquor store owner who received SSI payments on behalf of people with drinking problems and used the money to run up a large tab.²⁹ In response, Congress eventually passed two major laws that made it hard for someone to qualify for SSI on the basis of substance abuse alone and cut back the benefits that substance abusers received. The first law came from a Democratic Congress and the second from a Republican Congress.

The old age category in SSI also ended up creating a group of recipients who were considered undeserving and against whom Congress felt the need to take punitive actions. Casual decisions made at one point in time produced large consequences at other points in time. Allowing noncitizens to be eligible for SSI benefits reflected the spirit of the times as well as historical serendipity. When SSI was under consideration, no federal law barred the states from denying welfare benefits to noncitizens. The states did what they wished. The state of Arizona precluded lawfully admitted aliens from participating in any of its adult category programs, unless the alien had lived in Arizona for fifteen years. Then in June 1971, just when Congress was considering SSI, the Supreme Court struck down the Arizona law. The decision received special mention in a Senate Finance Committee report. Legal aliens became eligible for SSI. Congress, preoccupied by what seemed to be larger and more consequential policy issues, said little about including legal aliens.³⁰

In time, paying welfare benefits to noncitizens became controversial. Reinforced by traditional attitudes about deserving and undeserving welfare recipients, the cohort of noncitizens on SSI proved to be an especially vulnerable group. The notion developed that some people came to this country to take advantage of its generous social welfare programs (an interesting rebuke to those who complained about America’s undeveloped welfare state). At a time when the immigration rate was rising and, inevitably, leading to social tensions, stories circulated about immigrants who brought their parents to this country and, instead of taking care of them, helped them get on SSI. As with many stories about welfare abusers, the evidence to support these claims was thin. Aliens made up about 10 percent of the SSI population, and their numbers peaked at 12 percent. They became visible, however, because so many of them were concentrated in the old age category.

Beyond these particulars, the hope here is that history illuminates public policy and that the history of SSI helps improve our understanding of America’s welfare state. A steady state program description might lead someone to conclude that social policy is either incomprehensible or nonsensical. Why, for example, have a national program in which disability determination is handled by the individual states? Why make special provisions for the blind when the law does not provide such special accommodations for, say, the hearing impaired? Why emphasize the inability to work as a measure of disability at a time when advocates for disability rights emphasize the capabilities of people with disabilities and insist that it is often the physical design of the workplace, rather than the inherent capacities of people with disabilities, that keeps disabled people from jobs? Why administer aid to dependent children at the state and local levels and aid to disabled children at the federal level? These perfectly reasonable questions can best be answered not through elaborate social science exercises in hypothesis testing but, rather, through the simple device of chronicling the process of change over time.

The resulting narrative demonstrates how a logical sequence of events can produce outcomes that might appear irrational at any particular time. Academics in such esoteric subfields as American