Between House Speaker Jason White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, a handful of special committees were created this summer to make recommendations on issues that the Mississippi Legislature is expected to take up in 2025.
There are committees studying tax cuts, certificate of need laws, prescription drug pricing, labor force participation, and women, children and families.
All of these are important concerns, but one issue that continues to be a glaring omission on the Republican agenda is how Mississippi manages its federal welfare dollars.
Five years since the scandal broke showing that at least $77 million of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grants had been squandered or stolen by the friends and appointees of high-up Republicans, the GOP leadership in Mississippi has been mostly mute. Reform legislation has solely come from Democrats, but since they are grossly outnumbered in the Legislature, the proposals have gotten nowhere.
About the best the Democrats can do is continue to shine a spotlight on not just the past corruption but a system that is set up to do very little to reduce the endemic poverty that exists in Mississippi.
This past week, the Mississippi Legislative Democratic Caucus held its third hearing about the TANF program. Lawmakers heard both good and bad.
First the good.
Under the direction of Bob Anderson, who was tapped by Gov. Tate Reeves to clean up the cesspool in the Department of Human Services created by Phil Bryant’s crooked appointee, John Davis, steps have been taken to make it less likely for the money to be stolen.
Most notably, Anderson took himself out of the equation for determining what organizations get slices of the tens of millions of dollars Mississippi receives each year to implement poverty-reducing initiatives, such as training people for potential jobs or promoting stable, two-parent households. When Davis headed DHS, he controlled most of those award decisions. He used that unchecked authority to help his friends as well as those who were well-connected to Bryant and other Republicans in power.
Anderson has also switched to doling out these millions as reimbursements rather than payments in advance. The change theoretically should make it tougher to disguise illegitimate expenditures.
Anderson himself partly acknowledges what’s still not good. He told the Democratic lawmakers that his agency lacks expertise in administering the TANF money and that excessive red tape, required under existing state law, increases the odds that deserving applicants will be denied cash assistance. He has previously asked the Legislature to remove some of these application hurdles, but it so far hasn’t listened.
The hearing again raised a fundamental policy debate: What’s the best approach to alleviating poverty? Is it better to give direct cash assistance to the needy, or to create programs that could theoretically end their dependence on the government?
Since the advent of federal welfare reform in 1996, Mississippi has gone overwhelmingly in the latter direction. That’s both because of a conservative distaste for welfare and an ideology best encapsulated in the oft-quoted proverb, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
The state currently spends only about 5% of its roughly $86.5 million annual TANF award on cash payments to needy families, according to Mississippi Today’s reporting. What the state does give out tends to be miserly. In 1999, the state set the maximum amount for a family of three at $170 a month and didn’t increase it for 23 years. It’s now $260, and Anderson plans to ask that to be raised to $320 next year. When questioned why he wouldn’t be seeking a larger bump, especially since TANF has a current unused balance of around $150 million, Anderson indicated that his boss, Reeves, would not agree to a bigger ask.
Certainly, prior to the advent of welfare reform, government cash assistance tended to become addictive. Those who got on the dole often stayed on it indefinitely.
But the “teach a man to fish” approach doesn’t seem to have worked either in Mississippi, where the welfare money was either pilfered or thrown down a rathole of good intentions but limited results.
At least with cash assistance, the money is probably going to be used for food and rent, rather than for volleyball stadiums and drug rehab stays in Malibu.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
