The rollback of welfare reform under New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, has begun in earnest. The city’s Human Resources Administration just informed able-bodied, childless adults that they no longer need to do anything in exchange for their food stamps. Sitting at home and watching TV while you collect your benefits is just fine with de Blasio and his new welfare chief, former Legal Aid Society chief Steve Banks. Until this Monday, New York City required able-bodied adults without dependents to work or to participate in a work-placement program for 20 hours a week in order to maintain their food-stamp eligibility. (Mothers with children are exempt from the work requirement.) Federal law limits healthy, childless recipients who refuse to seek work to three months of food stamps over a three-year period. That same law, however, allows states and cities to request a waiver of the food-stamp work requirement, if their economies are less than robust. The Obama administration grants those requests as a matter of course. To the fury of the city’s welfare activists and then-Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, however, the Bloomberg administration refused to request a waiver from Washington, in the belief that the best way out of poverty is work. Now the activists are back in the saddle. The city has just sought a waiver, effective immediately, and joins jurisdictions that treat food stamps as an unconditional entitlement, for which nothing can be asked in return. HRA is not only banning the placement of any able-bodied food-stamp recipient into a city workfare assignment, starting this summer it will also forbid recipients from voluntarily seeking assistance from the city’s most successful job-placement agencies.
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