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

Extract

Thanks to Martha Derthick's Policymaking for Social Security (1979), there is a comprehensive legislative history of the old-age pension provisions of the Social Security Act of 1935. In The Other Welfare, the historian Edward D. Berkowitz and the Social Security Administration (ssa) chief historian, Larry DeWitt, undertake a similar project for Supplemental Security Income (ssi), the 1972 program that emerged as a more limited and more conservative alternative to Richard M. Nixon's failed guaranteed-income proposal, the Family Assistance Plan. ssi would unite and nationalize the scattershot relief programs for those blind, aged, and disabled people who were typically without the work histories that would have made them eligible for the disability program that had been added to the Social Security program in 1950 (Social Security Disability Income).

Berkowitz and DeWitt offer an exceptionally fine history of ssi. They explain clearly and comprehensively how the program came to be; track the implementation of the new program, paying special attention to its rather disastrous launch (offering a timely reminder of the difficulties inherent in implementing any large, new federal-state program, even when managed by an agency as generally competent as the ssa); show how the program came more and more to serve disabled, working-age adults (confounding expectations that most beneficiaries would be the elderly); describe efforts in the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan eras to reduce the recipient rolls and cut costs; account for the role ssi played in the 1990s welfare reform efforts (with welcome attention to the sloppy, hysterical reporting that helped raise opposition to the program and fear of rampant fraud within it); and conclude with reflections on the current state and potential vulnerability of the program. The book instantly becomes the central text about ssi—a program that has been neglected in the history of the American welfare state and in academic analysis of contemporary social policy.