The Harvard Family Research Project separated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to become the Global Family Research Project as of January 1, 2017. It is no longer affiliated with Harvard University.
Volume IV, Number 2, 1998
Issue Topic: Evaluation in the 21st Century
Spotlight
Welfare, Information, and the New Federalism
Thomas Gais of the Rockefeller Institute of Government discusses the use of information technology in welfare reform.
The Personal Responsibility Act of 1996 may be the first large-scale “information age” social policy in the United States. Informational linkages lie at the heart of the new devolution. Rather than relying on procedural rules and regulations to control the administration of state and local programs, information systems offer the promise that state and local agencies can experiment with different policies, procedures, staffing, and agency assignments—including privatization—while still remaining accountable to central authorities by reporting accurate and interpretable information on program objectives and expenditures.
That promise may be fulfilled some day, but the time has not arrived yet. Data are the only possible major weakness in the implementation of the new welfare. The new federal, state, and local welfare reforms demand a multiplicity of new or greatly expanded functions for state information systems, and governments, even during these relatively flush times, do not have the resources to create systems in the short run that perform all of these functions. A critical political struggle has developed over which of these functions will take priority, a conflict whose resolution could shape welfare programs for many years.
Most of the attention to information systems has focused on generating the new quarterly reports states are required to submit to the federal government. These are controversial since the federal government can impose financial penalties on states that fail to submit timely reports and because they call for data that greatly exceed the information traditionally reported by state welfare systems. Most of these systems were designed to generate routine information on the number of families served as well as selected characteristics of those families. But the new reports call for information on work participation rates, hours worked, types of work activities engaged in, and reasons why people leave the welfare rolls—information that few state systems ever bothered to collect, much less report.
An even greater challenge for the states is the pending federal proposal to require states to report extensive information on the programs that states treat as “maintenance of effort” (MOE) spending. Federal agencies are concerned that some states may divert hard-to-employ adults away from federally-supported TANF programs—which are subject to minimum work participation rates—and into separate, state-funded programs not covered by such rates. To be sure that states are not inflating their TANF work rates in this way, the federal government proposed a rule that requires reporting for MOE programs on people who would otherwise be eligible for TANF. This rule makes sense from a federal perspective, but many states argue that the proposal adds new and difficult reporting burdens and that it works to constrain MOE services to TANF eligible rather than encouraging support for post-TANF services.
Federal accountability is certainly a legitimate function. The Congress and the federal executive—and the nation's citizens—ought to know how federal funds are spent. They should be able to tell whether TANF money is spent on the purposes identified in the Personal Responsibility Act, or whether states are instead using the block grant to reduce their own share of welfare spending. Federal authorities also should determine whether indicators of good performance are attributable to good programs, or whether those indicators are an artifact of a strategic shuffling of client families.
But it is also true that federal accountability is only one of the many functions that information systems need to perform. Before you can account for a program, it seems reasonable that the program ought to operational—yet in research conducted by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, we are finding that there is an enormous and pressing need for information systems that would give workers and managers the ability to implement the new welfare programs fully.
The State Capacity Study of the Rockefeller Institute is examining the management systems that states have created (or, more accurately, are creating) to carry out their new welfare programs. As of mid-May, 18 out of 21 state research teams in the study had submitted reports and we can tentatively draw several conclusions from their analyses:
1) Although many states have devolved authority and responsibility for the design and operation of welfare programs down to local offices—whether they be local governments, local offices of state agencies, or private contractors—they are still using centralized information systems that are designed to support statewide information collection and analysis, not local management and operational needs. Local managers and workers often have no direct access to the state's welfare information system. They provide data which are entered into mainframe systems but it may be weeks or even months before they receive information about their own caseload, work participation rates, and other summary measures. Local managers cannot use this old information to respond quickly to rapidly changing problems. Nor can they use the information to pinpoint the sources of problems, since the reports are often summaries that do not let managers see whether the problems are occurring at certain points in the administrative process, at certain times of the week, or for certain types of clients or families. The data reports thus offer little information managers can use to improve their own work processes.
2) Most states are bringing several functions together in their administrative systems to achieve the ambitious goals of welfare reform, such as child support, child care, employment programs, job readiness training, as well as the traditional cash assistance program. In some states, front-line welfare workers are given broad case management responsibilities and have such titles as “family independence specialists.” Although positions and offices are officially integrated, their information systems are not. Each function typically has its own information system, and workers with new holistic titles and responsibilities may have to deal with three or more different systems—for example, one for child support, one or more for determining and tracking eligibility for assistance, and at least one for job placement and activities.
3) There is a lot confusion about what current information systems can and cannot do, especially among state and local officials. Our researchers asked both state and local administrators whether their information systems could answer a wide range of questions that we thought managers would want to know. We sometimes found very little agreement between state and local officials about what questions could and could not be answered by current systems. In particular, state officials saw these systems as much more capable and informative than did local managers and workers.
4) Substantively, the current information systems are generally fine at determining program and maintaining information on program eligibility, though keeping track of multiple time limits is more of a challenge. They are much less adept at giving front-line workers a view of the “history” of each family as it goes through the increasingly complicated process of welfare, which may include immediate job search, orientation meetings, job readiness training, assessments of employability, waits for child care, individual responsibility agreements, job placement, job loss, recertifications, partial sanctions, and loops back through one or more of these stages. Thus, the systems are not really designed to help case managers keep track of the families assigned to them.
5) State information systems are not readily changed to fit new policies and administrative structures, nor do they easily accommodate variation across localities. They are not very adaptable to local differences in programs and attempts to try out innovations in program design, performance measures, or ways of connecting with other related systems. Part of the problem seems to be the tendency for states to make system changes in one of two ways: by making small changes in large existing systems and patching together previously unconnected systems (which don't change the fact that the basic systems are mostly unsuited to the new policies); and, to a lesser degree, by making comprehensive statewide redesigns. Both of these approaches are reasonable, but they also generate a tension between information systems (which either change very little or in occasional great leaps) and policies or management needs (which change more frequently and may vary across localities). This tension may be inevitable. However, a modular system might alleviate the problem by creating an integrated platform that permits the development, modification, and replacement of specific functionalities.
6) The training of workers who are supposed to use the new systems is generally inadequate. States usually offer short sessions with little follow-up, and day-to-day assistance is typically not available locally. This is hardly a unique or surprising point. Many states are still developing new systems, and weak instruction of end-users is a common problem in the private as well as the public sector.
7) The information reported by local service providers and administrative offices is still fairly “thin.” That is, accountability within states is often not very well developed, though many states are trying to address this problem. There is still little consensus about what constitutes success in welfare programs and how to measure it, though work participation rates and caseload reduction tend to dominate the current measures. Even in more “advanced” states with significant experience under the waiver programs, there is very little information on what treatments people receive and why, which can make it difficult to protect against creaming, inequities, and under-service by providers.
These preliminary observations are not criticisms of states, federal requirements, or even welfare reform. State and federal welfare reforms call for major changes in informational capacities, and it is still early in the process of implementation. Instead, we present these findings because we want the full scope of the informational challenge to be recognized—which includes local management needs as well as the demands of federal accountability. When these challenges are understood, it becomes clear to us that, given the current resources available for welfare information systems, there is a need to find a balance among short-term priorities. This need has become even more acute as states' technological expertise is strained by the effort to solve the “Year-2000” problem. Determining this balance demands a wide-ranging discussion of “Informational Federalism,” the proper roles of federal, state, and local governments in creating, managing, and using information—a discussion which the Rockefeller Institute hopes to inform in its future reports.
Additional information on these and related management issues will be highlighted in forthcoming Rockefeller Reports. Readers of this article may be particularly interested in Dr. Terrence Maxwell's forthcoming report on “Informational Federalism.” To be placed on the mailing list, please contact the Federalism Research Group. Or our reports are also available at the Institute's website rockinst.org.
Thomas Gais
Director
Federalism Research Group
The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government
Tel: 518-443- 5844
Email: fedgroup@rockinst.org