Mayor Bill de Blasio sets out to dismantle the reforms of the Giuliani-Bloomberg era.

Back to Welfare’s Future in New York

by Heather Mac Donald

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Now here comes de Blasio. The new mayor calls Bloomberg’s conviction that everyone should work for a living an “ideological hang-up.” He plans to reinstate education and training as core activities of welfare recipients. He fought Bloomberg’s insistence that food-stamp applicants be finger-imaged on the grounds that such a requirement was stigmatizing. Somehow, that stigma has not deterred hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers from seeking government employment, despite an identical finger-imaging requirement. And rather than divert applicants from welfare, de Blasio wants to sign up even more people.

He will ask Obamacare outreach workers to enroll Obamacare applicants in all possible welfare programs, and he believes that the city’s nearly 2 million food-stamp recipients are at least a quarter-million too few. Far from stressing personal responsibility, as Mayor Giuliani did, de Blasio believes that it is government’s role to “provide basic income and food security to all New Yorkers.” No wonder de Blasio views private-sector experience as a disqualifier for working in his administration; the private sector competes with his vision of a society in which all initiative resides in the government. De Blasio will likely eviscerate performance contracting, whereby the city paid its for-profit and nonprofit social-services partners only if they actually moved welfare recipients into jobs. Instead, expect a return to the racial spoils system, whereby feckless neighborhood nonprofits were given indefinite city contracts based on identity politics and get-out-the-vote capacity alone.

We don’t need to guess how de Blasio’s welfare philosophy will pan out. New York has been down this road before. In 1960, 328,000 New Yorkers were on cash assistance. By 1972, after two terms of Mayor John Lindsay, the rolls had exploded to nearly 1.25 million. One in every ten welfare recipients in the United States lived in New York City. As de Blasio promises to do again, Lindsay dismantled the city’s welfare-fraud detection system, leading the Daily News to dub his welfare commissioner “Come-and-Get-It Ginsberg.”

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