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Carole Keeton-Rylander |
Buried in the latest Texas Performance Review, “Challenging the Status Quo,” published by the comptroller’s office, tucked away literally in a footnote to the section titled “Reduce Department of Human Services’ Costs,” is a figure many DHS workers are bound to find disturbing — 3,042. That’s the number of employees state Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander has deemed superfluous to the agency’s functions and who therefore should be yanked off the payrolls in the next two years.
“Since 1994, in the wake of federal and state welfare reform, program clients declined, but DHS administrative costs [i.e. workers] did not decline proportionally,” the report explains. The audit predicts that the cuts, which will amount to 20% of the department’s 15,500 workers,will reduce the department’s workforce to a level “proportional” to its duties. That astonishing reduction in force — by percentage, an even larger cut than Land Commissioner David Dewhurst’s 110-person early-January “massacre” — would result in a total “savings,” the report estimates, of $85 million every year through 2004.
Ironically, the mass downsizing is due to the department’s success in reducing welfare caseloads — in some areas as much as 35% over the past four years. The cuts chiefly target workers who determine eligibility for Texas Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) benefits and food stamps, a division reduced by 13% between 1997 and 1998 alone.In 1998, according to the comptroller’s office, eligibility workers throughout Texas numbered just under 6,500.
Eva De Luna of the Texas Center for Public Policy Priorities, a nonprofit group which researches poverty and welfare issues, says the proposed reductions are based on unrealistic projections of further caseload reductions for the next five years — reductions which are contradicted by Rylander’s own unemployment estimates in the 1998 State Economic Forecast, which predict that unemployment (and thus the need for welfare services) will increase from an estimated 4.9% in 1999 to 5.4% in 2001. “If unemployment goes up, more people are going to be needing food stamps,” De Luna says. “That is how it has historically worked.”
Rylander’s office says that welfare caseloads are projected to continue their downward trend for the next biennium. But if caseloads do go up, “the Legislature will have a chance to look at that and increase the budget” for Human Services to hire and train the additional workers, says Sheila Clancy, a spokeswoman for the comptroller’s office. (Of course, the Lege won’t come back in session until 2001, by which time the current workers would be long gone.)
De Luna points out that eligibility workers do more than just determine food stamp eligibility for prospective welfare clients. They also conduct repeat interviews, adjust and restore benefits, and process overpayments and changes to the status of already-existing clients. And in an August 1998 report the Sunset Advisory Commission recommended that the department’s employees take on a few more tasks. For example: Instead of just determining that an individual is not eligible for welfare, the report urged DHS employees to try to figure out why a person has been unsuccessful at getting a job in the first place, and help divert him or her “into preventive and support services offered by other agencies and organizations.”
This increase in services would likely require stabilization or even an increase — not reductions — in the number of DHS caseworkers. Moreover, the increased employee skills required to meet the recommendations would probably require increased wages for DHS eligibility workers, who earn on average about $24,000 a year. In fact, the department’s budget request for the 2000-2001 biennium called for $66.4 million in additional state and federal funds to pay for increases in employee wages though 2001. “Over a period of years, eligibility staff have taken on more responsibilities,” says Sherron Heinemann, a DHS spokeswoman. “That was a lot of the rationale behind asking for the increase in funding.”
But wage hikes — particularly for non-executive employees — fit poorly with Rylander’s vision for “smaller, smarter government” — the subtitle of the recent performance review. Instead, Rylander would like to see DHS coffers cut by an estimated $271 million over the next five years — a figure far out of proportion to proposed cuts in agencies which have exploded in size during the past five years, such as the prison system (which grew 57%), the TNRCC (up 59%), and the Texas Youth Commission (up 113%).
Clancy insists the DHS cuts were not motivated by animus, but simply because departmental job cuts have not kept up with reductions in caseloads (the agency has reduced overall employment by 8% since 1993). “It’s not that we’re targeting DHS,” she says. “It’s just that caseloads are going down, and not as many eligibility workers are needed.”
The cuts would decrease the number of workers in 450 offices scattered in counties throughout the state, many of whom, according to De Luna, “are pretty much middle-class workers … If you’re going to eliminate 3,000 jobs with benefits, you’re just going to create a little more need for state services.”
But Rylander’s office insists that its proposal would lessen the blow by phasing in the cuts over time, through “turnover and leaving open positions unfilled,” according to the report, and by allowing employees “to transfer to other programs within DHS or have priority for jobs at other state agencies.” DHS spokeswoman Heinemann says that current turnover rates in the department range between 25% and 35%. The problem, she says, is matching reductions in staff through attrition with “where you need reductions to occur.”
The cuts in human services are by far the most severe proposed in Rylander’s plan for widespread government reductions. But the audit also pushes for across-the-board reductions in every government agency, raising the question of whether Rylander is focusing on “smaller” at the expense of “smarter” government. The proposal suggests unilateral funding decreases of 0.75% for smaller agencies and 1.25% for larger ones. DHS — already the target of far more extreme cuts — was exempted from this funding proposal.
This article appears in March 19 • 1999 and March 19 • 1999 (Cover).