[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 54 (Thursday, March 23, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H3721]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  WELFARE--A SPIDER WEB OF BUREAUCRACY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Calvert). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Hoekstra] is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I followed the debate very closely during 
the day today and actually all of this week as we have been debating 
welfare reform, and it is amazing to me that, as much as everybody says 
that we need change, there is also such a strong effort to support the 
status quo, to support a failed welfare state, a welfare state that in 
the name of compassion we funded a system that is cruel and, experience 
has shown us over the last 40 years, has been destroying the American 
family. We have a failed welfare state. Welfare spending now exceeds 
over $305 billion per year, $5 trillion since 1965. Three hundred five 
billion dollars is roughly three times the amount needed to raise all 
poor Americans above the poverty line.
  What kinds of results have we seen? Since 1970, Mr. Speaker, the 
number of children in poverty has increased by 40 percent, the juvenile 
arrest rate for violent crimes has tripled since 1965, and since 1960 
the number of unmarried pregnant teens has nearly doubled and teen 
suicide has more than tripled.
  Next week, Monday, in my Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations 
of the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities we may take 
a look at why all of this spending and why all of this bureaucracy in 
Washington has failed to deliver the kind of results that we all would 
have wanted to see for America, and I think what we are going to see is 
that what we have developed is we built off of a system that inherently 
is wrong. We have the right motivations, but we have developed a system 
that cannot deliver the kind of results that need to be delivered.
  I have a couple of charts here, and what we are going to be doing on 
Monday in the subcommittee is we are going to have members of the 
subcommittee, as well as staff, break into different groups and 
actually go through the process of applying for the benefits of 19 
different welfare programs, and I think we are going to find that the 
process that the poor and those in poverty face and what they take a 
look at in Washington is a spider web of bureaucracy, regulations, 
mandates, and a system that just does not work for them.
  In the House of Representatives we have 10 committees, 20 
subcommittees, that take a look at all of these programs. When you take 
a look, and I do not know how well it will show up tonight, but this is 
the spider web and the confusion that we see here between the House and 
the Senate of different kinds of programs that affect children and 
families. Certain committees have responsibility for income subsidies, 
social services, health, housing, nutrition, education, and training. 
This is what we want to attack in the Republican bill.
  We are not going after women and children. We want to get benefits to 
women and children. We want to actually go through and tear up this 
bureaucracy in Washington and actually deliver results and benefits 
back to them and back to women and children so that we do not end up 
eating the dollars here in Washington.
  We need a new process, a new focus, a focus on women, children, and 
families, not a focus on bureaucracies, and bureaucrats, and rules and 
regulations here in Washington. We are going to go through these 19 
programs, and they are only a small sample of the many programs and 
many different bureaucracies that we have here in Washington.
  In the next chart that we are going to develop that we will not have 
an opportunity to take a look at on Monday, but will be to take a look 
at it from the user standpoint, the people that are supposed to be 
getting these benefits, the ones that we are supposed to be lifting and 
helping up out of poverty.
  There has been discussion tonight earlier that we need more job 
training programs, we need more money and more programs for child care. 
The problem is not programs. The problem is not dollars as we are 
working off a failed model and a failed system.

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