Bush proposes marriage programs

[Paul Prescod]

Remember when conservatives would deplore liberal "social engineering?"

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Bush proposes marriage programs


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By Laura Meckler



March 21, 2002  |  WASHINGTON (AP) -- 

As Congress debates government's role in promoting marriage, the Bush
administration is considering creating community-wide programs to teach
teens the benefits of marriage, offer counseling to couples and inject
pro-marriage messages into the culture. 

The program, still being drafted, would channel money for the program
through the child support collection program, a tactic that critics say
may be illegal. 

The plan would not need approval from Congress, which is considering
President Bush's request to devote hundreds of millions of dollars for
promoting marriage through welfare. 

The proposed child support program would involve a maximum of about $22
million in federal and state money for about 15 communities, according
to two draft documents that describe the plan. 

Advocates for the poor charge that the plan could siphon off money
needed to administer child support programs, is inconsistent with the
goals of the child support program and is an effort by the
administration to bypass Congress. 

Encouraging two-parent families is a "laudable goal," said Vicki
Turetsky, a child support expert at the Center for Law and Social
Policy. "But that's not the goal of the child support program." 

The federal dollars that would be used for this program, she said, were
approved by Congress for the purpose of child support collections, she
said, not for marriage activities. Therefore, she and others said, the
program may not be legal. 

According to the draft plan, community coalitions would develop "a
saturation approach" including programs at the community, state and
regional levels, focused on people with lower incomes. 

Activities would include educating young people about the benefits of
marriage, providing skill building to promote healthy marriages, and
creating media campaigns to "rebuild cultural norms" relating to
marriage, family formation and fatherhood and the benefits of delaying
childbearing until marriage. 

The idea is to incorporate marriage and fatherhood messages into a range
of federal programs including Head Start, child care, welfare and a
program targeting runaway and homeless youth. 

Participating states would be given special permission by the government
to spend money through their child support programs for these
experiments. The federal government would match those dollars as they
normally match child support spending for administrative expenses. 

The proposal is still in draft form and must be approved by officials at
the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House,
cautioned Wade Horn, who heads the HHS Administration for Children and
Families, which would run the program. 

Horn, a longtime advocate for marriage and fatherhood programs, said
promoting marriage and discouraging out-of-wedlock childbearing were
goals of the 1996 welfare law. And he said HHS has long had the power to
approve demonstration programs like this one. 

"This is not an attempt to circumvent any kind of debate about
anything," he said. "The debate about whether government should be
involved with this issue at all was resolved five years ago when
Congress passed a (welfare) law and a Democratic president signed it." 

While the welfare law gave states power to spend their money to promote
marriage, few have done so. That's partly because of questions about
whether the government should be so involved in people's personal lives
and partly because there is little evidence about what might work. 

The Bush administration is pushing the issue on a variety of fronts,
including asking Congress to devote up to $300 million in federal and
state money to pro-marriage experiments when it renews the welfare law
this year. 

The draft proposal is considerably more modest. It would allow select
states to put up one-third of the money for these marriage initiatives
through their child support administrative spending accounts. The
federal government would pay the remaining 66 percent, the same match
rate it uses for the child support program. 

Critics fear that facing tight budgets, states may wind up siphoning
money they would have spent on child support for this. 

"The primary focus should be getting those kids the support they need,
not some half-baked experiment that no one knows whether it will help
poor kids or not," said Laurie Rubiner of the National Partnership for
Women and Families. 

And Turetsky worries that, as drafted, the program would allow the
administration to hand-pick the participating states, meaning some
states with alternate ideas may be left out. 

"They've cut out competition and kept control at the federal level," she
said. "It's the top down nature of this that's really startling."