Reading Comprehension (RC) | Re: Between 1965 and 1970, welfare caseloads more than doubled and costs

Between 1965 and 1970, welfare caseloads
more than doubled and costs tripled. The Nixon administration
was unable to secure a legislative majority for comprehensive
welfare reform. Legislative welfare reform raised contentious
issues of who is entitled to support, how much, and on what
terms—precisely the types of issues that have defied political
resolution throughout welfare‘s history.

As a mechanism of policy change, the Nixon administration
turned to a common managerial tool—performance monitoring.
Middle-level officials at the Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare
(HEW) crafted quality control—a system for monitoring the
accuracy of state welfare payments—into an instrument for
indirectly influencing states to become more restrictive in the
provision of welfare. Quality control‘s manifest purpose was
to achieve fiscal accountability.

Through this instrument HEW could monitor state welfare
payments and withhold federal reimbursement from those
that it deemed to be improper. However, quality control
also served a latent, political function, partly reflected in its
design. It penalized states only for overpayments and
payments made to ineligible individuals.

Quality control‘s effectiveness depended on the uncoordinated
responses of street-level bureaucrats in hundreds of local
welfare offices to new demands that administrative reform
imposed at the workplace. For example, welfare workers
translated administrative concern for procedural uniformity
into demands that welfare applicants routinely produce scores
of documents of dubious relevance to their eligibility.

Applicants who could not meet these procedural demands,
whether reasonable or not, were denied welfare.
Administrative reform traded errors of liberality for errors of
stringency. Behaviours directed toward the helping aspects of
welfare policy were virtually displaced as workers responded
to incentives to maximize measured attributes of performance,
namely procedural uniformity and productivity. At the same time,
worker discretion to make unreasonable procedural demands was
virtually unchecked.

Quality control did not overtly breach the integrity of theoretical
entitlement to welfare promised by statute and supported by legal
precedent. Rather, it seemed designed to protect this promise.
But in practice, quality control appears to have initiated a process of
effective disentitlement. Its adverse effects were unmeasured and
unobserved, leaving quality control‘s manifest legitimacy unimpaired.
Government institutions and officials were thus insulated from the
effects of their actions. In this sense, quality control ironically eroded
the government accountability that it was ostensibly intended
to guarantee. Furthermore, through quality control, federal
authorities could indirectly influence state administrative practices
without directly encroaching on areas of nominal state authority.
Performance measurement backed by fiscal sanctions proved to
be a relatively potent, if imperfectly cast, instrument for penetrating
a decentralized bureaucracy.

All of the following are mentioned in the passage by the author as
adverse effects of quality control EXCEPT:
A. undue emphasis on administrative paperwork and procedures.
B. arbitrary and inconsistent penalties for state welfare agencies.
C. a decrease in the number of people who were eligible for
welfare benefits.
D. lack of accountability for certain systematic infringements of
the welfare system.
E. initiation of a process of effective dis-entitlement




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2. In paragraph 4, the phrase ―uncoordinated responses of
street-level bureaucrats‖ is used in order to:
A. support the author‘s claim that unreasonable administrative
procedures caused many applicants to be denied welfare benefits.
B. refute the theory that quality control was used to hold states to
a higher standard of accountability in their fiscal administration.
C. prove that quality control policies were implemented to serve a
political rather than a social agenda.
D. provide a potential reason for the ineffectiveness of performance
monitoring on general welfare reform.
E. criticise bureaucrats for the state of affairs with regards to quality
control



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3. What does the author of the passage suggest about the use of
common managerial tools to effect policy changes in the welfare
system?

A. Procedural changes in welfare agencies should be established in
ways that assure adherence to regulations for both workers and
applicants.
B. Administrative reform methods like performance monitoring
may cause welfare organizations to become overly restrictive in
their policies.
C. State payments and federal reimbursement funding can be
effectively monitored through changes in welfare administration
at the national level.
D. Implementation of quality control methods helped to hold the
federal government accountable for its actions.
E. Such tools have completely failed to effect policy changes in
the past