Editorial: A better approach to welfare must be out there

Talk about it

Imagine you’re a state welfare agent. A family comes to your office, and it’s obvious the family is in need of assistance.

Perhaps one of the parents has died. Perhaps a parent is absent from the home. Perhaps the parents suffer from a physical or mental incapacity, or recently lost a job.

How would you respond? It’s likely you would check to see if the family qualifies for assistance. If the qualifications are met, you would probably offer whatever help you could. That’s the purpose of government welfare: providing help to those truly in need.

But that’s not how some legislators want South Dakota’s welfare agents to respond. Some of our elected leaders want welfare agents, when confronted with such a family in need, to subject one or both parents to a drug test. Then, if drug use is detected, those lawmakers want the family’s government assistance taken away for a year.

Some background is in order here. The circumstances listed above — a deceased parent, a parent absent from the home, a parent with an incapacity or a parent who is unemployed — are all criteria by which South Dakota families can qualify for cash payments from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. That’s precisely the program to which House Bill 1152 applies.

The bill was passed Tuesday by the House’s Health and Human Services Committee and will now go to the House floor. The simple, three-sentence bill would empower the state Department of Social Services to randomly test TANF recipients for drug use. The department could withhold benefits for a year from anyone who fails a test.

This legislation appears to arise out of conservative antagonism toward welfare. We understand that viewpoint. In order to maintain our government’s fiscal discipline, welfare should be limited, and it should go only to those who truly need it.

But this legislation is conservatism taken to a dangerous extreme. If a family qualifies for assistance from TANF and a parent tests positive for illegal drugs, that doesn’t lessen the family’s need for help; in fact, it shows a need for additional help, probably from a drug counselor. Why punish the family’s children by immediately taking away their TANF assistance?

We agree that welfare money from the state should not be used to buy drugs, but this is not the way to prevent it. Expecting welfare agents to be drug detectives and instilling fear of random drug tests in needy families only serves to work against the goals of welfare. It also fuels prejudice and discrimination against poor people by lending credence to the suspicion that most of them are on drugs, even though statistics cited Tuesday during a hearing on HB1152 show that’s not the case (about 7 percent of the general population uses illegal drugs, compared to 9 percent of people on welfare).

Beyond all that, similar laws in other states have been voided by the courts because such laws violated constitutional protections against unwarranted searches and seizures.

This kind of legislation is exactly the type of harsh social activism that gives conservatism a bad name. If welfare money is indeed being spent on illegal drugs — and remember, statistics show that’s probably not happening much — surely we can find a more compassionate approach to solving the problem.

Tags: opinion, editorial, columns