WELFARE WAIVERS MAY NOT LIVE UP TO REFORM PROMISES

This week saw the Clinton administration grant Missouri a waiver of federal rules to facilitate welfare reforms passed last year by the General Assembly and signed into law by Gov. Mel Carnahan. Missouri joins 27 states that have been granted some form of federal waiver on welfare reform. Although the state law was passed last May, its major components couldn't take effect until Missouri officials received the waiver.

Referring to the waiver at his press conference Tuesday night, President Clinton said that among the reasons Missouri received it was that the new state law required welfare recipients to go to work within two years. Strictly speaking, this is not true.

The law that Gov. Carnahan is so proud of actually states that, if a welfare recipient makes a good-faith effort to find work during a two-year period but failed in this quest, welfare payments can be extended for another 24 months.

The centerpiece of Missouri's welfare reform is what last year's reform law called a self-sufficiency pact between the recipient and the state. Part of the pact is that for the first two years, the recipient agrees to work toward getting a job. Incentives are built into the self-sufficiency pacts. Participating welfare mothers will qualify for such state-paid benefits as day care, transportation, education and job placement.

It is apparent these pacts will require a high degree of supervision by social workers. Gary Stangler, director of the Department of Social Services, lauds Missouri's approach as unique in the nation. To concerns that this approach could actually cost the state more, Stangler replies that savings will be achieved swiftly.

Perhaps. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, progress will be slow. Stangler says that of the 90,000 Missourians currently receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children, about 55,000 will be eligible for the self-sufficiency pacts. (Disabled people or mothers with disabled children are ineligible for participation in the pacts.) Stangler expects to have about 20 percent of the eligible recipients under self-sufficiency pacts within two years, and half by 1998.

In short, there is much that remains to be seen as to whether last year's reform law is as promising as Gov. Carnahan and other supporters claim. The same lawmakers who enacted it rejected other measures that should have been tried, at least in pilot programs. Foremost among these was the proposal to deny benefits to mothers who continue having children while on welfare.

All Missourians will hope that the state's welfare reform program proves as sound as Gov. Carnahan believes it to be. Bitter experience suggests otherwise. Meanwhile, action continues at the federal level in the form of a House-passed bill that is even more radical and more promising. It is to be hoped that the Senate will act this year on sweeping welfare reform for the whole nation.