On Thursday, ProPublica and the Salt Lake Tribune published a fascinating article detailing a link between Utah, the church, and welfare payments. I assume most readers here have already read it. If not, you really need to read it. Maybe before reading this post but, if not before, definitely right after.
The tl;dr of the article is this: since about 2009, Utah has underspent on its social safety net. Also, based on an MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) it signed with the church, it has counted volunteer hours performed for the church in calculating how much it has spent.
Reading the article the first time, though, left me with questions. And it turns out I’m not the only one who didn’t entirely understand what was going on: on Friday, the Editorial Board of the Tribune published an unsigned op-ed, the heart of which were these three paragraphs:
As an independent, non-government organization, the LDS Church is unquestionably free to give or deny aid to whomever it wishes, for whatever reasons it wishes.
But once a church’s welfare system gets tied to the state’s federally funded welfare operation, in the way the LDS Church’s efforts are linked to Utah’s, it is not so independent any more. It becomes a de facto arm of the state that, in these instances, pushes people to follow the rules of, or even formally affiliate themselves with, a religious organization in order to receive benefits they need to survive.
That is an obvious violation of the First Amendment’s ban on the establishment of religion in America.
It turns out that the Editorial Board entirely misunderstood what the relevance of the story it published was. Now, I don’t know anybody on the editorial board of the Trib, but I’ve been lucky enough to converse with a number of its reporters. And honestly, if the Editorial Board is half as smart, inquisitive, and engaged as the paper’s reporters, its missing the boat like that suggests that an explainer is in order.
A caveat first, though: U.S. welfare law is not my primary area of focus. Also, I don’t have any inside perspective into either the church’s or the Utah legislature’s minds. I’m basing this post primarily on the excellent ProPublic/Trib reporting, reading the MOU (which the reporters were kind enough to embed in the story and which I’ve now linked to), looking at the law, and some speculation. Where I’m speculating, I’ll say I’m speculating. Where it comes to speculation, and especially where it comes to speculation about the motives of the church and the Utah legislature, I could clearly be wrong. But I don’t think I am.
A Quick Look at the State of U.S. Welfare Law
In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, fulfilling his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.” For our purposes, the signal accomplishment of the law was replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Under AFDC, the federal government reimbursed a portion of state welfare payments. Under AFDC, states were required to provide aid to all state residents within certain federally-defined classes and whose income and assets were within state-defined ranges.
TANF shifted the rules states faced significantly. Under TANF, states get a block grant that they can use almost however they want. (I exaggerate a little, but not much.) Even under TANF, though, there were rules: in most cases, states have to spend at least 80% of what they spent on welfare in 1994, before the TANF program was instituted. (This is called the maintenance of effort (MOE) provision. You notice a lot of acronyms? It turns out attorneys and lawmakers like acronyms!)
What happens if a state doesn’t meet its MOE requirements? The following year, the federal government will reduce its TANF block grant dollar-for-dollar by the amount the state failed to spend.
And this leads us to the agreement between Utah and the church:
What’s in it for the Church?
When I first read the story, my big question was, what’s in it for the church? Why is it agreeing to this MOU?
I mean, it’s clear what’s in it for the state: the state is counting donations to the church toward its MOE requirements. Specifically, the church agreed to allow the state to count volunteer hours at, for example, Welfare Square toward its MOE requirements. (In fact, a significant number of pages in the MOU between Utah and the church is dedicated to calculating the monetary value of donated services.)
The ProPublica/Tribune article points out that, by counting these service hours (up to a value of $15 million per year), the state of Utah has managed to spend $75 million less than it otherwise would have needed to spend.
But how about the church? It’s not like the state is paying it for the use of volunteer hours. And it’s not like members are volunteering more because it counts toward the state’s obligations. I suspect that with or without the MOU, church members would have volunteered precisely the same service.
And, as people interviewed in the story point out, the service members provided didn’t necessarily accrue to Utah’s poor; the numbers may count humanitarian aid that is shipped out of state.
The answer to the question of what the church gets out of it, I suspect, is the final bullet point on page 3 of the MOU. In part, it reads: “As a condition of use of Welfare Services expenditures, DWS or the state of Utah will not reduce spending on services eligible under the TANF program or other services for poor and needy individuals and families in the state of Utah as a result of the TANF MOE documented through this agreement.”
In other words (and this part is speculation, but the documentation strongly suggests that I’m right) what the church got out of it was that Utah couldn’t reduce the TANF portion of its social safety net spending (by, for example, diverting the money other places).
The Utah Legislature Frankly Sucks
The article points out that as soon as Clinton signed TANF, Utah made significant changes to its welfare, creating a labyrinthine process that rejects a high percentage of applicants. Which leads me to further speculation that, based on the way the Utah legislature as addressed welfare, I also suspect is correct.
The article frames this as the church allowing Utah to spend $75 million less than it would have otherwise spent. But that assumes it would have spent enough on welfare to avoid federal penalties.
Now I’m not a Utahn, so I don’t have to pay close attention to the Utah legislature. But the casual attention I’ve paid suggests that on the whole it is largely indifferent to the welfare of the poor. Did the church save it from spending $75 million? That’s a fair assumption if you believe that, had the church not agreed to let the state count its members’ service, Utah would have spent the money. But if you believe Utah wouldn’t have spent the money under any circumstance, then without the MOU, the state would not only have spent $75 million less, but it would have lost another $75 million of federal matching money. Which means that, without the MOU, Utah would have spent $150 million less on welfare, not just $75 million less.
Is that legal? In the article, a spokesperson for the state says it is and that lots of states do the same thing. And I assume they’re right? Like I said, this isn’t my area of expertise, so I don’t actually know.
What I’m saying is, based on the documentation, it looks like, by allowing the state to count its volunteer hours, the church actually prevented significant welfare cuts. (In fact, the deal seems to have been brokered in 2009, in the height of the Great Recession. And the Great Recession hit Utah hard: high unemployment rates and low labor participation rates suggest that many Utahns probably needed the welfare benefits the legislature was so eager to deny them.)
So What’s Up with the Church-State Stuff?
Here’s where we get some conflation. Because the article also mentions that the state sends people who have been denied welfare to the church; the church may or may not provide non-members with welfare and it may or may not impose requirements on people who request welfare.
But the thing is, this is completely unrelated to the MOU or any other agreement between the state of Utah and the church. Here’s another place I’m speculating, but this is what I suspect is happening (and someone interviewed in the story seems to think the same thing): Utah rejects A. Lot. of applications for welfare. Like, it only provides benefits for about 10% of families living in poverty.
I assume that most caseworkers in Utah actually legitimately want to help the people who come to them who need help. And I assume that, since they don’t get to make the rules, they have to reject a lot of requests from people who need help. And I assume they don’t particularly want to reject these needs. So what do they do?
They try to suggest other places people can get help. And in Utah, one of those other places is the church.
(I’ll note here that the idea that Utah is trying to pawn off its responsibilities to care for the poor on private organizations, including the church, is a huge dereliction of its obligations and is deeply immoral. But it’s also infeasible. The church’s welfare system is pretty good for what it does. But what it does isn’t going to scale to take care of all needs. You know the church’s $100 billion fund? Yeah, that would pay for about 1/7 the amount U.S. state and local governments spent on welfare in 2018. It wouldn’t even begin to touch the amount the federal government, or non-U.S. governments, spend.)
There’s no indication that there’s an agreement between the church and Utah that the church will act as a formal backstop for the state’s irresponsibility. And as far as I can tell, even the state doesn’t have a formal policy of sending welfare applicants to the church.
Which is why, in the end, the Tribune is entirely wrong that this is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Because the church isn’t acting as an arm of the state. Its private welfare decisions are unrelated to the agreement between the church and the state. The agreement, in fact, expands the state’s ability to fund its welfare obligations. And the agreement obligates the state to provide at least a baseline.
So Are We All Good?
No. In fact, I think the church should end its MOU with the state of Utah. Not because its a constitutional violation. And not because it will cause the state to spend more on welfare. (In fact, it will likely cause the state to lose federal funds and spend less on welfare.)
But it’s not fair to let the Utah legislature use the church’s goodwill to skirt its own expenses. The legislature seems to like the idea of self-reliance. Or at least, it likes to require welfare recipients to take self-reliance courses. But the state avoids making difficult decisions (like raising taxes) because it can take advantage of other people’s money (or, rather, time and efforts).
Because there is a villain in this story. And the villain is the Utah legislature.
But here’s the problem: the villain in the story has the church–and the people of Utah–in a tough place. If the church ends the MOU, there’s no reason to believe that the legislature will start spending that $15 million per year. And if it doesn’t, that will hurt poor Utahns by $30 million per year. Meanwhile, the MOU doesn’t cost the church anything, and no cost to ensure poor Utahns get an additional $30 million a year seems like a small price.
And the Utah legislature won’t (probably) be directly hurt even if they hurt the poor in the state. Still, they need to be held accountable. And the church needs to stop subsidizing their irresponsible disregard for their obligations to the poor.
A Tangential Aside
It’s not particularly relevant to the ProPublica/Tribune story but it’s also worth noting that, if we’re interested in helping people be self-reliant, welfare provides generational benefits. And those benefits come with little if any net cost when we factor in the future taxes both beneficiaries and their children will pay.