Gov. Charlie Baker's budget would let welfare recipients keep more benefits while working

Gov. Charlie Baker releases his fiscal 2019 budget on Jan. 24, 2018. (SHIRA SCHOENBERG / THE REPUBLICAN)

BOSTON -- A proposal in Gov. Charlie Baker's budget aims to help welfare recipients return to work by continuing to pay them benefits even after they start a new job.

"We're going to make it possible for people who work to be able to continue to do so past the point that they would have been able to historically," Baker said Wednesday.

Deborah Harris, an attorney for the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, which focuses on poverty law, said, "These are important first steps toward program simplification and promoting the goals we all share of helping low income families."

Today, a person's welfare benefits are lowered as they begin to earn more money.

The problem is that when welfare recipients start working, they may reach a point where they are ineligible for benefits but do not earn enough to live on. So in some cases the benefits may keep someone from working or taking on additional work hours.

Under Baker's proposal -- which must still be approved by the Legislature -- a welfare recipient will be able to keep receiving the full welfare benefit for the first six months they are working, as long as they are earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or approximately $40,800 for a family of three.

Administration officials say the goal is to make it easier for welfare recipients to return to work. The message, Harris said, is, "We want you to stabilize your family during that six- month period and hopefully you won't need assistance for much longer after that."

After six months, the calculation that will be used to figure out someone's welfare benefits will be based on income and will be less favorable for the recipient than it is today.

This plan would replace a program Baker crafted in fiscal 2017 to provide transitional support -- between $70 and $280 a month -- to families for four months after they leave welfare due to income.

Advocates for poor people say they have some concerns about what will happen to people after those six months are up. Naomi Meyer, a senior attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services, said if for example someone is working part time and their pay does not increase in the first six months, "they're still going to need that supplemental bit of benefits for awhile longer."

But Harris and Meyer both said the change for the first six months will help families and will also alleviate some of the program's complexity, since individuals will no longer have to worry about exactly how much they are earning and how it will affect their benefits.

Baker also proposed two other related changes. One would raise the limit on the size of assets a welfare recipient can have from $2,500 to $5,000.

The other relates to a law put in place during state welfare reform in the 1990s that lowered the amount of money given to welfare recipients who are required to look for work by 2.75 percent. That means those who are exempt from the work requirement -- such people with small children or with disabilities -- get benefits of $593 a month for a family of three, while those who are subject to the work requirement get $578 a month.

Baker would eliminate the disparity, bringing individuals who are subject to the work requirement up to the higher rate.

The state will spend $3.8 million providing the incentives. Baker wrote in his budget message that the goal is "to help individuals return to the workforce, ultimately gain and sustain employment, and keep them on a path to long-term self-sufficiency."

Harris said low-income families will appreciate the extra money and the steps toward making the welfare program less complicated. Harris said she sees the move as "a recognition that we have to simplify this program."

For the last two years, Baker has angered advocates for low-income families by trying to cut welfare aid to families with children where a member of the family gets other federal disability benefits. The Legislature rejected the proposed change both times. Baker did not renew that proposal this year.