Abstract

"Making a Virtue of Austerity: Defunding the Safety Net and Rewriting the Boundaries of Public/Private Responsibility in 1990s America"

Brooke Depenbusch, University of Illinois Springfield (bdepe2@uis.edu)

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the fiscal crises facing America’s cities, deindustrialization, and the Reagan-era withdrawal of federal funding for state and local governments left America’s subnational governments facing a difficult dilemma – more need and rising inequality as the availability of public resources dried up.

This paper examines how, in this fraught context, Michigan was one of a handful of states whose republican governors garnered nationwide attention for their experiments in dismantling the safety net. In Michigan, the state made the sharply polarizing decision to simply eliminate its general relief program, the state program that served those impoverished persons who did not meet eligibility criteria for federal assistance programs.

This controversial decision was widely protested and, as researchers found, the elimination of this lifeline inflicted real harm. Nevertheless, the decision also had its cheerleaders. Indeed, many conservative thinkers and institutions actively heaped attention on what they viewed as the success of Michigan’s experiment in defunding the safety net. In these celebratory accounts, state officials attracted particular praise for their efforts to recalibrate the norms around public versus private responsibility. The state government, after defunding general relief, entered into contracts with private nonprofits like the Salvation Army to aid those who had been cut off from public benefits. Publicizing the move helped lend credence to accounts which characterized public welfare spending as excessively wasteful while also valorizing the potential for further the further privatization of functions that had previously been public.

Beyond examining the origins of the decision as well as the controversy it engendered, the paper will point to its significance both in ramping up the pressures that led to Clinton-era welfare reform and, more broadly, in reflecting and contributing to the rewriting of the boundaries between public and private responsibility in late-twentieth century America.