Abstract

"The Big Blue Welfare State: Technological Federalism in the Post-New Deal United States"

Marc Aidinoff, Institute for Advanced Study (marc.aidinoff@gmail.com)

IBM famously made possible the administration of a centralized system of retirement insurance for workers in the United States. It was punch cards fed into an IBM 077 Collator that powered the New Deal system of Social Security. The other half of the U.S. welfare state, the matriarchal welfare state designed to serve poor single mothers through the Social Security Act’s Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program, remained decentralized. Into the 1970s, it was the work of human case workers, public servants employed by county and state governments. This paper traces what happened when those caseworkers also began to rely on IBM computers and IBM standards.

This paper argues that technological transfer, among states, was a central feature of the federated U.S. welfare state. It traces three systems: one eligibility verification system that moved from Alaska, to North Dakota, to Mississippi, and one child support enforcement tool that traveled from to North Dakota. In doing so, it argues that private sector consultants and large technology firms, led by IBM, functioned as the agents of federalism, enabling exchange and some unification across a distributed and uneven system of poverty relief. This technological federalism reveals the changing labor of governance, both how private sector consultants spread the mechanisms of governance and how public sector caseworkers’ routine work changed to conform to the expectations of these tools. At the center of this story is the private sector strategy of pursuing differentially matched federal dollars, to unlock new sources of funding for cash-strapped state and local governments.