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Legal Accountability in the Age of Privatized Welfare |
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Michele E. Gilman |
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| When the federal welfare system was reformed in 1996, Congress gave States the option to contract out administration of their welfare pro-grams to private entities. Moreover, after enactment of the welfare reform, welfare recipients are expected to work to receive benefits. This means that front-line welfare office workers must engage in intensive interper-sonal counseling rather than simply confirm objective eligibility criteria and dispense checks. This results in vastly increased discretion for these front-line workers. When privatization is layered over this discretionary scheme, issues of accountability to program beneficiaries becomes signifi-cant. For over thirty years, it has been a tenet of public benefits law that due process protections attach to the government’s delivery of benefits. Yet when private entities deliver the same benefits, constitutional protec-tions may fall by the wayside. This article explores the implications of welfare privatization on welfare beneficiaries’ procedural rights. It ex-plains how the Supreme Court’s current state action doctrine may well insulate private welfare providers and their state contracting partners from constitutional claims. Accordingly, the Article also explores other poten-tial federal and state bases for enforcing accountability in welfare pro-grams in privatized jurisdictions, ranging from statutory to contractual to equitable claims. The Article concludes that the procedural rights of wel-fare recipients after welfare reform are greatly diminished | |
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Copyright
© 1998 by California Law Review, Inc. |
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