CONTENTS I. Introduction. The need for OEO during the next 2 years_ III. Proposed funding levels. A. Overall authorizations for fiscal years 1970 and 1971. C. Special impact programs (community economic develop ment). D. Community action program_ E. Headstart__ F. Follow through.. G. Legal services_ H. Comprehensive health services. I. Emergency food and medical services.. J. Family planning---. K. Senior opportunities and services... L. Rural loans... M. Migrant workers.. N. Administration. O. VISTA program P. Day care projects-- IV. Evaluation of antipoverty efforts. V. Increased flexibility in use of funds.. VI. Advance funding authority-.. VII. Participation of children in Headstart projects.. VIII. Time of appropriations technical amendment.. IX. A new alcoholic counseling and recovery program_ X. A new drug rehabilitation program__ XI. Integrity of legal services program XII. Civil service credit for VISTA XIII. GAO audit authority--- XIV. Use of closed Job Corps centers for special youth programs. Supplemental views of Messrs. Javits, Prouty, Dominick, Murphy, Tables, funding- Section-by-section analysis.. Changes in existing law. Schweiker, Saxbe, and Smith.. Individual views of Mr. Murphy.. (III Mr. NELSON, from the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, submitted the following REPORT together with SUPPLEMENTAL AND INDIVIDUAL VIEWS [To accompany S. 3016] The Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, having had under consideration legislation to amend the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, to authorize funds for the continued operation of economic opportunity programs, and for other purposes, reports an original bill and recommends that it do pass. I. INTRODUCTION-THE NEED FOR OEO DURING THE NEXT 2 YEARS The cycle of poverty in the slums and ghettos has been slowed by the counterforce of the whirring economy. Unemployment is down and income is up, even in the hardestto-reach places and categories of people. But the cycle of dependence, measured by the number of welfare recipients, has accelerated more than the (Kerner) Commission anticipated. *** Progress in dealing with the conditions of slumghetto life has been nowhere near in scale with the problems. Nor has the past year seen even a serious start toward the changes in national priorities, programs and institutions advocated by the Commission. The sense of urgency in the Commission report has not been reflected in the Nation's response.-One Year Later, published by Urban America, Inc., and the Urban Coalition, March 1, 1969. Despite the apparent affluence of the Nation as a whole, poverty, and the social problems which go with it, remains a deeply serious problem in America and demands the urgent attention of the Federal Government. This was the principal conclusion of witnesses who testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower and Poverty as it considered legislation to extend the Economic Opportunity Act. And this remains the principal conclusion of the Labor and Public Welfare Committee as it reports to the Senate a bill to extend the Office of Economic Opportunity for 2 additional years, as recommended by the Administration. Although there are (and perhaps always will be) differences of opinion as to the precise manner in which to attack the problems of poverty, there is almost universal agreement that vigorous governmental action is needed, and that substantial resources must be committed to the fight. The dimensions of poverty On August 19, 1969, on the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Economic Opportunity Act, the U.S. Census Bureau placed the number of Americans living in poverty at 25,400,000, which represents 13 percent of the population. Of this large poverty population, 42 percent are children, under 18, and 18 percent are elderly, over 65. This estimate is based on a newly established level of $3,553 per year as the minimum income needed by a nonfarm family of four to live above the poverty level.1 The specter of 25 million poverty stricken fellow citizens haunts this prosperous Nation. A nationally recognized authority on hunger testified before our committee that there are "at least 5 million chronically hungry people in the United States and another 10 million who are chronically malnourished." A distinguished physican operating an OEO-financed health center in Mississippi described scientific studies which indicate that hunger and the cultural deprivation which goes with poverty are transforming above average children into substantially below average human beings within the first 2 or 3 years of their lives. Although poverty is a problem for a minority of Americans, it is limited to no one racial group and no one region of the Nation. Of the 25.4 million victims of poverty, 17.4 million are white. That is to say, poor whites outnumber poor nonwhites 2 to 1. Yet the poor who are nonwhite-Negroes, Indians, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans and Eskimos-appear to suffer from deeper extremes of poverty, and their effort to climb out of the morass of poverty is made all the more difficult by their race. The rural South remains an area with especially critical poverty problems, but depressed rural areas in many sections of the Nation face similar problems, and the 1 In August 1969, the statistical definition of poverty was revised as a result of studies by an interagency task force. It sets the poverty level at $3,553 for a nonfarm family of four and $3,034 for a farm family. The previous levels had been $3,335 and $2,345 respectively. Such definitions are necessary to develop national statistics. Their shortcomings must be kept in mind, however. The GAO audit of OEO (March 1969) stated: "The poverty line measure of individual need has been frequently challenged as a valid measure of individual need. *** It is based on a rather arbitrary multiple of food costs for families of different sizes. A purely economic definition or indicator of individual poverty is likely to oversimplify multidimensional aspects of the problem." Review of Economic Opportunity programs, by the Comptroller General of the United States, p. 20. 2 "The South contains 48.5 percent of all poor people and almost two-thirds of the nonwhite poor." OEO Congressional Presentation, May 1969, p. 2. poverty of our large city ghettos confronts us with even more complex and explosive problems. This is essentially the same situation which the Congress faced in 1964 when it first established the Office of Economic Opportunity. It recognized that existing Federal agencies and the programs they were assigned to administer, were for a variety of reasons not fully adequate to the challenge of poverty in the 1960's. The creation of a new Federal agency and the launching of a variety of quickly developed new programs aimed at breaking up long established patterns of poverty, was bound to create controversy. A review of progress made Progress has been made in the War on Poverty, but it is always difficult to correlate such progress with specific programs. It is estimated that 11 million Americans have "come out of poverty" since 1964 by rising above the somewhat arbitrary poverty income levels. There is debate as to whether this progress can be attributed to any great extent to the programs established under the Economic Opportunity Act. The committee believes that this argument begs the question. There is no question that much of the progress toward eliminating or reducing poverty in America has resulted from the broad expansion of the American economy, rather than from any single program or set of programs operated by OEO or any other agency.3 At the same time, there is no question that ŎEO has achieved sufficient success to merit its continuation as what it was meant to be- a program which is both supplemental and experimental, serving as an advocate of the poor within the agencies of government and in the Nation at large, facing up to the unmet needs and seeking the answers to the riddle of poverty which have eluded us in the past. OEO itself described its record in these words in a report early in 1969: We have deep pride and satisfaction from much that OEO has accomplished. There are the indisputable community action achievements of institutional change, the enlistment of the largest peacetime army of volunteers in history, the mobilization of community resources, and the pioneering involvement of the private sector in social welfare programs ** * We find great significance in the stationing of U.S. Employment Service personnel in ghetto offices; in the location. of welfare workers in OEO's neighborhood centers; in the more than 50 law schools which have incorporated courses on poverty law into their curriculum; in the "participation of the poor" principle adopted by almost every Federal agency concerned with domestic programs; in the increasing proportion of United Fund efforts that are directed toward the poor; in the adoption by the military services of Job "Between 1959 and 1967, the number of poor declined by one-third from 38.9 million to 26.1 million. The main reason for this dramatic improvement has been the achievement and maintenance of a full employment economy during recent years." OEO Congressional Presentation, May 1969, p. 142. The role of full employment must be kept in mind in interpreting statistics on the dimensions of our poverty problem as well as in measuring success or failure of antipoverty programs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on October 8, 1969, that unemployment rose from 3.5 percent to 4 percent of the labor force. Because persons living in poverty are often "last to be hired and first to be fired," even such seemingly small changes in overall employment figures can have a great effect on the poverty problem. |