Finally, although many States, including the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, have for some time experimented with one or more of the administrative and legislative proposals set forth by the Secretary and the Department in establishing a new focus and new emphasis in public welfare administration, the broad purposes and objectives of H.R. 10032 establish as a national public policy both the leadership and the ways and means for a broad revision of the emphasis of the last quarter century; a concentration of our skills and resources upon the family as the most important segment of American society; and a recognition of the rights of each family and each individual to the assistance and resources available in his community to assist him to a self-supporting, productive station with dignity and status in his community.

His Excellency, the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Honorable John A. Volpe, sincerely urges favorable action by your committee on this legislation.

Mr. KING (presiding). Does that complete your statement, Commissioner Tompkins?

Mr. TOMPKINS. Yes, sir.

Mr. KING. The committee wishes to thank you for the benefit of your views. Are there any questions? Mr. Burke will inquire.

Mr. BURKE. Mr. Tompkins, is Massachusetts ready to implement this program if it is passed into law?

Mr. TOMPKINS. I do not think any State is completely ready as of this moment.

Mr. BURKE. May I put it this way? Have you made any plans to implement the program?

Mr. TOMPKINS. Yes. For 3 months our staff has been working on a variety of approaches, including agreements with the State department of education for full utilization of their adult education classes for the training or retraining or the equipping of the adult employables who have no skills or who have latent skills that have not been used for many years, to equip them for productive employment.

We are also in the process of socially diagnosing our aid-to-dependent-children cases with some emphasis upon those mothers who have only one high school or adolescent child for purposes of stimulating that type of mother; that is, with the one single child in the family of high school age, to return to these adult education classes, because if she waits to reemploy herself, or to find new employment, until the child has reached age 18 she is 3 to 6 years older than she is today. She is 3 to 6 years more removed from the skills that she had at the time that she was single and did not have family responsibilities to carry. We have also developed for immediate use within the next month a crash training program of our social workers, in the aid-to-dependent-children program particularly of 40 hours of institute work, and set up a requirement for a segregation of the family cases within the public assistance categories as one administrative unit, and the adult. individual caseloads of disability assistance, old age assistance, and unattached general relief persons; plus medical assistance to the aged as a second administrative unit.

That is broadly what we have been working on since November 15,

1961.

Mr. BURKE. You honestly feel that this program will help these people help themselves?

Mr. TOMPKINS. I have no doubt about it. I think it has been long overdue. As I indicated in my prepared statement, public welfare leadership in the States and in the cities and counties of America have been crying for and hoping for national public policy and national leadership in this entire field of intensive social services, rehabilitation, retraining, and reequipping individuals who are basically employable for productive employment; plus protection of children.

Mr. BURKE. That is all.

The CHAIRMAN. Any further questions of Mr. Tompkins?

Mr. TOMPKINS. I would like to thank the committee, Mr. Chairman, through you, for the courtesies extended to me over the years. The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Tompkins, we are always very pleased to have you before this committee and so today on this subject.

Mr. TOMPKINS. Thank you.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Lourie. Mr. Lourie, you have been with us before, but for purposes of this record will you again identify yourself?

STATEMENTS OF NORMAN V. LOURIE, PRESIDENT, AND WAYNE VASEY, IN BEHALF OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SOCIAL WORKERS; ACCOMPANIED BY RUDOLPH T. DANSTEDT, DIRECTOR OF WASHINGTON BRANCH OFFICE

Mr. LOURIE. Yes, sir. My name is Norman Lourie. I am president of the National Association of Social Workers. I am employed as the deputy secretary of public welfare in the Commonwealth of Pennsyl vania, and I have with me on my left Dr. Wayne Vasey, who is the dean of the School of Social Work at Rutgers University, who was a consultant to the Ad Hoc Committee on Public Welfare which Secretary Ribicoff appointed in 1961 to advise him on public welfare programs; and also Mr. Rudolph Danstedt, who is the Washington representative of the association.

The CHAIRMAN. We are pleased to have you gentlemen with us today also. You are recognized.

Mr. LOURIE. Thank you, sir. I just wanted to comment that the national association, as some of you may know, is a national professional association of approximately 34,000 people who work in governmental and voluntary Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, and nonsectarian health and welfare agencies.

We have long supported what the President called in his recent welfare message the "rehabilitative road" to the alleviation and prevention of economic and social poverty

We would like to call the attention, and we do call the attention of the committee in our written statement, to the fact that we presented to both major political parties for inclusion in their platform our own notions as to what their platforms ought to be, and we were pleased to note that the platforms of both parties were addressed quite significantly to improvements in the public welfare program.

The 1960 Democratic platform, for example, stated that

The Federal Government, which now shares the cost of aid to some of these (i.e., persons in need), should share in all, and benefits should be made available without regard to residence.

The Republican platform the same year advocated, and I quote:

A single. Federal assistance grant to each State for aid to needy persons rather than dividing such grants into specific categories.

We believe that H.R. 10032 fulfills these promises in part through its sections 136 and 137, which reduce or eliminate residence, in title XVI, which provides an option for combining the old age assistance, the disability, and the medical aid to the aged into a single State plan. Under the heading "Child welfare," the Democratic platform, you will recall, promised, and I quote:

The child welfare program and other services already established under the Social Security Act should be expanded.

The bill provides such expansion not only for increasing child welfare authorization to $50 million by fiscal 1969-that is in section. 102-but also provides for day-care services in its section 527. I would like to ask now for the opportunity to have Mr. Vasey present his part of our statement.

The CHAIRMAN. All right, Mr. Vasey.

Mr. VASEY. As indicated earlier by Mr. Lourie, I did serve as consultant to the Ad Hoc Committee which advised the Secretary on recommended changes in public welfare laws. This group included 25 persons, all with extensive experience in social welfare.

This group worked without any per diem or travel expenses from Government, and they took this assignment very seriously and did examine and recommend upon a number of issues. The report was presented to the Secretary early in September 1961, and I understand that a copy of this report has been placed by the Secretary in the record, and the report contains these recommendations.

We made a number of recommendations which we felt would enhance and strengthen the public welfare program, a number which we are pleased to find are included in this bill, or at least some of the provisions. I will not go over these in detail, these points of similarity, but I would note the deduction of earnings of an employed child in an ADC family should not be required so that there would be greater incentive.

Also the amendments of 1961 providing for ADC to needy children of unemployed parents, extension of this measure was another one. Research and demonstration projects to deal with the problems of illegitimacy, desertion, and other forms of social maladjustment, some provisions' recommendations were made to that effect also by the committee.

I want to indicate at this point that our association endorses H.R. 9299 introduced by Mr. Mills last September. This bill authorizes the Children's Bureau to provide grants, execute contracts, and provide other arrangements for research related to maternal and child health services and crippled children's services. It provides essentially the same authority, these sections of the title, that was granted to child welfare services last year.

I want to go on record that the association endorses this bill also. By far our most important recommendations, and we think the ones that are central to this bill H.R. 10032 are those which are directed towards the provision of protective, preventive, and rehabilitative services. We noted in our report that financial assistance is essential, but is not enough by itself. Expenditures for assistance, unaccompanied by rehabilitation services, could actually have the effect of increasing dependency and eventual cost to the community. We felt that the very essence of a vital program should be full use of our rehabilitative service, including, but not confined to, financial assistance. We recognize the need for qualified staff to man these services and to carry on the program of rehabilitation. We had to face the conclusion that the present level of training in public welfare is not enough for the job to be done.

We were not in any way disparaging the excellent work that has been done against heavy odds by public welfare staffs, but we felt that they could be further strengthened by provision for training and upgrading of skills and abilities. We recommended both an immediate and long-range program. We also noted the importance of the assurance that aid goes only to those legally eligible for it and that this is best safeguarded by adequate numbers of well-qualified staff to evaluate the needs of recipients and to determine their qualifications for receiving help.

A constructive public welfare approach rests on the belief that the capacities of persons to meet their problems and to behave responsibly can be reinforced by knowledgeable, well-directed help which builds their self-respect. We emphasized and underlined the fact that the public welfare agency must be given the resources in terms of authority, funds, and personnel to be a principal community agency in the prevention and control of dependency and related social problems. Today the public welfare agency is the only agency, governmental or voluntary, that is found in every county in the United States. We want to see that this important and essential agency is equipped to help constructively the people who are dependent or in danger of becoming dependent.

There are several other areas in which we reendorsed the recommendations of the Advisory Council on Public Assistance and Child Welfare respectively which were authorized in the 1958 social security amendments and reported to Congress early in 1960.

We agreed on a number of points and I will not go into detail except to note those and our essential harmony of purpose with them.

Therefore, we are heartily endorsing this bill, its purposes and its content, and we think that it would materially help to do an important job.

Mr. Lourie will now conclude the statement.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Lourie.

Mr. LOURIE. I would just like to reemphasize a couple of things Mr. Vasey talked about. The provisions in the legislation which would allow 75 percent financial participation we think is real urgent in providing the States with the ammunition to do what has been called this rehabilitative job. It actually is above the 50 percent

matching that now exists, sharing the cost 50-50 with the States of what represents a new approach.

I was impressed by some of the things that were mentioned by the Congressman from Iowa and would like to just point out from our standpoint that here we have the only public service in the 3,000 counties in the United States and if we are really going to make this public welfare agency the kind of an effective device which can do more than just give money to people and do more than what has been described as determining eligibility, we have to really make this public welfare agency in each county a solid rehabilitative force, and the only way to do this is to give them the ammunition and the tools to do it with.

We think that this business of giving the public welfare agencies enough people and giving them the kind of people that can have enough time and not be too crowded in their caseloads to do this job is of basic importance.

We note that the bill does call for the use of other public agencies on a purchase basis. It does call for the use of other private agencies, the voluntary agencies, on a purchase basis. We think this is important, but we would like to point out that even to purchase, if you are going to be in a public welfare agency and you are going to go out and purchase services, you have to have the kind of personnel on your own staff that knows what they are going to purchase.

We also would like to point out that the voluntary agencies have a tremendous contribution to make, but they are not really ever going to be able to substitute for this massive job that has to be done.

We hope that the approach to both public and private purchase will be done cautiously and will be done on a case-by-case basis with the basic responsibility being with the public welfare agency.

The final comment I would like to make has to do with the adequacy of assistance payments. The bill does propose including aid for the spouse or relative with whom a dependent child is living. It continues the increase for the adult titles which were provided in 1961, but we would like to point out that even with these, and we repeat what the Advisory Council on Public Assistance found, there is a gap of several hundred million dollars between the estimated needs of the ADC families and the Federal and State appropriations; and we know that in the average State the food allowances for ADC families are substantially below the U.S. Department of Agriculture's low-cost plan.

In other words, despite all the other problems that we have in the public welfare programs, we are still feeding people and caring for people outside and below a minimum level of health and decency and I think that this is always something that ought to be of concern. We have put into the record our own legislative objectives. I hope that the committee has an opportunity to look at them. We think they are very much in line with this bill. We want to repeat how much we support this particular bill and hope that you will give it all consideration. We appreciate this opportunity to appear.

The CHAIRMAN. Without objection the legislative objectives of the organization will be included at this point in the record.