Late NM Congressman said pay the Legislature
NM programs are better run at the state level than from D.C., but that requires full-time
Our late Congressman Steve Schiff was laid to rest 20 years ago this year. As his former spokesman, I wrote in the Journal about policy concerns of the day around the fifth and 10th anniversaries of his passing, relaying his perspectives as I knew them.
With the passage of time, fading memories and evolving political circumstances, I generally feel less certain these days about where Schiff would have stood on various issues.
There is one opinion, however, he expressed to me on the way home from addressing the Legislature in Santa Fe for what would turn out to be the last time. Simply put, he was in favor of professionalizing the state Legislature. In fact, it was what he intended to tell them at the following year’s address, had he still been around to deliver it.
During his tenure representing New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, sweeping federal changes to the welfare state put the onus on Santa Fe to develop and manage billion-dollar programs like Medicaid, as well as cash assistance, food stamps, child support enforcement and more.
Ironically, after Schiff’s passing, I would return to New Mexico and help manage these very programs during the second Gov. Gary Johnson administration. There I saw firsthand just how complex the residual federal “strings” attached to each program made setting and directing policy.
I know it’s not generally in keeping with good Republican principle to support growing already out-sized government, and I appreciate that our state Constitution’s architects wisely chose an essentially volunteer citizen legislature that would only meet for a month or two each year.
But circumstances have changed rather drastically in recent years. And really it is not a good business practice to get so lean in the boardroom that those who are setting policy are often woefully underinformed about what’s involved and at stake.
My first few months at Human Services (HSD) were awkward. Going before interim legislative committees to answer questions meant taking expert staff with me and turning to them often. But after a year or so, the shoe was on the other foot and I found myself attempting rather often to educate citizen lawmakers on the basics of federal flow-through programs, let alone the myriad finer points.
I don’t mean to denigrate those who serve in Santa Fe in any way. Lawmakers generally meant well and were by and large intelligent people. But when you’re talking about several billion dollars per year in taxpayer-funded public assistance, they need to work closer to full time.
Under our current system, most lawmakers must take time off from their jobs or businesses to serve in Santa Fe. So they are often stretched too thin to give complex policy the kind of focused attention it needs.
In one instance early in my time at HSD, the state Senate actually passed a bill to break up the Human Services Department, which was widely considered ungovernable after six Cabinet appointments in four years. As much as the Johnson administration might have liked to pare down government this way, the fact was the federal government required a “single state agency” for some of these programs.
The bill also sent the department’s Child Support Enforcement Division (CSED) to the Children, Youth and Families Department, presumably because both have “children” in their titles. But the interface between CSED and its sister Income Support Division (ISD) is perhaps the most complex in government since cash assistance is predicated upon cooperation with CSED and it took 9 million lines of code just to properly disburse CSED collections.
CSED was much more a collection agency than social work. So if it were to have been re-deployed, the Attorney General’s Office or Taxation & Revenue would have been a more relevant pairing.
At any rate, once I got a chance to explain the basic challenges, the Senate recalled the legislation from the House. Yet, I couldn’t help but think that Steve Schiff was right and the situation wouldn’t have gotten so dysfunctional in the first place if there had been something closer to full-time legislative oversight.
As nettlesome as these programs can be, it’s still far better to have them run at the state level rather than from D.C. And it’s not hard to imagine further delegation of program responsibilities from Washington to the states.
Because we also continue to see state agencies in need of better oversight, I felt it appropriate on this occasion to convey one of Steve’s public policy opinions one last time. I hope I’ve done right by him.