Computerizing a Covenant Contract Liberalism and the Nationalization of Welfare Administration

Abstract

In the 1980s, US liberals believed that they could diminish the political potency of welfare as a racialized electoral issue by computerizing welfare administration. They therefore worked to automate, professionalize, and nationalize the administration of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and interconnected systems of child support collection. As a result, for welfare recipients, computers mediated the experience of the state. With these networked technologies, liberals constructed a specific social contract in which anti-poverty payments would be tracked as debts using the seemingly objective mechanisms of computerized accounting. In their attempt to contain the politics of welfare, liberals transformed welfare’s underlying logic from a rights-based to a contract-based liberalism. This chapter traces that the operational and ideological work of computerizing welfare administration and its shifting logic at three levels. First, state-level officials and technicians linked records across databases with the goal of reducing fraud and, by doing so, facilitated new types of federalized exchange based on common technical standards. Second, national leaders, led by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and supported by Governor Bill Clinton, endorsed this contractual approach and further funded its computerization as part of the Family Support Act of 1988. Third, individual states deployed increasingly extractive digital tools to collect child support payments to offset the costs of welfare. In sum, the computerized national welfare state proved effective at extraction, able to automate debt collection across all fifty states. As a political entity, the national welfare state remained weak; its opacity and newly nationalized status leaving it vulnerable to national reforms that would end liberal welfare entitlements altogether.