DC Youth Jobs Program: A Case of Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

Here in Washington, D.C., the Summer Youth Employment Program has just wrapped up another controversial season. As is so often the case, what you see depends on where you stand.

The program aims to provide summer-long subsidized jobs for as many young D.C. work-eligible residents as possible. According to Joe Walsh, who directs the Department of Employment Services, it placed nearly 20,000 youth this year — the largest number in two decades. This at a time when some local governments cut back their critically-important summer youth jobs programs or decided not to run them at all.

We know that teen unemployment is extraordinarily high. We know that job experience of any kind is a plus on your resume. We know that even a job that involves nothing more than picking up trash or standing at a copying machine teaches basic workplace behaviors — show up on time every day, follow instructions, talk politely, etc.

We know the money can make a difference, especially in these tough times. Participants in the District's Summer Youth Employment Program earned $1,100 if they worked the full-time they were scheduled.

So what's not to like?

Well, first there's a long-standing issue about whether bigger is better. Martha Ross, the Deputy Director of Washington-area research at the Brookings Institution, has repeatedly argued that the District should shift its focus to consistently high-quality summer job experiences, combined with larger investments in year-round programs for disconnected youth, i.e., those who are neither in school nor working. They, after all, are at much higher risk than youth who like as not are going back to school when the summer is over.

The biggest hang-up here is that providing summer jobs for youth is a proven political winner for elected officials. Parents and some of the enrolled youth themselves vote. You want as many as possible grateful and as few as possible angry because jobs weren't available. Those in the District have come to expect a large program.

A more pressing issue is that the District's Summer Youth Employment Program has repeatedly operated a larger, longer program than its approved budget would cover. In 2007, costs were double the $12 million budget. In 2008, the cost overrun was nearly three times greater. Yet another cost overrun in 2009.

The District, like virtually all states, must balance its budget every year. So funds to fill the gaps had to be found somewhere else.

Which brings us to the flap that arose near the end of this summer's program. The DC Council had capped it at six weeks. The mayor, Adrian Fenty, wanted to run it for seven and a half. So late in the game, he asked the Council to extend it.

At which point, the committee that oversees the program discovered that it had already cost many millions more than the Council had approved. The mayor had filled the gap in part by using $4.1 million of the funds the District had received from the TANF Emergency Contingency Fund (pdf). There were plans to use an additional $4.35 million or so to cover the costs of the extra days.

Now, the Emergency Contingency Fund can be used to pay for subsidized jobs for youth, if their families are poor enough to qualify for TANF. Walsh claimed that 80 percent of this year's program participants were. But we have reason to question this figure. What's more certain is that nearly a third of them came from families receiving government cash assistance or an equivalent like food stamps. So the extra funds helped some youth who truly needed it.

But the Department of Human Services had assured its oversight committee that the Emergency Contingency funds it expected to receive would be used for other purposes. Homeless services were perhaps the most critical.

DHS had in the past used regular TANF funds to supplement the amount the Council appropriated for homeless services. For the current budget, the administration decided to use them for other things. But the head of DHS told the Council that Emergency Contingency funds would be used to make up the difference. An even larger amount would go to homeless services in the upcoming fiscal year.

The funds are urgently needed to address the acute shortage of shelter for homeless families — in fact, maybe even more funds than DHS had allocated. Last winter, the main emergency shelter that's supposed to accommodate them filled to over-flowing. Families lined up on cots in the activity room. Some bedded down in hallways.

Now families are being turned away, even when they have no safe place to spend the night. In mid-August, there were 446 families on the waiting list for shelter (pdf). And before we know it, winter will be upon us again, which means that the District will be legally obligated to ensure that all residents have shelter in severe weather.

We've been assured that the mayor's raid on the Emergency Contingency funds won't impact the DHS plans for homeless services. Some of us are skeptical, given last year's assurances that everything would be fine.

In any event, there were other planned uses of the Emergency Contingency funds, including crucial improvements in the job training and supportive services available to the District's TANF participants. Also on the agenda were an overdue increase in TANF cash benefits and a new case management system to handle the overwhelming tide of applications for food stamps and other public assistance.

Something's going to get cut now because sure as shootin' the DHS budget won't be supplemented to make up for the lost Emergency Contingency funds.

Now, some of this is just local politics and personalities — a hard-charging mayor who's running for re-election, a Council he's repeatedly side-stepped.

But I see some broader implications here.

All over the country, state and local governments are struggling to keep their budgets balanced with falling tax revenues. They're trying, as leaders always say in these situations, to do more with less. But beyond a limited point, that's not possible. Well-worn conservative assertions notwithstanding, there just isn't that much fraud, waste and abuse to root out.

So spending priorities are competing for shares of a shrinking pie. We see lots of robbing Peter to pay Paul, often at the expense of programs for low-income people.

Granted, tough choices are inevitable in tough times. But they're made harder when government officials take some things off the table. Here in the District, for example, the mayor ran on a promise of no tax increases.

He's tinkered with fees — most of them disproportionately burdensome for low-income residents. But efforts to change the tax code so that high-income residents would pay more ultimately failed. They would have had a much better chance if the mayor hadn't made a big deal about how he'd balanced his proposed budgets without tax increases.

Last but not least, we need more transparency — and in many cases, more collaboration. The late-in-the-day surprise about the District's Summer Youth Employment Program never would have happened if the mayor had proposed a realistic budget and then lived with the Council's decision, asked it to reconsider or, at the very least, sought its input on what he intended to do.

Photo credit: cohdra