Family Assistance Plan

The Family Assistance Plan (FAP) was a welfare program introduced by President Richard Nixon in August 1969, which aimed to implement a negative income tax for households with working parents.

The FAP specifically provided aid assistance to working-class Americans, dividing benefits based on age, the number of children, family income, and eligibility.

Initially, the Nixon administration thought the FAP legislation would easily pass through the House of Representatives and the more liberal Senate, as both chambers were controlled by the Democratic Party.

Michael Harrington, a prominent socialist of the time, called it "the most radical idea since the New Deal," and a Yugoslav Marxist is reported to have commented that "were it to pass, it might well be the most important social legislation in history in that it would finally free the individual and his family from the myriad and inescapable forms of coercion which society exerts through the employment nexus.

From 1965 to 1970, the AFDC experienced an expansion of 110 percent, and its rapid growth had become a heated topic of debate for both the Democratic and Republican parties as welfare costs for the government increased.

[4] By the time Nixon came into the presidency, the projected cost of the AFDC was 6 billion dollars annually, straining already tight state and federal budgets.

Legislation was passed in Louisiana which declared children born out of wedlock or families cohabiting without an official marriage license to be inadmissible for AFDC benefits.

[7] Indeed, this cultural divide between the deserving and undeserving would continue to underscore public opinion on welfare not only as the AFDC was debated, but in later moments as well in discussions of Nixon's FAP.

In 1967, legislation pushed for a work-incentive phase (WIN) to AFDC, which required families currently on the program to participate in job/work training to continue receiving benefits.

[9] By early January 1969, the Nixon Administration had installed a committee to study the welfare system and propose changes, culminating in the eventual announcement of the FAP in August 1969.

Nixon highlighted this as his 'Northern Strategy' – efforts to garner votes and support from blue-collar workers in industrialized states where the working class was predominantly white.

Nixon therefore objectively took a moderate/centrist stance in his implementation of the FAP, noting that conservatives would likely find issues in welfare reform, especially if it blurred racial lines.

[10] By creating an entirely new system of welfare reform, Nixon was also separating himself from liberal policymakers like former president Johnson, gaining him an edge politically.

By proposing the FAP, Nixon hoped he could not only garner praise from liberals seeking more egalitarian welfare reform but also appeal to a new kind of veiled, latent racial conservatism.

[18] As the initial proposal for the FAP developed, both the AFDC and food stamps were retained as part of the package, but the stated ultimate aim was to phase out the service component of the program.

The FAP sought to eliminate this "undifferentiated work requirement" by reducing the penalty and granting an exemption for mothers with children under the age of six (60% of families headed by potentially employable females fell into this category).

[28] The first formal proposal of the FAP was introduced to the American public in August 1969 when President Nixon set forth his new goals of welfare reform during a televised address.

Nixon's FAP was highlighted as a form of 'workfare' in hopes of incentivizing poorer families to continue working rather than seek unemployment welfare benefits.

In April 1970, after revisions were completed on its initial proposal, the October 1969 administration bill, still including the FAP, was passed by the House of Representatives under closed rule.

[31] Nixon's FAP came at a time when Congress sought to assert its power in domestic affairs, be it scrutinizing existing programs or declining to enact new ones, which the architects of the Family Assistance Plan hardly realized.

[33] The conservative lawmakers regarded the new welfare program as a huge drain on the treasury of the nation, while the liberals concerned themselves with the work requirement of the FAP and its insufficient benefit level.

[36] in his memoirs, Nixon reflected on the opposition he faced to his FAP proposal from both liberals and fellow conservatives, noting that In many respects I was in a very peculiar situation: less than eight months after my inauguration as the first Republican President in eight years, I was proposing a piece of almost revolutionary domestic legislation that required me to seek a legislative alliance with Democrats and liberals; my own conservative friends and allies were bound to oppose it.

[45] Nevertheless, the FAP raised concerns for white Americans as they resented that Black people, especially in the rural South, could receive more benefits that could increase their living standards.

[48] Additionally, small business owners also worried that people with FAP benefits would demand higher wages and better working environments in the future.

[50] Ideologically, for moderate business leaders and organizations that did not hold low-income citizens responsible for their poverty, the FAP was popular as they thought it could quell urban violence as a form of their contribution to social justice.

This meant women, who had irregular jobs with low wages or who stayed at home to focus on household affairs, had to be economically dependent on their male family members.

[51] Thus the government responded to potential inequality between male and female earnings by proposing a daycare system alongside the FAP that could encourage mothers to participate in job training and employment.

[52] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his 1973 book The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan, devotes much space to the opposition to FAP by what he characterizes as middle- to upper-middle class welfare professionals.

These were individuals who constituted, in the words of a Life Magazine editorial of the time, a "'vast welfare bureaucracy," 170,000 employees with a "built-in resistance to change…'"—and whose salaries were heavily responsible for the costs of that system—as well as others benefitting less directly.

The FAP was dictated by economic policies that dominated American political discourse since Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, where welfare expansion, especially towards his blue-collar white constituencies was a necessity for electoral success.