Jason DeParle of the New York Times has one of the best reported articles I’ve read about government’s response to the recession. Basically, the response is a two-layered — federal and state government — bloody mess:

Now decades after the Great Society brought a new burst of policymaking, aid programs flow through multiple — and sometimes rivalrous — departmental chains of command. Welfare and Medicaid reside at the Department of Health and Human Services, food stamps at Agriculture; rent subsidies at Housing and Urban Development; unemployment insurance at Labor; and tax credits at Treasury.

The "complex and Balkanized" federal bureaucracy is then made exponentially more confusing by states, which each have their own requirements and allocation system for food stamps, health care and housing help and unemployment benefits:

Fifteen states rank among the top 10 in providing one form of aid and the bottom 10 in another. California ranks second in distributing cash welfare but last in food stamps. South Dakota, last in jobless benefits, is first in subsidized housing.

Aid in states most hit by recession is also scattershot. Michigan’s programs reach a comparatively high share of the needy, while South Carolina’s rank in the middle and Nevada’s reach relatively few. All have double-digit unemployment rates.

One minor quibble is that DeParle says both liberals for more government aid and conservatives for less can agree with the Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler that the current aid system is a "jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t really fit together."

But that statement doesn’t go any farther that just admitting the status quo is flawed. There are two obvious — albeit massive and complex — steps to make the puzzle pieces fit. The first is to better coordinate aid to the poor, sick, and unemployed among federal agencies. But that first step will have a small impact unless Washington gets states to develop more uniform aid policies. Conservatives like Butler say they want a simpler aid system. Would these conservatives agree to a more streamlined, and perhaps inexpensive system, if it meant less state control?-MB

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