Dream deferred: the most inspired caseworker in America's most lauded welfare agency can barely do his job

Washington Monthly, Sept, 2004 by Jason DeParle

Perhaps he was thinking of Corey Daniels, the caseworker assigned to train Michael. He wore a platinum Dennis Rodman do and watched soap operas at his desk. Playing his voice mail on the speakerphone, he deleted clients' messages as soon as he heard their names. Bo-rring! Heard that! "The guy's a flipping goof," Michael said. A background check would have shown that Daniels was also a convicted forger, with an arrest record that included kidnapping, battery, and impersonating a police officer. Maximus hired him while he was on parole. A few months after his tutelage of Michael, Daniels was back in court, charged with extorting nearly $4,000 from his clients. (In a trial that largely pitted his word against theirs, he was acquitted.) Michael wondered what he had gotten into: "Drug abuse, check kiting, knocking up people--what is it about this place?"

W-2 buys the crack

Tracking a Maximus client named Opal Caples, I was developing my own concerns about the W-2 bureaucracy. We met in the summer of 1997 at another W-2 agency, a nonprofit grassroots group called the Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC). It, too, was a mess. I spent an hour in a room of corralled indigents, listening to a job counselor read from an almanac of occupations. It was social work as farce: "Mathematics: reading graphs and stuff like that--it gets real deep when it comes to mathematics ... Agriculture: that thing with cows, gets real deep--giving them hormones? ... Social studies: like socialization, only you studying it ... Forestry: why don't we see any more wolves? Somebody eating them?"

I included Opal in an article about the challenges W-2 faced, and she wound up posed with Tommy Thompson on the cover of The New Fork Times Magazine. She was also, secret; a cocaine addict in the process of relapsing. Six months later, her addiction was out of control. She auctioned off her furniture to drug dealers. She smoked up her food stamps. One day, she failed to pick up her three little girls from the day cam center that kept them after school. "I didn't forget--I was just high," she said.

W-2 variously ignored and abetted her demise. Her original caseworker, Darlene Haines, left OIC for jobs at Goodwill and Maximus. Then she got convicted of check forgery and wound up on the other side of the desk, as a W-2 client herself. With Haines gone, Opal went months with no caseworker at all. Facing eviction, she finally showed up at OIC's door, wild-eyed and wasted, begging to be seen. Had the receptionist bothered to look in the file, she would have known that the thin disheveled woman seeking help was a mother on drugs. (A previous caseworker had documented it a year earlier.) Instead, she said the office didn't see walk-ins.

A cousin called Opal's mother, who came from Chicago and got the girls. Opal fled to a drug den. With her new address in Maximus's district, OIC transferrd the case, and the monthly checks continued to flow. Opal, the W-2 poster child, was pregnant and riving in a crack house. And Wisconsin's celebrated program was buying the crack.