Brynn Anderson/AP Photo
Unsanitized-051020
Teachers hand out free lunches in Cusseta, Georgia, on May 7.
The following is a guest edition of Unsanitized from Michael Lipsky, the author of the award-winning Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (1980, 2010).
In a tacit rebellion, school lunch officials are taking the initiative to extend the food safety net beyond what existing policy allows. In short, they are feeding people because they are hungry.
In Los Angeles, the city’s Unified School District is serving meals to unemployed and underemployed adults at the district’s cafeterias. “We decided that we were going to serve all of those who came and needed help, no questions asked,” declared school superintendent Austin Beutner.
In Baltimore, school cafeteria workers have extended food services to children regardless of income. They are also accommodating adults who show up and say they are hungry. Remarkably, some school kitchens are sending basic food supplies home with needy families.
In the time of the coronavirus, whether their institutions will be reimbursed does not seem to definitively guide cafeteria decision-makers. As one manager reported, “we are supposed to be here to meet the needs of the community. How could I say no?”
Read all of our Unsanitized reports
In normal times, administrators of public programs are conditioned to say “no” consistently. Virtually all social welfare programs, including school lunch provision, have eligibility requirements. The most evident reason is to delineate the target population while creating the rationale for restricting budget outlays. So long as a society targets public programs rather than offers them universally, it will create eligibility requirements.
There are often good reasons to look more closely at the function of dividing people into categories of eligible and ineligible. Even though most food stamp recipients are employed at least part of the year, some decline to participate in the program because they don’t want to be categorized as unable to take care of themselves. A familiar observation about school feeding programs is that requiring parents to prove they are poor establishes pernicious divisions between children. Some children choose not to eat the free lunch offered at their school because they don’t want to be stigmatized.
But is society worse off if some children whose parents aren’t certifiably poor get a free meal? School lunches could become a public good, like libraries and fire protection.
When it comes to feeding people, there have always been different approaches to assessing eligibility. Means testing is one way. Taking people at their word is another. The tension in the various approaches to food eligibility was evident in the early days of the Reagan Administration, when the federal government decided to empty its underground warehouses of stored cheese and give it to the needy through food banks and pantries and soup kitchens.
Initially, government was content simply to give the cheese away. But when word got around in low-income communities, distribution sites were overwhelmed. Near riots occurred in a few cities as applicants forced their way into food pantries, in fear that they would close before they could be served.
As demand surged, the government moved to require sites to give cheese only to people who could prove they were poor, for example, by showing they were also enrolled in the food stamp program.
But as Marc Thibodeau and I reported at the time, many front-line organizations were troubled by the government’s demands that pantries certify recipients’ eligibility. These Churches and charitable organizations operated on different principles: if a person says she is hungry and willing to wait in line to eat a common meal in a church basement, she should be fed, no questions asked. Checking the income of someone who says she is hungry was inconsistent with their moral and spiritual obligations.
At issue is whether some public policies should be based as much on solidarity as on categorical eligibility. In food policy we could consider taking people at their word when they say they don’t have enough to eat. Yes, some people who are not truly hungry might take advantage of the program. Some people who are truly hungry might not be poor. But the benefits might be great: greater public support, reduced stigma for people in need, greater recognition that food security is a society-wide concern, the elimination of program expenses associated with verification.
In the current plague environment, we are seeing workers in positions to be helpful suspending normal rules of governance at their own discretion. Their instincts to respond to perceived need are similar to those of neighbors helping neighbors after floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters.
A sense of crisis dominates our current discourse. People are making masks out of scraps and fashioning medical gear out of trash bags. Health care workers, grocery clerks and bus drivers are now first responders. In the urgency of coping with the pandemic, an emergent sense of community is revealing what a more human set of priorities might look like.
Today I Learned
- I was on Status Coup with Jordan Chariton talking about pandemic response. Watch here. (YouTube)
- When Iran’s top leadership all became stricken with coronavirus, some said it was an example of a failing political culture. Now America’s public health leadership is heading into quarantine. (Associated Press)
- Job losses accelerated this past week, as depressions tend to fold in on themselves in the absence of demand. (Wall Street Journal)
- Fast casual and buffet-style chain restaurants are likely done. (Washington Post)
- Delivery fees becoming such a big expense for restaurants that cities are getting involved with capping rates. (Politico)
- Elon Musk searching far and wide for someone to let him put his workers at risk of asphyxiation by forcing them back to work. (Reuters)
- Small-time drug dealers retooling for the social distancing era. (Washington Post)
