by Heather Mac Donald
Bill de Blasio brings another professional leftist into city government.
11 March 2014
11 March 2014
New York mayor Bill de Blasio has finally announced his choice to head the city’s massive welfare agency: Steve Banks, attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society. It was hard not to be awed by the sheer brazenness of the appointment. Banks and Legal Aid have spent the last three decades fighting to expand public assistance and housing entitlements in the city and to slow down the pioneering welfare reforms initiated by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1995. With his choice of Banks, de Blasio has signaled that he’s not interested in even the illusion that he seeks nonpartisan technocratic managers for his administration. Instead, he is committed to bringing into the heart of City Hall the aggressive left-wing advocacy that constituted his own brief private-sector experience.
Banks’s appointment as commissioner of the Human Resources Administration likely portendsrollbacks to the substantive areas of welfare reform, such as work requirements and anti-fraud checks. It also raises a more subtle question of conflict of interest. Like many so-called public-interest outfits, the Legal Aid Society has proven masterful at stretching out its fee-generating class action lawsuitsagainst the city long after the suits’ initial complaints were resolved. The Society has kept alive a suit from 1998 that initially sought to block the rollout of welfare job centers, a key component of the Giuliani administration’s effort to nudge welfare recipients into the workforce. Though the initial claims in that suit, Reynolds v. Giuliani, have long since been resolved, Legal Aid is still receiving quarterly reports from the city regarding its compliance with the (allegedly) final judgment. Another suit from 1996, Davila v. Turner, claimed that the city was not taking the preferences of unwed mothers sufficiently into account in deciding whether to assign them to a workfare job instead of to “education and training.” The Legal Aid Society is still overseeing the city’s performance in assessing single mothers’ education inclinations; it has recently added to the case’s purview the issue of whether homework can count toward the hours that a recipient must devote to work or training.
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Banks’s appointment as commissioner of the Human Resources Administration likely portendsrollbacks to the substantive areas of welfare reform, such as work requirements and anti-fraud checks. It also raises a more subtle question of conflict of interest. Like many so-called public-interest outfits, the Legal Aid Society has proven masterful at stretching out its fee-generating class action lawsuitsagainst the city long after the suits’ initial complaints were resolved. The Society has kept alive a suit from 1998 that initially sought to block the rollout of welfare job centers, a key component of the Giuliani administration’s effort to nudge welfare recipients into the workforce. Though the initial claims in that suit, Reynolds v. Giuliani, have long since been resolved, Legal Aid is still receiving quarterly reports from the city regarding its compliance with the (allegedly) final judgment. Another suit from 1996, Davila v. Turner, claimed that the city was not taking the preferences of unwed mothers sufficiently into account in deciding whether to assign them to a workfare job instead of to “education and training.” The Legal Aid Society is still overseeing the city’s performance in assessing single mothers’ education inclinations; it has recently added to the case’s purview the issue of whether homework can count toward the hours that a recipient must devote to work or training.
-go to link-
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