Congress Launches Pilot Program To Personally Verify Census Bureau's Warning About Itself
Lawmakers say the only way to know if cutting the safety net would erase poverty gains is to cut the safety net and watch closely.
Congress this week unveiled the Poverty Reversal Verification Initiative, a bipartisan effort to test, empirically and on purpose, whether reducing aid to low-income families would in fact undo the very progress a recent government report just described.
The pilot program works by identifying households that recently moved above the poverty line and reducing their benefits first, on the theory that these are the control group most likely to produce a clean, publishable result. A dashboard will track how quickly each family's income falls back below the threshold, updated in real time on a screen in a committee room nobody is required to visit.
"We read the warning in the report and thought, well, someone should check," said a committee spokesperson, adjusting a lanyard that identified them as belonging to no department in particular. "It felt irresponsible not to find out."
Health coverage, which the report noted was largely unchanged, will not be part of the pilot, officials said, because they could not agree on which agency should be responsible for un-changing it.
The initiative includes a built-in off-ramp: if the poverty rate rises as predicted, the program will be hailed as a rigorous success and made permanent, and if it does not rise, the funding will be restored just in time for next year's report to note an unexplained improvement.