We are the people who actually administer these various programs, the local and State agencies and we have a very intimate contact with what actually is going on.

As you know, relief rolls are increasing very rapidly at the present time. There are 6,200,000 people on relief in the United States right today. According to present statistics we will probably exceed 1 million people on general relief this month when the statistics become available, probably the most serious situation we have had in this country since 1940.

Mr. DENTON. How many did you say are on relief?

Mr. COHEN. 6,200,000 people in the United States are receiving relief.

Mr. DENTON. You think it will increase a million this month? Mr. COHEN. I did not say it will increase a million. Perhaps I should explain it more fully. You will see what I have in mind.

There are 6,200,000 people on relief in the United States today made up of 2.5 million people who are receiving old-age assistance, 2.5 million who are receiving aid to dependent children, roughly 100,000 receiving aid to the blind, close to 300,000 who are receiving aid to the permanently and totally disabled-these are the 4 federally aided categories and roughly 900,000 who are on general assistance. This 900,000 increased just in this last month of December from 744,000 to 900,000 and probably by February will exceed a million.

Very likely the relief rolls will keep on going up for several months to come. In fiscal 1959 it is my own personal opinion they will continue to rise because in general the relief rolls continue to rise at least 6 to 9 months after business conditions begin to climb back.

So I think what we can see for fiscal 1959, the year you are concerned with, is a very striking increase both in the federally aided categories and the general assistance rolls, which are not federally aided at the present time.

In general I think you are going to find from the survey we made that the budget request of $1,806,400,000 that is before you is going to turn out to be too low. I do not think that will be sufficient to carry the legal and moral commitments in the Social Security Act for grants-in-aid through fiscal 1959.

Mr. DENTON. That is what the committee thought when the Department appeared before us. They said it was.

Mr. COHEN. Sir, we have just finished making an individual estimate from every State in the Union, asking them what their present

Mr. DENTON. What figure did you get?

Mr. COHEN. I do not have the total because 3 or 4 States did not send in their figures and I would not want to say that my figure at the present time is in excess, from the forty-some States that I have, of $1,806 million. But I will say this, sir.

Mr. DENTON. You take those 3 or 4 States and put in the amount. they are spending this year and tell us what the figure is.

Mr. COHEN. I did not put in what they spent this year but all I had available to me was 1957. It came very close on that basis to the $1,806 million which I think is going to turn out to be too low. Mr. DENTON. Of course we are through 1957.

Mr. COHEN. Yes; I said I had only 1957 which was lower than 1958. That made me feel the $1,806 million will be too low. From quite a

number of States-I can read from these statements-they point out aid to dependent children rolls in many States are running 10 to 20 percent higher than the estimates they submitted to the Federal agency in July which are the basis of the budget estimates included in the budget.

Old-age assistance is somewhat down and I think will continue to be down because of the very important impact that old-age and survivors insurance has in keeping old-age assistance down.

But last month, sir, we reached a very historic point in the United States. We now have more people in the United States on aid to dependent children than we have on old-age assistance. We reached that for the first time in December 1958; 33,000 more children were added onto aid to dependent children between November and December of 1957. All the reports from the States indicate that this will continue to go on because of the unemployment situation throughout the country. I believe also that my figures tend to show that the estimate, which includes $125 million for the administrative costs, will probably turn out to be somewhere between, I would guess, $5 million to $7 million too low because the States are having to put on more people to process the applications, which are swamping many of the States. While in the past, as you know, there have been both the legal and moral commitments for the open-end appropriation on this which the States have always relied on, we are not concerned about your adding more on the budget if the open-end appropriation is continued. In view of the fact there have been two occasions where there has been attempt to limit the appropriation for administrative expenses, we felt it was our responsibility to draw these facts to your

attention.

Even if business conditions should pick up within the very near future, as we hope they will but as we rather doubt they will, we foresee a situation in which the budget request that you have before you is going to be too low.

If you have no objection I would like to put in the record 1 or 2 statements from the States. I have from Rhode Island, which I took out because I thought Mr. Fogarty might be interested, a few paragraphs about the increase in the relief situation there.

I have here from my own State of Michigan, a newspaper article, Hundreds of Jobless Jam Relief Office in Detroit. I could select here from any number of other States.

Mr. DENTON. Would you like to put that in the record?

Mr. COLEN. Yes.

Mr. DENTON. You may do that.

(The statements referred to follow:)

Miss LOULA DUNN,

FEBRUARY 21, 1958.

Chicago, Ill.

Director, American Public Welfare Association,

DEAR MISS DUNN: Attached please find data on the estimated amount of Federal funds to be expended in fiscal year 1959 as per your request. These projections are based upon our current caseloads and would be influenced by any changes upward or downward in the national economy as well as the State economy.

The number of public assistance recipients, including both the categories and general public assistance, was 35,389 in January, an increase of 2,806 in a month. The largest increases have been in general public assistance with 2,474 persons added during the month and the aid to dependent children program with 571

persons added during the month. The total number of recipients is the second highest since the depression years. The highest point since the depression was reached in 1950 when there were 40,495 persons receiving assistance. It would appear that if the present trend continues, that the number of public assistance recipients will exceed that peak.

The monthly reports of the Rhode Island State Employment Service are not optimistic. Unemployment benefit payments increased 45.5 percent in January over December and were 45.2 percent greater than a year ago. There has been a 43.7 percent increase in a 12-month period in the number of exhaustions of unemployment benefits. Payrolls and man-hours worked are down 12.7 percent for the year. Consequently, there is no omen to indicate that the situation might change drastically.

We are awaiting with considerable anticipation the change in seasons to determine how much employment pickup there will be and whether the predictions of President Eisenhower that the national economy will improve are borne out. Should you desire additional information, we will be glad to provide it.

Very truly yours,

JAMES H. REILLY, Administrator.

[From Ann Arbor News, February 27, 1958]

HUNDREDS OF JOBLESS JAM RELIEF OFFICE IN DETROIT

(By Jim Klockenkemper)

DETROIT.-Would you like to learn in a half-hour how hard times spread? Then come along into the stifling waiting room of Detroit's main public relief office.

Four hundred or more persons all day long sit jammed together on wooden benches or stand packed in the aisles. The room is quiet and the faces are glum, worried, serious as their owners listen for their names to be called.

These are the people at the bottom of the heap. Some of them, says Welfare Director Daniel Ryan, are unemployables even in good times. The others are hard-times victims, the first to lose their jobs when industry tightened its belt. The majority are Negroes and many of these came to Detroit from the South during World War II or during the postwar auto booms. But you talk to some whites here who were machine craftsmen or veteran production workers, and Ryan said their numbers are growing.

All have run out of unemployment benefits, or the benefits aren't enough to keep a large family alive. Their savings are gone. The rent or house payment is due and the cupboard's bare.

Ryan's statistics show that in a 10-day old sampling of 1,336 relief applicants, 709 were directly or indirectly connected with auto employment. The rest had no auto employment connection-on paper.

HAS WIFE, FIVE CHILDREN

Malachi Brown, 33, with a wife and 5 children, would be at the top of our trickle-down recession. He's worked at Ford Rouge since 1946 and was a heavy press operator making $99.33 a week until laid off January 10. He's still drawing unemployment compensation and supplemental benefits totaling $59 a week. But he was buying a house with $96 a month payments. His family needs more for food, clothing.

Ford laid Brown off, but its troubles are also the troubles of Joe Gralka, 29, white, who worked for the Misco Precision Casting Co. Misco did casting for Ford, Kelsey-Hayes, and Firestone, 2 auto suppliers, and Pratt & Whitney, among others. Gralka, laid off last August from his heat-treat furnace job, has 3 children. His unemployment benefits ran out 2 weeks ago after 26 weeks. He's looked for work in "every large shop in town" and his savings are gone.

Frank Durda, 38, was one of several persons in the room who worked for L. A. Young Spring & Wire Corp., working in the auto seat-making shop. These people were laid off at various times in 1956-57. Durda went to work on a Great Lakes freighter, missed his ship in September and the season ended.

WAS BUYING HOME

Another ex-L. A. Young employee, a woman who wouldn't give her name, made $85 a week in the factory and was buying a home. "When I try to get nonfactory work, they tell me I made too much at the factory," she said.

Another notch out in our rippling recession would be John Hinton, 31, Negro, who worked for a car undercoating shop doing work on new Chrysler Corp. cars. "We never get as many cars to undercoat in the winter but usually there are some. This winter there are none," he said.

Near the outer rim would be Harold Rush, white, with two children, laid off at a filling station, then a truckdriver for a charity institution picking up secondhand goods for sale. "People just aren't giving things away anymore," said Rush.

Mr. COHEN. We are faced with this very serious situation. There are several points I would like to make about that which I have outlined on page 3 of my testimony. In the middle of the page I sayas some of the factors that are causing this, in addition expenditures for public assistance have increased because of the rise in the cost of living. Medical-care costs in the United States have risen for 40 consecutive months. And I think with the cost of living increase that was indicated yesterday that will probably bring it up to 42 straight months that medical-care costs in the United States

have gone up.

Medical care is an important if not the most important factor in conditioning eligibility for public assistance. Medical-care costs have been rising twice as fast as the overall cost of living in the United States and hospital costs, which is the major reason for eligibility for assistance, have risen nearly four times as fast as the general price level. Every indication is that this is going to continue in the future and you are going to have a much more serious problem with respect to assistance in 1959 and 1960 than we have had in the past.

I think that completes that part of the testimony relating to the general appropriation.

I would now like to touch on two of the specific items in my testimony relating to the training and research funds. Social-security payments of all kinds now total over $20 billion a year of which $3 billion is for public assistance. These amounts are increasing and will continue to increase. Yet the amounts being spent for the training of qualified workers in public assistance and for research in reducing dependency are very small and we believe an investment in these programs will pay dividends.

As you know, the budget does not include the request to implement two of the features of the 1956 Social Security amendments on training of public-welfare personnel and research and demonstration projects to minimize dependency. The administration did include items in the 1958 appropriation bill which this subcommittee in part. endorsed but which were turned down by the full committee. I would like to talk to those two points for just a brief moment.

The American Public Welfare Association urges inclusion in the 1959 appropriation bill of the $2.5 million requested by the President and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1958 to increase and improve supply of professionally trained welfare personnel. We are very sorry that the administration did not include that in the budget this year. The shortage of trained workers is very serious. If the number and quality of trained personnel can be increased we shall be in a far sounder position to help more recipients of public assistance to help themselves and become able to take care of themselves or become self-supporting. Unless we begin to do something about training more workers we are going by 1960 to have 7 million people on relief in this country, spending over $3 billion a year, Federal, State, and local money, for relief and putting very little money into either of these 2 factors of training competent people or finding out the causes of dependency and trying to remove them.

The problems involved in obtaining and retaining adequately trained personnel for the administration of public-assistance pro

grams is becoming more acute every day in the States and localities. The competition for personnel in this field trained primarily in the social-work field, and competition from business and private agencies is so serious the public-welfare agencies are losing their trained personnel every day. Our personnel in this field carry very heavy responsibilities. Individual caseworkers in some States and counties have a caseload which involves making a commitment of payments of over $100,000 a year, 1 employee in the county. It means they certify $100,000 worth of Federal, State, and/or local money a year. Yet in many cases throughout the country these people are not trained; they do not have the skills to help get these people off the relief rolls. Unless we can begin to put some money, as we do in the medical field, in the health field, to train these people, you are going to be spending a lot more Federal money in the next generation than could be saved if we trained our personnel.

In 1954, because of the high turnover rate, about one-fourth of all persons in public-assistance, social-work positions were new to their jobs. This turnover is so great that it is one of the major reasons, in our opinion, why we can only do the minimum job of getting these relief people on the rolls and do very, very little about getting them off, getting them to be self-supporting, which we would like to do, and which I am sure the Federal agency and the Congress would like to do. The Congress has made available substantial amounts for training in the public-health field, mental-health field, and in vocational rehabilitation over several years, which is under the jurisdiction of your subcommittee, but it appears time that the fundamental services available through public welfare should also be strengthened through provision of funds for staff training. The most serious problems of individuals and families, in the community come, eventually, to the local public-welfare departments. We need trained personnel to understand the needs of those individuals and families, and then to try to work with them in terms of providing resources to help meet their needs and, in turn, to provide services constructively as possible. It is for these reasons we urge you to include the $2.5 million appropriation for training of public-assistance workers in the 1959 bill now under consideration. May I say now, off the record

(Discussion off the record.)

Mr. COHEN. The 1956 amendments to the Social Security Act authorize $5 million for cooperative research and demonstration projects to learn more about the causes of dependency and to find more effective means of dealing with this problem. The President and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare requested $2,080,000 for the implementation of these areas in 1958 for the first year of operation. Our association believes that this is a far-reaching and significant approach to the whole problem of dependency in our society, and we urge you to include this appropriation in the 1959 bill. As administrators, we constantly find ourselves faced with questions to which we do not know the full answers. If we knew more about why families break down, why some children become delinquent, how better to motivate dependent persons to become more self-reliant, and the answers to similar questions, we could provide far more constructive services for dealing with the problem of dependency. We seek ways and means of preventing the basic problems with which we deal. Too long has our approach been, of necessity, ameliorative in focus rather than preventive and rehabilitative.