The Computerized Welfare Covenant: Recoding Liberal Citizenship in the Late Twentieth Century U.S.

In the second half of the twentieth century, liberal reformers worked to computerize welfare administration in the United States. In response to racialized rights claims of the 1960s, and the racist tropes of the “welfare queen” in the 1970s and the “deadbeat dad” in the 1980s, liberals crafted a new category of machine-governable citizenship. Each welfare claimant would be coded as a client or “CLNT,” part of a nationally interoperable computerized welfare state. This talk will trace how liberals created this new technological state subject as the object of policy design and political debate and show the consequences of that shift as both a reaffirmation and a rejection of the framework of citizenship as a contract. The talk centers Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s and Bill Clinton’s embrace of the language of “covenant” and the tools of digital case management software to show how the computerization of welfare structured what liberal reformers thought was operationally feasible, politically sensible, and democratically just.

Marc Aidinoff is a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Social Science. Aidinoff studies the intersection of public policy, technology, and liberalism in the United States. At IAS, he will be working on a book about the computerization of the U.S. welfare state since 1974.