Super Wonk: Robert Greenstein's 40-Year War on Poverty

Fifty years ago, Robert Greenstein was a young idealist who participated in Vietnam Summer, a movement to educate the public about the war, and who was greatly influenced by his Harvard professor, child psychiatrist Robert Coles. Coles traveled to Mississippi with Robert Kennedy, and wrote about poverty for progressive publications of the day. “I remember being struck” by his articles, Greenstein says.

Greenstein arrived in Washington in 1972, “not knowing what I really wanted to do, thinking that I didn’t want to be in Washington and I wouldn’t stay more than a year,” he recalls.

Greenstein soon discovered, however, that he “could actually do work that could contribute to policy change … Fortunately, the work I came to do was on anti-hunger programs, particularly food stamps and child nutrition programs.” When he learned that he could make a difference, he says, the realization was “energizing, intoxicating. It’s just amazing to me that you can actually do things and have an impact.”

Starting with a single grant 

Ever since, Greenstein has been energized and intoxicated at the prospect that his work and research could improve the lives of poor people. The real adventure began in 1981, when he founded his own nonprofit, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “I started the center with a single grant of $175,000,” he says. “That was all we had.”

Greenstein, who retired as CBPP president at the end of December, has been lionized by journalists as “a one-man liberal army,” and “a powerhouse for the poor.” The center’s reports were considered fair, accurate and credible by policymakers of both parties. He received numerous awards, including a MacArthur fellowship.

But when he began the center, his goals were modest. He hoped that with more grants, he could ultimately expand the staff to 12. “I envisioned it as an organization that would work on federal policy in a limited number of areas,” he says. “Not only does it now work in more areas of federal policy,” he says, it’s expanded to state policy. He never expected that the center would “build and then coordinate and assist a network of state policy organizations now in over 40 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico.”

Over the years, Greenstein was always cautious about taking on new issues, getting involved in work on Medicaid and Social Security only when he was convinced that the center could contribute something valuable to the effort.

He was also initially wary of a changing media landscape. When blogs were in vogue, he resisted. “I was worried that by their very nature, blogs would result in products that weren’t sufficiently grounded in solid data and analysis,” and would lack “the credibility I wanted all center products to have.” The center’s policy and communications staff had to convince him that blogs could meet the “same quality standards as other center products” and come out more quickly, he says. “Fortunately, I eventually came to understand this.” Now, he speaks with pride about the center’s timely “tweet threads” in 2020 about relief packages Congress was considering “even before we could get a statement out.”

CBPP’s legacy

At his retirement, Greenstein left an organization employing more than 150, with a stellar reputation for its fact-based reports, and an annual budget of nearly $40 million. Funding comes from a who’s who of big mainstream foundations—including Ford, Rockefeller, Annie E. Casey and Kellogg, as well as less well-known liberal funders like the JPB and Sandler foundations. The philanthropies of top billionaire donors have also supported CBPP in recent years, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Arnold Ventures. 

But the figures that really stand out for Greenstein have to do with the well-being of poor people in the U.S. When he founded the center in 1981, he says, safety net programs like food stamps, rental vouchers and the earned income tax credit “lifted out of poverty 23% of those who would otherwise be poor.” In 2019, the last year before the pandemic and recession, safety net programs lifted 48% of those who would otherwise be poor. “The center and I were hardly the sole actors” in effecting this change, he adds. “We had allies in other organizations, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. But we played pivotal roles.”

He adds that the improvement in the poverty statistics is “due primarily to programmatic expansions that the center helped design,” including SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), “which we used to call food stamps,” the earned income tax credit, and the refundable component of the child tax credit, “along with other programs such as rental assistance, and the Women Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition program.”

He said he was “most proud” of “our role on both defense and offense. There are years [when] you have the opportunities to strengthen programs and make them more effective, helping more people in need, and … those programs are under attack.”

Biggest disappointment

Not that the center always won its battles. Greenstein says the biggest disappointment of his career was the passage of the 1996 welfare law, which ended Aid to Families With Dependent Children, a program that gave cash benefits to 12.8 million persons, including 8 million children. The law gave states federal block grants to design their own programs to provide financial aid to poor families, required welfare recipients to look for work, and cut off benefits to poor families after five years.

Welfare was a major political issue for House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), who swept House Republicans to victory in 1994. Not only did Gingrich change the futures of scores of House Democrats, his victory also changed Greenstein’s career track.

He had accepted an offer to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, but had not yet been confirmed. When Gingrich won, his staff begged him to stay at the center to fight the conservative firebrand’s agenda.

“I went through a couple of weeks of deep soul searching, not being sure what to do. And also feeling badly because I had told [OMB Director] Alice Rivlin that I would come in and be her deputy. Alice, who is sadly no longer with us, was, apart from her many other stellar qualities … an extraordinary human being … And she really understood, and she, in effect, gave me permission to reverse my acceptance.”

Greenstein mounted a strong defense against the welfare bill. “Even though we were on the outside,” Greenstein says, the center played a “very large role to coordinate a last-minute effort by the cabinet to persuade President Clinton to veto the bill. … As I recall, every cabinet member but one did urge the president not to sign the bill. But it was a few months before the election,” he says. “I believe to this day that if it hadn’t been for the election, he probably would have vetoed the bill.”

Nevertheless, the center “had a major effect in keeping that law from being even more problematic than it was,” Greenstein says. “For example, the SNAP program came within a hair of being converted to a block grant. And a last-minute intervention that we were involved in at least prevented … mothers and children who were losing cash assistance under the welfare law from automatically losing Medicaid as a result.”

Fighting the infant formula industry

But Greenstein relishes one victory that the center accomplished almost single-handedly. It concerned the WIC program, which provides extra nutrition aid to pregnant women, babies and young children. Infant formula is a “key item” in WIC assistance, he says. So when the three infant formula companies that dominated the market started increasing their prices, the center first helped a few states willing to mandate competitive bidding for formula contracts, and then, “against all odds,” and with the leadership of Rep. George Miller, helped to extend that requirement to all states and codify it into federal law. When the companies then secretly colluded to keep their prices up, the center investigated. Its findings prompted a Senate hearing and action by the Federal Trade Commission, which ended up levying “huge fines” on the companies, he says.  

Competitive bidding, Greenstein adds, saves the WIC program an estimated $1.7 billion each year. Those savings make it possible for the program to serve 2 million more women, infants and children annually. Whenever the formula industry has tried to convince Congress to undo that mandate, the center has successfully pushed to retain it.

“That was our anti-corporate crusade,” Greenstein says. But going after specific corporations for specific acts of wrongdoing is not how the center usually works. Instead, it has a history of pushing for legislative reforms to increase the minimum wage, close corporate loopholes, and ensure that corporations pay their fair share of taxes.

Walmart support

Moreover, it does accept grants from corporate foundations, but only after thorough review by the center’s board. “We rejected offers of millions of dollars because we were concerned that the corporation … or corporate foundation … would try to influence the positions we will take on various issues.”

When Walmart approached the center, Greenstein says, “I frankly assumed that the conversation would end almost before it started.” The center stipulated it would not identify Walmart as the funder of any of its reports, and that Walmart would not have any right to review its work in advance or to influence it, or to review any of its positions and policies on any issue.

Nevertheless, Walmart agreed to the conditions. It targeted its money to the center’s work on food assistance programs. Thousands of Walmart’s more than 2 million employees qualify for food stamps, but he doubts that fact motivated its corporate foundation. (He adds that even if Walmart paid every full-time employee $15 an hour, “in many cases,” a single mother “without a second earner” and with “several children” still would need food stamps.)

Greenstein surmises that Walmart knew federal food programs would help its bottom line. “Walmart sells food. They’re one of the biggest retailers in the country.” More people enrolled in SNAP meant “more food sales” for the corporation.

Greenstein adds that the center’s opposition to the Trump corporate tax cuts “clearly are not in Walmart’s interest.” But “they’ve never called us” to complain. “The ground rules we set have been clearly understood on their side.”

What’s next

Greenstein corrects himself when he uses “we” and “us” in explaining the center’s work and policies. His retirement was announced a year in advance, but he says that he left the search for a new leader to the board. He adds, however, that he’s pleased that they chose CBPP Senior Vice President Sharon Parrott to succeed him. “At this point, she knows more about various anti-poverty programs, and in more depth, than I probably ever did,” he says.

He’s in no rush to jump into more policy work. He hasn’t taken off more than two consecutive weeks since 1991. The last time he took more than three consecutive weeks off was in 1973. “I’m finding all these things around the house that I’ve neglected dealing with, that my wife has put up with for too long. I’m actually spending some time right now trying to organize the house to make it more livable.”

Asked if he ever thinks about the job he gave up at OMB, Greenstein responds: “Just a few days ago, cleaning up some old papers at home … I actually found a very gracious letter that President Clinton sent back to me, indicating how much he understood why I had reversed my decision. I said to my wife, ‘I think this is a letter I want to keep.’”