ABSTRACT
The Advisory Council on Public Welfare was appointed in July, 1964, by the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, acting under a Congressional directive included in the Public Welfare Amendments of 1962. The purpose of the Council was to review the administration of public assistance and child welfare services programs and to make recommendations for their improvement. The Council’s report was submitted in 1966, by which time public assistance had been widely discredited as inadequate, inefficient, inhumane, expensive, and administratively cumbersome. The report’s version of a universal guaranteed income calls for improvement on these issues, but commits itself to the present decentralized state-federal apparatus at the very time critics were insisting on shifting welfare transfers to a less stigmatized administrative agency.
