The Dunleavy administration is going out of its way to confuse recipients of Adult Public Assistance and the public about the governor’s reversal of a proposed reduction of benefits for impoverished Alaskans who are old, blind or disabled.

Exhibit A in the campaign is this letter to 19,000 recipients, signed by Shawnda O’Brien, the director of public assistance.

Rather than say, “We screwed up,” the administration emitted an impenetrable bureaucratic cloud, thicker than ice fog at 50 below, to obscure the reasons why it approved $100 per month in benefit cuts and then canceled the decision in little more than a week.

The toxic brew of jargon, doubletalk and obscure references to federal regulations arrived like an unwelcome December visit from Marley’s ghost.

Maintenance of Effort anyone? How about the total expenditure method of calculating the MOE and the 1983 payment standard?

She might as well have composed her missive in Klingon. It was an exercise in government jabber.

What really happened is that the governor’s office realized that it was bad politics to cut benefits for the most needy Alaskans and this was the last thing that Gov. Mike Dunleavy needs.

As with everything else Dunleavy is doing, this is all about the recall, the most effective political movement in Alaska in decades.

There has been little news coverage of the public assistance debacle beyond superficial and misleading accounts based on press releases that added to the confusion.

The administration wants Alaskans to believe that no one knew what was going on until after public assistance recipients learned that most would lose $100 a month starting Jan. 1.

Rather than own up to a bonehead move, the administration claimed that Dunleavy deserved credit for declaring that cuts approved by his administration were unacceptable to his administration. The claim that the state had to cut benefits because of complicated federal rules—which went unchallenged in news accounts—was proven to be a lie when Dunleavy said he had the power to restore the benefits.

Or at least most of them. “Some APA program recipients could still see an overall monetary reduction in their benefits compared to the previous calendar year as the state uses the new methodology to become compliant with CMS regulations,” O’Brien wrote.

The state never announced the public assistance cuts. I wrote here Dec. 4 about an obscure document the health department published on its website that revealed the plan.

The notice to recipients in early December included false claims that the $100 per month cut was “due to the cost of living increase you will get in your Social Security benefits and a payment standard change.”

In fact, the cut was a decision by the Dunleavy administration, caused in part by his veto of $7.5 million for the program in June. For good measure, he vetoed the money a second time in August after the Legislature put it back.

“This action is based on APA manual section 452-1,” the December letter said.

Perhaps the state assumed that all impoverished people who are blind, disabled or old have a working knowledge of section 452-1. Or maybe the state figured that no one would dare question a bureaucratic directive about section 452-1 and the manual that means nothing to those who haven’t been taught the secret handshake.

Five days after my blog post, the administration told legislators it was reversing its decision. It did so in a confusing “Mistakes Weren’t Made” (MWM) memo that contained many of the same incoherent paragraphs as the letter sent to 19,000 recipients of assistance.

It is one thing to deploy bafflegab with legislators. But recipients of Adult Public Assistance deserve a letter written in simple language in which the administration accepts responsibility and tells the truth about what happened—the cut was not required by federal law.

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