Peter Cove, the founder of the highly successful for-profit welfare-to-work job placement firm America Works writes in:

A report released this week by the East Harlem not-for-profit Community Services Heard found that the city's Human Resources Administration's squishy, albeit compassionate-sounding WeCare program, intended to to help those on welfare with mental and physical problems find work, has fallen flat.

As reported in the Times dispatch on the study, "half of those who were deemed to be employable but with limitations and were sent for vocational rehabilitation found those programs unhelpful."

Whenever programs are paid to provide services in order to get welfare recipients or others employed they inevitably fail. Why?

Because most if not all the funds pay for the services while little or none go to placement and retention of the participants. This was a powerful lesson first documented by Professor E.S. Savas in his work on government privatization and later by David Osborne in his seminal book Reinventing Government.

Payment for outcomes, on the other hand, at the least assures no payment for failure. When government pays for services, the incentives are just not there for the harder work of placing and retaining the workers in jobs.
 
Are there some people who cannot go directly to jobs? Sure. But over 40 years in this business convinces me that diversion of the supposedly not work ready into activities other than work is often more harmful than direct job placement with adequate supports. 

We all know that the welfare restructuring 11 years ago, which rightly put work first, cut the rolls over 50% in a decade. Chock one up for work. More critically, experience shows that government is a poor judge of who can, and cannot, succeed in work. Putting bureaucrats in charge of figuring out who should go to work is like asking my dogs to speak Yiddish. The unable are being asked to perform the impossible.
 
The lesson? We should be constantly on guard of government's plans to help the most vulnerable. Since it is their ultimate sacred duty to do so, care by them and stealth scrutiny by us must prevent good intentions from steamrollering bad programs. As taxpayers and as concerned citizens, caveat emptor.

WeCare was established by then-HRA commissioner Verna Eggleston (she resigned in December to work for one of Bloomberg's private philanthropic projects), who speaks at length about the program in this City Limits dispatch, which she makes plain the movement toward support services and away from work:

“I don’t want to spend time having a debate with people who are chronically ill and critically ill, wasting government money,” said Eggleston. “If I…got up enough gusto to come to you and ask you for anything, then let’s just make the assumption that I need something

…

“We shouldn’t be in a position where we’re regulating what someone’s self-sufficiency looks like. Everybody’s level…is different,” said Eggleston. “I will not put down a gauntlet and [say] ‘Our thing is work first.’ It’s more than that.”