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IN HIS TELEVISION ADS IN 1992, presidential candidate
and then-governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton said: “For
so long government has failed us, and one of its worst failures
had been welfare. I have a plan to end welfare as we know
it — to break the cycle of dependency. We’ll provide
education, job training, and child care, but then those who
are able to work must go to work…. It’s time to
make welfare what it should be — a second chance, not
a way of life.”
Welfare As We Knew It
President Clinton signed a welfare reform act in 1996, and
today, “welfare as we know it” has become “welfare
as we knew it.” This legislation, which is up for renewal
later this year, is regarded by many conservatives and liberals
alike as a success story. At the bill’s signing, however,
liberals found some of the provisions more restrictive than
they wanted. Fortunately, their worst fears never materialized.
Welfare rolls are down by nearly 57 percent — about 7
million people — according to the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS). The work requirements that
terminated open-ended entitlements have helped to increase
job rates among the poor and to decrease poverty. Moving the
responsibility for welfare programs from the federal to state
governments also proved to work well.
“It worked much better than [I] thought it would,”
says David Ellwood, professor of political economy at the
Kennedy School. “Things went well because the economy
was really good.” He notes that as a result of a strong
economy “states also had flush budgets.” During
the Clinton administration, Ellwood served as assistant secretary
for planning and evaluation at HHS and was co-chair of Clinton’s
efforts on welfare reform.
Mary Jo Bane, professor of public policy and management at
the Kennedy School, was also a co-chair on Clinton’s
task force. From 1993 to 1996, she was assistant secretary
for children and families at HHS. Bane, in a New York Times
interview in March of this year, said, “My current take
is that the country was enormously lucky that welfare reform
was implemented in the midst of the best economic expansion
this country had in decades.”
One of “the biggest surprises to me was that the proportion
of single moms who found jobs was as high as it was,”
says Christopher Jencks, professor of social policy at the
Kennedy School. Jencks recently published an article on welfare
for the July special issue on welfare reform in The American
Prospect. In his piece, he discusses how the “prophets
of doom,” such as himself, were wrong about the Welfare
Reform Act of 1996 and reviews what went right.
An Idea Whose Time Had Come
In addition to coinciding with a period of very low unemployment
rates, welfare reform came at a time when many Americans had
become more than eager for a revamped welfare system. A growing
consensus over the years — swept up with Reagan’s
initiatives against big government in the 1980s — loathed
the program. In their eyes, welfare had become a program that
distributed “money for nothing” without end. Such
assistance went against the American work ethic. Americans’
desire for reform was also driven by the popular conception
of a typical welfare recipient, known as the “welfare
queen.” She was an unwed young mother who continued to
have more children to increase her monthly assistance, refused
to work, and, perhaps, was a drug addict. Another image was
the person who was simply lazy. Welfare recipients were seen
as scam artists, people who found a way to rip off the government
— and taxpayers’ dollars.
In an article titled “Welfare as We Might Know It,”
which Bane wrote for The American Prospect (January/February
1997), she said, “The public, rightly, wanted welfare
reform that expected work and parental responsibility. The
political rhetoric supporting the new law, unfortunately,
made the concept of a federal entitlement synonymous with
irresponsibility and lifelong dependency, and the replacement
of the entitlement with block grants synonymous with work
requirements. This rhetoric was misleading but powerfully
effective.”
While certainly the old system — then called the Aid
to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program —
did have its freeloaders, they were atypical. “There
was a minority who stayed on who were characterized as the
majority,” says Gloria Nagle MPA 1988, director of evaluation
for the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance.
“AFDC always had most people use it as a transitional
program.”
Bane and Ellwood resigned in protest over the final welfare
reform package that received Clinton’s backing. Writes
Ellwood in his bio on the Kennedy School Web site, “The
Republicans took the Congress, and Clinton almost immediately
indicated a willingness to support a very different vision
of welfare reform — one which mostly devolved responsibility
to the states by block-granting federal payments while stipulating
work requirements and time limits, but no last-resort jobs
and few protections for welfare recipients.”
That legislation, formally known as the Personal Responsibility
and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWOA) of 1996, abolished
a federally controlled welfare system of open-ended entitlement
that had been in place for decades. Instead, states would
run welfare programs that featured time-limited cash assistance
and work requirements, funded with “Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families” (TANF) block grants from the federal
government. States could use the money in any manner as long
as the programs accomplished the purposes of TANF (pronounced
TAN-eff) grants. HHS lists these goals in a summary of the
PRWOA: “to provide assistance to needy families so that
children can be cared for in their own homes; to reduce dependency
by promoting job preparation, work and marriage; to prevent
out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and to encourage the formation
and maintenance of two-parent families.” Furthermore,
TANF grants carried restrictions on use. For example, only
families that include a child or an expectant mother may receive
assistance, while people convicted of a drug-related felony
are ineligible for life.
“This legislation was very alarming to lots of liberals
because it gave states huge amounts of discretion,” Jencks
says. “The other big surprise for me had to do with the
way in which states responded to this.” The states “responded
in constructive ways” and did much faster than he anticipated.
“On the whole, most of them did pretty well. I found
that pretty encouraging,” he says. He singles out the
programs run by Wisconsin and Massachusetts as overall good
performers.
Nagle oversaw her state’s participation in an HHS-funded
study of former welfare recipients, for which 15 states created
similar surveys to allow for comparability of results. The
Massachusetts data showed that 80 percent of households had
at least one adult employed. “At the same time, there
was heavy reliance on income supports,” Nagle says. “They
were employed, but housing assistance is very critical.”
They also needed food stamps and were helped by the Earned
Income Tax Credit, another Clinton plan. TANF funds subsidized
other income supports, such as child care and transportation
— two of the biggest expenses that these families face.
One of the reasons that many states were so effective with
welfare reforms, Jencks says, is that a lot of money went
into child care, which allowed mothers to work. According
to Jencks, who has been studying the trend of single mothers,
two-thirds of those on TANF are single mothers.
New Reforms
Encouraged by the reductions in states’ caseloads, increases
in job rates among welfare recipients, and a decline in out-of-wedlock
birthrates, President Bush weighed in earlier this year with
his vision for the next phase of welfare reform. “We
ended welfare as we’ve known it, yet it is not a post-poverty
America. …our work is not done,” he said. Later
in his speech, he added, “We will pursue four important
goals to continue transforming welfare in the lives of those
that it helped. We will strengthen work requirements. We must
promote strong families. We will give states more flexibility,
and we will show compassion to those in need.”
He followed that up with his administration’s proposed
changes to the act. The current law requires that 50 percent
of a state’s welfare recipients have jobs. Bush proposes
upping it to 70 percent. In addition, he wants to increase
the number of hours per week that welfare recipients must
work, from 30 to 40, with up to two days each week in education
or job training. He is recommending that $300 million be earmarked
for premarital education programs and $135 million for abstinence
education programs. In May, the U.S. House of Representatives
passed a reauthorization package that included the new work
requirements. The vote was 229 to 197, with the majority of
the support coming from the Republicans.
The Working Poor
Aside from the debates over the Bush proposed changes to
the original welfare reform act, many agree that the poor
are better off overall than they were before welfare reform.
But some are raising the question of whether welfare reform
is enough to lift them above the poverty line. “It’s
not that welfare reform isn’t important. It’s just
these other issues are looming large,” says Ellwood,
who admits to being “very nervous for the future.”
He adds that changing the larger forces underlying poverty
“is more important than anything we’ve done with
welfare reform.”
An example of a program that tries to help those with the
day-to-day struggles associated with poverty is FOR (Follow-up,
Outreach, and Referral) Families. This program, which is a
collaboration of the Massachusetts transitional assistance
and public health departments, was established in 1998 to
work with families losing their cash benefits due to the time
limits, says Sally Graham MPA 1992, who has been program director
since 1999. According to Graham, the agencies shared a mutual
concern: What would happen to families reaching the 24-month
time limit, who appeared to have no visible means of support
and who had not completed job training, educational programs,
or supported work?
A transitional case management team of nurses, social workers,
and resource specialists would contact families that the public
health department identified. These families usually had barriers
to stability that went beyond simply getting work, such as
histories of domestic violence, substance abuse, mental illness,
inadequate food supply, or homelessness. They typically were
unaware that they still could receive other types of support,
such as food stamps and shelter, after their time limits were
reached; had difficulty navigating the bureaucracy to obtain
those benefits; or could not hold down jobs because of their
situation. In addition, the children within these families
often have special education or medical needs, and the families
live in temporary housing until affordable housing becomes
available.
“They can’t overcome the physical, mental, environmental
and social malaise,” Graham says. “They’ve
been battered around so much that they give up. They’d
like to get a job but can’t.”
In December 1998, the bulk of families that received assistance
from FOR Families consisted of the first wave of welfare recipients
who reached the end of their time limits. “But today
those numbers are very small [because caseloads decreased],
and we are referred only 30 to 40 percent of cases that close,”
says Graham. “Our primary population now is homeless
families temporarily housed in motels.” Many of these
families are getting cash benefits but have lost their housing
for various reasons, while others are receiving emergency
noncash assistance.
“This is not necessarily a huge number of people. What
they are is very costly people,” she says. They are also
the hardest cases, the ones for whom welfare is not enough.
And even with employment and income supports, families cannot
afford basic needs, Graham says. They are the working poor
and, in turn, vulnerable.
Welfare reform hasn’t completely removed the susceptibility
of the disadvantaged, the experts say. Since cash assistance
is available only for those people with jobs, what happens
when they lose their jobs for reasons out of their control?
The lack of work during recessions and in places of high local
unemployment is a cause for concern, writes Ellwood in “Anti-Poverty
Policy for Families in the Next Century: From Welfare to Work
— and Worries,” (The Journal of Economic Perspectives,
Winter 2000). In addition, falling state revenues during a
recession may result in states cutting back support.
There is unemployment insurance to help people out of work,
but not much if they were earning low wages. “My sense
is that we need to rethink our unemployment system for a recession,”
Jencks says, so that it provides a cushion when the economy
sours. “For these single mothers, you need to do either
something different with unemployment or something else with
the welfare system.”
But also worrisome is the rise in single-parent households,
usually headed by a mother — a phenomenon that Ellwood
and Jencks are examining. These women tend to lack education
and work skills and, as a result, are employed in jobs that
pay low wages. The growing gap in wages is another trend that
troubles Ellwood. “Any strategy designed to help working
families and their children will be readily undermined if
the wages of working parents are declining,” he writes
in the anti-poverty article for The Journal of Economic Perspectives.
The danger of such unintended consequences points to the
complexity of reducing poverty further. The current debates
in Congress over what changes to make in the welfare reform
legislation before its reauthorization later this year have
touched on the larger problems of poverty. Can any of the
modifications they make improve on the achievements of the
1996 legislation? That, of course, remains to be seen.
Delia K. Cabe is a writer/editor for the Radcliffe
Quarterly and a freelance writer.
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