Unfinished Business

What ever happened to welfare reform? Our nation’s financial assistance to low-income (and usually single-parent) families was a hot-button issue in the 1990s, but since then it seems to have vanished from our collective radar. In the debates among presidential candidates of both parties, welfare reform has been obscured by other issues. Until the recent economic downturn, post-9/11 concerns about security, terrorism, immigration, Iraq, and now Iran made it hard to pay adequate attention to domestic policy in general, and social-welfare policy in particular. Yet for the millions of Americans-most of them children-whose lives are directly affected by even the slightest change in federal welfare regulations, the future of the welfare system is an important matter. While the positions staked out on this issue by candidates and their parties may appear as mere afterthoughts in this campaign season, it is a mistake for voters to think of welfare as a minor issue-or to imagine that welfare reform is finished business. Grinding poverty persists in our country, even if many of us fail to notice it.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is our nation’s major cash-assistance program for low-income families, having replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in 1996. TANF is small potatoes by most budgetary measures. Its $16.5 billion annual budget is tiny compared to our annual expenditures on the military ($16.5 billion would fund the Iraq occupation for a few weeks). TANF was designed to save federal money, and no one can deny that it has.

But the reformed program was also supposed to be good for the poor: it would be, we were told, both more efficient and more effective. Of course, the only way to verify its effectiveness is to study its results, but so far the federal government hasn’t shown much interest in the results. Until it does, the welfare reform of the ’90s will remain seriously incomplete. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which was passed by Newt Gingrich’s Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by Bill Clinton in the summer of 1996, called for a thorough review and reauthorization after six years. Almost twelve years later, there has still been no real review and the program has been temporarily extended rather than reauthorized. Since politicians were convinced that the welfare problem had been solved, there seemed no need to make sure that it had been.

The period of 1996-2002 witnessed so many simultaneous innovations in federal welfare policy that even ardent supporters of reform acknowledged the need for a thorough review of its effects. Insofar as these have been measured, they defy even the most informed predictions. Nobody could have known in advance how the different features of the sweeping overhaul would interact with each other and with new demographic and economic trends. The reform included the block-granting to states of what had previously been a matching-grant entitlement, time limits on benefits, work requirements, and a reduction in federal oversight of local welfare administration. States also enjoyed new freedom to impose behavioral rules on welfare recipients. If the recipients broke these rules, they lost their eligibility. States could now adopt “family caps” and exclude teenage mothers. Such policies encourage abortion and impose hardships on particular groups of applicants and recipients. This is one reason the U.S. Catholic bishops have consistently expressed serious reservations about the welfare reforms of the ’90s.

After many months of contentious debate, frustrated opponents and triumphant supporters of the 1996 law agreed on little except this: Over time, the law would surely require adjustments, corrections, fine-tuning, and revisions. Both Republicans and Democrats insisted that special vigilance would be required to insure that the reform stayed on track and responded to the many variables in play. Opponents of the law worried that vicissitudes of the business cycle and other unpredictable trends would do severe damage to the low-income families and communities most affected by the reform. Supporters emphasized the wisdom of using states as laboratories for policy change. The whole point of increasing state autonomy was-or was supposed to be-to test the states’ different policy responses. That way states could learn from the best practices of other states.

So the idea was to study the effects of welfare reform carefully-to make sure the reforms were working, and to compare one kind of reform with others. But that has not happened. No new resources have been devoted to measuring the effects of the 1996 law; and although President George W. Bush and congressional leaders drew up competing plans for a reauthorization package, none passed by the September 2002 target date.