Twenty years ago today, President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law.
The sweeping overhaul was meant to move people from welfare to work and to end what critics saw as a cycle of dependence that kept families in poverty.
The law has resulted in far fewer people receiving welfare, but critics say that’s because the program is not succeeding at helping those who need assistance.
“Six decades of federal policies to help the nation’s poor ended yesterday in the White House Rose Garden,” read the story in the next day’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “as President Clinton signed a bill that turns over many welfare programs to the states and imposes strict requirements on welfare recipients.”
“Today we are ending welfare as we know it, but I hope this day will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began,” the president said at the Aug. 22, 1996, bill signing.
The bill, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, did truly “end welfare as we know it,” as Mr. Clinton famously promised, by radically overhauling the program in several key ways.
The old program — Aid to Families with Dependent Children — was considered a federal entitlement, meaning families poor enough to qualify were guaranteed federal assistance. The new program — Temporary Assistance to Needy Families — is a block grant, meaning each state gets a set amount of money and no more, so not every person who qualifies for assistance is guaranteed to receive it.
The reforms were generally regarded as fairly successful — at first.
Caseloads plummeted. In Pennsylvania, a little over 531,000 people were receiving welfare in August 1996, when Mr. Clinton signed the reform bill into law. That number had already declined from 623,000 individuals in 1994, when the state had begun experimenting with welfare-to-work measures that had driven participation down prior to the federal changes being adopted. By 2006, the number of people receiving welfare in Pennsylvania had declined by more than 50 percent, to about 252,000.
‘Complete wrong direction’
But post-Great Recession, the changes have come to be seen much differently than in the booming economy of the 1990s.
Despite widespread job losses and economic hardship during the Recession, caseloads barely increased and at points continued to fall.
“I think that for us was a red flag that TANF has just gone in the complete wrong direction in terms of assisting families who are experiencing financial hardship,” said Rochelle Jackson, public policy advocate for anti-hunger group Just Harvest and herself a former welfare client. “And that’s really what the program is supposed to be about. It’s, you know, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. And there were a lot of needy families in the Recession who did not access TANF benefits, not just in Pennsylvania, but across the country,” she said, noting there were not large increases in participation during the Recession years, unlike other assistance programs, such as food stamps, that saw case loads increase.
“I think that was evidence, right there, that it’s not structured in a way to help families,” Ms. Jackson said of the welfare program.
As of June, Pennsylvania had fewer than 158,000 TANF recipients, a more than 70 percent decline from when welfare reform was signed into law in August 1996.
A report released last week by Community Legal Services of Philadelphia criticized Pennsylvania’s welfare program as helping too few families, with benefits that are meager and are too difficult to get. In most Pennsylvania counties, the monthly grant is $403 for a family of three. The dropping caseload, they and other critics argue, is not evidence of success but evidence that the program is poorly designed to help those at the bottom, in particular people with challenges such as lack of transportation or health problems that have thus far kept them from employment.
“Families dealing with domestic violence, homelessness, job loss, or other crises often cannot get through the obstacles to the help they so urgently need — starting with the requirement to search for jobs even without access to child care or transportation,” said Louise Hayes, supervising attorney at Community Legal Services, and one of the authors of the report.
Ms. Hayes is referring to a 2012 state law that requires welfare applicants to apply to at least three jobs a week during the time their application is pending, which can be a period of several weeks. Previously, applicants did not have to begin their work requirement until they had already been approved to receive assistance. Similar requirements have become common among states, advocates argue, because with states being measured by the federal government based on their work participation rate, there is a strong incentive for states to deflect people from ever enrolling in the program in the first place.
State block grants
When lawmakers overhauled welfare 20 years ago, in addition to the five-year lifetime limit on the program and the work requirement for participants, they also gave states broad latitude to make changes in how they administer their welfare programs. Critically, states don’t have to use all of their block grant on direct cash assistance to the poor. Advocates have argued this also gives states incentives to keep people off the welfare rolls — whether or not those people have found steady employment.
Close to 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s state and federal welfare spending goes to subsidized child care, which also benefits many low-income workers who are not on welfare, said Liz Schott, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who studies welfare reform.
Additionally, about $1 million annually goes to Real Alternatives, an anti-abortion counseling service, according to state records.
The report also noted that as of 2014, 35,000 households statewide received food stamps and had income low enough to qualify for welfare but don’t receive it. The state Department of Human Services should reach out to these families in a systematic way as well as make an effort to find out out why they are without cash assistance, the report’s authors said. “Did they previously get TANF and lose it? Have they applied and been denied? If so, what happened?” the report asked.
Ultimately, welfare rolls are declining not because fewer people need welfare but because fewer can successfully access it due to the program’s design, critics charge.
“Shrinking rolls is not evidence of success,” said Ken Regal, Just Harvest’s executive director.
Kate Giammarise: kgiammarise@post-gazette.com or 412-263-3909 or on Twitter @KateGiammarise.
First Published: August 22, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
