Welfare Rolls Fall to Half of ’96 Numbers

Driven down by a 4-year-old federal law and a booming national economy, the nation’s welfare rolls have fallen to half the size they were in 1996, reaching their lowest level in decades, the White House announced Tuesday.

Of the 1.6 million American parents still on public assistance, nearly one-third are now working--a threefold increase since the landmark welfare reform bill was signed by President Clinton on Aug. 22, 1996. All told, 6.3 million Americans remain on the rolls, subject to stringent new lifetime limits and work requirements. That represents a 56% decrease from the rolls’ 1994 peak of 14.2 million people, mostly single women and their children.

In a report to Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services said in 1999 that all 50 states and the District of Columbia had met the welfare law’s required work participation rates. Those rates are the heart of the measure that overhauled the nation’s main anti-poverty program. The welfare reform law requires that adults in 35% of a state’s families on welfare work at least 25 hours per week.

Tuesday’s White House report card gave passing grades even to states such as California, which had earlier difficulties meeting the bill’s requirements. Of the state’s 880,378 parents receiving Temporary Aid to Needy Families, 42.2% were either working or participating in the narrow range of school programs allowed by the new federal law. And just over half of the state’s two-parent families were working the 35-hour workweeks required by the measure.

“After four years, we have strong evidence that welfare reform is working,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, “but we have more to do to achieve its full promise for America’s families and children.”

The pace of the welfare exodus has slowed in recent months as states face the task of readying those remaining on their dwindling rolls for employment. California led the 43 states that last year saw declines in their rolls. In California, more than 500,000 recipients gave up public assistance in 1999. Illinois, the state with the next-steepest decline, saw 100,000 leave its welfare rolls.

Shalala and others who have tracked the nation’s boldest social experiment in decades said more must be done to ensure that those who leave the rolls for work are lifted out of poverty. At the White House, Clinton used the unveiling of the report to argue for legislation to raise the minimum wage by $1 and expand access to a tax credit designed to lift the working poor above the poverty line.

The report comes as candidates on both sides of the political aisle take credit for pressing welfare reform. Congress will have to reauthorize the 1996 law in the next two years--and lawmakers already plan a welter of adjustments to the measure. Many of those are expected to focus on how to press those still on the rolls, who tend to have the deepest problems, into jobs.

At the White House, Clinton met Tuesday with business leaders who have hired welfare recipients off the rolls to discuss their experience. Under the umbrella of the Welfare-to-Work Partnership, about 22,000 employers said that they have filled more than 1.1 million jobs since 1997 with former welfare recipients. With an average starting wage of $7.80 per hour, the group’s newest pool of employees could expect to earn about $16,200 per year if they work full time and year-round--a figure that hovers just above the federal poverty line for a family of three.

The business group recommended that Congress, when it revisits the law, loosen the federal requirement that welfare recipients find work while on welfare.

The law’s definition of a “work activity” should include substance-abuse treatment, domestic violence counseling and other special needs, the group said. And Congress should give a break to workers who need longer than five years to get off welfare because of low starting pay, the report said.

The employer group’s findings underscored some of the key obstacles that former welfare recipients and their employers face as more of the nation’s poor find jobs. Child care and transportation remain the biggest factors holding welfare recipients back from job retention and promotion.