New Rules Would Only Tighten Poverty’s Grip

Connie, a 25-year-old ex-welfare mother, will soon be earning $14 an hour as a chef and cake decorator at a local Safeway. This will be enough, at last, to support her two young boys.

In 1996, hoping to get her high school equivalency diploma, she came to Academy of Hope, an adult education school my wife founded in Washington, D.C. But by 1999, she was ready to drop out under the emotional strain of trying to go to school full time and make ends meet. Her welfare check and food stamps added up to a yearly income of only $7,440, about half the official poverty level for a family of three.

Connie was a gifted cook and had long dreamed of becoming a chef. She knew that the $7-dollar-an-hour jobs available to even a high school graduate (which she wasn’t) don’t bring small families out of poverty. Since she was intelligent, had worked hard in school and seemed utterly determined, my wife and I began offering her some modest financial support so she could continue her studies. She received her GED a year later.

Soon she had secured a scholarship, gotten a federal loan and enrolled in a 15-month culinary arts program. We continued to offer financial support. Noticing that Connie was now able to pay her bills on time, welfare officials grew suspicious. Everyone knows you can’t live on a welfare check, so if she was able to make ends meet, she must be receiving other income, which is strictly forbidden. As a penalty, her food stamp allowance was reduced.

In late 2001, she finally graduated as a chef, near the top of her class. In the deepening recession, it then took her a while to find a daytime job as a chef and to arrange for child care. She’s not out of the woods yet, and still needs a little help from us, but Connie will make it.

She is the lucky exception. It has been six years since Congress passed the Welfare Reform Act, promising to “end welfare as we know it.” This promise now threatens to become a far grimmer reality than legislators dreamed possible in the boom year of 1996. Congress is now supposed to reauthorize the act before it expires tomorrow. You will be forgiven for not having noticed this, as poverty has long been off the national agenda. But struggling families and poverty are still very much with us.

Connie’s story, while inspiring, is far from typical. Yes, there are many mothers “successfully” moving from welfare to work under welfare reform, but most won’t be earning nearly enough to bring their families out of poverty. Although welfare reform has been declared a smashing success because it has more than halved the number of families receiving financial assistance, the overwhelming majority of those who have left the rolls do not earn enough to leave poverty behind. Connie would probably not have made it, either, without extra financial help.

The 1996 welfare reform bill wiped out the 60-year-old entitlement to financial assistance that federal law had promised poor families, replacing it with a program accurately titled Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. Under the new system, any financial assistance, however temporary, requires the recipient’s participation in 30 hours per week of “work-related activities,” which can include education and vocational training. After 60 months (less in many states), financial assistance is cut off. Recipients who do not meet even the most technical requirements of the program can also be “sanctioned” by having benefits reduced or, more commonly, eliminated.

The 60-month limit and sanctions have been devastating for many. Despite the economic boom of the ‘90s, the average income of those who remain poor has fallen since passage of the bill. For women who have left the welfare rolls and are working, the median wage is a mere $7.15 an hour and--because most cannot find full-time, year-round work--annual earnings are around $10,000, not enough to bring the smallest family out of poverty.

The Welfare Reform Act did have one truly positive innovation: It gave states great leeway in designing education, training and work support programs. Some--like California and Michigan--used this flexibility well to provide things tailored to the needs of the recipient, like child care, transportation assistance, substance abuse treatment, continuing Medicaid coverage and some welfare benefits while working. It was child-care support and the flexibility to attend classes in lieu of work that enabled Connie to get her training.

But instead of building on this kind of flexibility by encouraging the remaining states to develop innovative programs that meet the needs of their recipients, President Bush has proposed tightening work requirements and limiting state flexibility in the welfare reauthorization bill. The White House wants to define “work-related activities” very narrowly, which would functionally curtail a majority of the most successful current state programs. It’s an odd tactic for a president who comes from a party that has traditionally espoused states’ rights rather than centralized federal control. But the restrictive proposal was picked up by House Republicans and passed on a strict party-line vote.

Under the House bill, further education, vocational training, substance abuse treatment, or other programs designed to address individual barriers to employment would be limited to three months in any two-year period, or the states would lose credit for “work-related activity.” After the three months, mothers would have to go to work, ready or not. Furthermore, if they couldn’t find jobs after that three-month period, states would essentially be forced to employ them in unpaid “workfare” programs, an approach that has been shown to be ineffective in promoting actual employment. In addition, all welfare recipients would have to work 40 hours a week or states would again lose credit. The current, common practice of allowing mothers with children under 6 months old to work part-time would not be allowed. A less-draconian Senate version of the bill has been proposed, but the president has threatened a veto if that version is sent to him.

Over the last six years, the most successful states have tailored their programs to the individual needs of the recipients, providing GED education, specific job training, or even counseling for domestic abuse. The earnings of California recipients of temporary assistance who attended community college programs, for instance, increased markedly after the program, but the largest gains were for those who completed vocational certificates or received associate’s degrees, which take much longer than 12 months to complete. The president’s proposal as passed by the House would not give credit for such programs. Of the 26 acceptable work-related activities in Minnesota’s successful Family Investment Program, for instance, the House bill would disqualify 21.

Nor, under the House bill, would Connie have been able to get her GED or attend the culinary arts program. She would likely be working for much less money with little hope of making ends meet.

Ultimately, instead of reducing benefits to women trying to get off welfare, Congress should increase those benefits--especially work supports--that have been successful. Research has shown that providing reliable child care is essential in moving mothers from welfare to work. But the current temporary assistance program provides less than 15% of the needed child-care support. Reauthorization should be seen as an opportunity to increase such support substantially.

Even the president has called for $1 billion more for child care. Unfortunately, the tightened work requirements of his proposal will, according to the Congressional Budget Office, increase state costs by more than $11 billion, while providing no extra funds to meet these costs, so the $1 billion will quickly be eaten away. In practice, the bill will keep states from providing even the current inadequate level of child-care support. In the context of a Welfare Reform Act that originally felt more like punishment than an aiding hand to the poor, the president’s proposal can only be considered even more punitive.

Fortunately, the Senate proposal, while hardly ideal, at least retains far more state flexibility, does not include unfunded mandates and provides $5 billion more for child care--still inadequate but far better than the House bill. Since the Senate bill is already a compromise between Republicans and Democrats, the House-Senate conference committee should scrap the ultra-punitive House bill in favor of the Senate’s.

Forty percent of families who left the temporary assistance program have already dropped into even deeper poverty. How many of them would, like Connie, make it if only they had the needed support? Isn’t that the least a compassionate country’s welfare program should provide?