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Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act

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President Bill Clinton signing welfare reform legislation.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA, Pub. L.Tooltip Public Law (United States) 104–193 (text) (PDF), 110 Stat. 2105, enacted August 22, 1996) is a United States federal law considered to be a fundamental shift in both the method and goal of federal cash assistance to the poor. The bill added a workforce development component to welfare legislation, encouraging employment among the poor. The bill was a cornerstone of the Republican Contract With America and was introduced by Rep. E. Clay Shaw, Jr. (R-FL-22) who believed welfare was partly responsible for bringing immigrants to the United States.[1] Bill Clinton signed PRWORA into law on August 22, 1996, fulfilling his 1992 campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it".[2]

PRWORA instituted Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) which became effective July 1, 1997. TANF replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program which had been in effect since 1935 and also supplanted the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) program of 1988. The law was heralded as a "reassertion of America's work ethic" by the US Chamber of Commerce, largely in response to the bill's workfare component. TANF was reauthorized in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005.

History

1930s to 1970s

AFDC caseloads increased dramatically from the 1930s to the 1960s[citation needed] as restrictions on the availability of cash support to poor families (especially single-parent, female-headed households) were reduced. Under the Social Security Act of 1935, federal funds only covered part of relief costs, providing an incentive for localities to make welfare difficult to obtain[citation needed]. More permissive Northern laws were put to the test[citation needed] during the Great Migration between 1940 and 1970 in which millions of people migrated from the agricultural South to the more industrial North. Additionally, all able-bodied adults without children as well as two-parent families were originally disqualified from obtaining AFDC funds. Court rulings during the Civil Rights Movement struck down many of these regulations, creating new categories of people eligible for relief. Community organizations, such as the National Welfare Rights Organization, also distributed informational packets informing citizens of their ability to receive government assistance.[3] Between 1936 and 1969, the number of families receiving support increased from 162,000 to 1,875,000.[4] After 1970, however, federal funding for the program lagged behind inflation. Between 1970 and 1994, typical benefits for a family of three fell 47% after adjusting for inflation.[5]

1980s and 1990s

Beginning in the 1980s, AFDC came under bipartisan criticism for the program's alleged ineffectiveness. While acknowledging the need for a social safety net, Democrats often invoked the culture of poverty argument.[6] Proponents of the bill argued that welfare recipients were "trapped in a cycle of poverty." [7] Highlighting instances of welfare fraud, conservatives often referred to the system as a "welfare trap" and pledged to "dismantle the welfare state". Ronald Reagan's oft-repeated story of a welfare queen from Chicago's South Side became part of a larger discourse on welfare reform.[8]

Republican governor Tommy Thompson began instituting welfare reform in Wisconsin during his governorship in the late-1980s and early-1990s. In lobbying the federal government to grant states wider latitude for implementing welfare, Thompson wanted a system where "pregnant teen-aged girls from Milwaukee, no matter what their background is or where they live, can pursue careers and chase their dreams."[9] His solution was workfare, whereby poor individuals, typically single-mothers with children, had to work to receive assistance. Thompson later served as Health and Human Services Secretary under President George W. Bush.

Passage of PRWORA was the culmination of many years of debate in which the merits and flaws of AFDC were argued. Research was used by both sides to make their points, with each side often using the same piece of research to support the opposite view.[6] The political atmosphere at the time of PRWORA's passage included a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Senate (defined by their Contract with America) and a Democratic president (defined by Bill Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we know it.")

Passage in 104th Congress

A central pledge of President Clinton’s campaign was to reform the welfare system, adding changes such as work requirements for recipients. However, by 1994, the Clinton Administration appeared to be more concerned with universal health care and no details or a plan had emerged on welfare reform. Gingrich accused the President of stalling on welfare, and proclaimed that Congress could pass a welfare reform bill in as little as ninety days. Gingrich insisted that the Republican Party would continue to apply political pressure to the President to approve welfare legislation.[10]

In 1996, after constructing two welfare reform bills that were vetoed by President Clinton[11], Gingrich and his supporters pushed for the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), a bill aimed at substantially reconstructing the welfare system. Introduced by Rep. E. Clay Shaw, Jr., the act gave state governments more autonomy over welfare delivery, while also reducing the federal government's responsibilities. It instituted the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, which placed time limits on welfare assistance and replaced the longstanding Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. Other changes to the welfare system included stricter conditions for food stamps eligibility, reductions in immigrant welfare assistance, and recipient work requirements.[12]

Gingrich and Clinton negotiated the legislation in private meetings. Previously, Clinton had quietly spoken with Senate Majority Whip Trent Lott for months about the bill, but a compromise on a more acceptable bill for the President could not be reached. Gingrich, on the other hand, gave accurate information about his party’s vote counts and persuaded more conservative members of the Republican Party to vote in favor of PRWORA.[11]

President Clinton found the legislation more conservative than he would have preferred; however, having vetoed two earlier welfare proposals from the Republican-majority Congress, it was considered a political risk to veto a third bill during a campaign season with welfare reform as a central theme.[11] As he signed the bill on August 22, 1996, Clinton stated that the act "gives us a chance we haven't had before to break the cycle of dependency that has existed for millions and millions of our fellow citizens, exiling them from the world of work. It gives structure, meaning and dignity to most of our lives."[13]

After the passage of the bill, Gingrich continued to press for welfare reform and increasing employment opportunities for welfare recipients. In his 1998 book Lessons Learned the Hard Way, Gingrich outlined a multi-step plan to improve economic opportunities for the poor. The plan called for encouraging volunteerism and spiritual renewal, placing more importance on families, creating tax incentives and reducing regulations for businesses in poor neighborhoods, and increasing property ownership for low-income families. Gingrich cited his volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity as an example of where he observed that it was more rewarding for people to be actively involved in improving their lives--by building their own homes--than by receiving welfare payments from the government.[14]

Provisions

Overall decline in welfare monthly benefits (in 2006 dollars) [15]

PRWORA proposed TANF as AFDC’s replacement. The Congressional findings in PRWORA highlighted dependency, out-of-wedlock birth, and intergenerational poverty as the main contributors to a faulty system.[16] In instituting a block grant program, PRWORA granted states the ability to design their own systems, as long as states met a set of basic federal requirements. The bill's primary requirements and effects included:

  • Ending welfare as an entitlement program;
  • Requiring recipients to begin working after two years of receiving benefits;
  • Placing a lifetime limit of five years on benefits paid by federal funds;
  • Aiming to encourage two-parent families and discouraging out-of-wedlock births.
  • Enhancing enforcement of child support.

In granting states wider latitude for designing their own programs, some states have decided to place additional requirements on recipients. Although the law placed a time limit for benefits supported by federal funds of no more than 2 consecutive years and no more than 5 years over a lifetime, some states have enacted briefer limits. All states, however, have allowed exceptions with the intent of not punishing children because their parents have gone over the time limit. Federal requirements have ensured some measure of uniformity across states, but the block grant approach has led individual states to distribute federal money in different ways. Certain states more actively encourage education, others use the money to help fund private enterprises helping job seekers.

The legislation also greatly limited funds available for unmarried parents under 18, and restricted any funding to immigrants (legal or illegal).[4] Some state programs emphasized a shift towards work with names such as "Wisconsin Works" and "WorkFirst". Between 1997 and 2000, enormous numbers of the poor have left or been terminated from the program, with a national drop of 53% in total recipients.[17]

According to the House Ways and Means Committee, "The major goal of Public Law 104–193 is to reduce the length of welfare spells by attacking dependency while simultaneously preserving the function of welfare as a safety net for families experiencing temporary financial problems." A major prong in this effort was to improve child support collection rates in an effort to move single parent families off the welfare rolls and keep them off. According to the Conference Report "It is the sense of the Senate that — (a) States should diligently continue their efforts to enforce child support payments by the non-custodial parent to the custodial parent, regardless of the employment status or location of the non-custodial parent."

The reformed child support program attacks this problem by pursuing five major goals: automating many child support enforcement procedures; establishing uniform tracking procedures; strengthening interstate child support enforcement; requiring States to adopt stronger measures to establish paternity; and creating new and stronger enforcement tools to increase actual child support collections. The law envisions a child support system in which all States have similar child support laws, all States share information through the Federal child support office, mass processing of information is routine, and interstate cases are handled expeditiously. Section III (Child Support), Subtitle G (Enforcement of Child Support) contains 14 enforcement measures to improve the collection of child support, including potential denial or revocation of passports.

Criticism

Frances Fox Piven questioned whether the problem with AFDC was not so much a problem with the welfare system, but with the structuring of low-wage work in general:

"Logically, but not in the heated and vitriolic politics created by the attack on welfare, a concern with the relationship of welfare to dependency should have directed attention to the deteriorating conditions of the low-wage labor market. After all, if there were jobs that paid living wages, and if health care and child care were available, a great many women on AFDC would leap at the chance of a better income and a little social respect."[18]

Feminist critics, such as Barbara Ehrenreich, point to a degree of misogyny and racism in the lead up to PRWORA, claiming that advocates for workfare rehashed stereotypes that had been around for centuries.[19] Through the perceived demonization of single mothers, Ehrenreich sees welfare reform as stigmatizing "unpaid, family-directed labor" and believes that the reform put many women into exploitative situations:

"Stigmatizing unemployment obviously works to promote the kind of docility businesses crave in their employees. TANF requires recipients to take whatever jobs are available, and usually the first job that comes along. Lose the job – for example, because you have to stay at home with a sick child or because you tell the boss to stop propositioning you – and you may lose whatever supplementary benefits you were receiving. The message is clear: Do not complain or make trouble; accept employment on the bosses’ terms or risk homelessness and hunger."[20]

The child support enforcement measures, designed to keep single parent families off welfare, have been criticized as ineffective. A CBO report accompanying legislation reauthorizing the TANF program (Deficit Reduction Act of 2005) estimated that only 10% of the passport revocations were related to TANF or former TANF families. The enforcement provisions affecting US passports have thus far survived Constitutional challenges in Weinstein v Albright (2001), Eunique v Powell (2002), In re James K. Walker (2002), Dept of Revenue v Nesbitt (2008), Risenhoover v Washington (2008), and Borracchini v Jones (2009).

Consequences

Welfare and poverty rates both declined during the late-1990s, leading many commentators to declare that the legislation was a success. An editorial in The New Republic opined, "A broad consensus now holds that welfare reform was certainly not a disaster--and that it may, in fact, have worked much as its designers had hoped."[21]

Critics of the law[who?] argue that a large reduction in the number of people collecting welfare was largely a result of steady and strong economic growth in the years following enactment of the law.[22] Others[who?] question the definition of success, asking whether "success", as measured by caseload reduction, was merely a political construction for policy makers to easily claim credit in front of their constituencies. In analyzing the effects of welfare reform, political scientist Joe Soss notes that caseload reduction is not very demanding, especially compared to improving material conditions in poor communities:

"The TANF program does not offer benefits sufficient to lift recipients out of poverty, and despite a strong economy, the majority of families who have moved off the TANF rolls have remained in poverty. Considerations of another traditional economic goal, reduction of inequality, only makes matters worse. Welfare reform has coincided with massive growth in income and wealth disparities; it has done little to slow the expansion of inequality and may have actually accelerated the trend. Has welfare reform created job opportunities for the poor? Has it promoted wages that allow low-wage workers to escape poverty? In both of these areas, the economic story remains the same: we have little evidence that reform has produced achievements that warrant the label of success."[17]

A pejorative neologism, 99ers, was constructed to refer to individuals and families in the United States who have exhausted all their unemployment benefits, including all unemployment extensions totaling up to 99 weeks. This term was brought into the spotlight because of the Financial crisis of 2007–2010 and United States public debt, which motivated the subsequent political debate calling for either an extension or reduction of benefits.

See also

References

  1. ^ Lacayo, Richard (December 19, 1994). "Down on the Downtrodden". Time Magazine. Retrieved 2008-04-01. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  2. ^ Clinton, Bill (October 23, 1991). "The New Covenant: Responsibility and Rebuilding the American Community. Remarks to Students at Georgetown University". Democratic Leadership Council. Retrieved 2010-04-20. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  3. ^ Piven, Frances Fox (1979). Poor People's Movements. Vintage Books. p. 264. ISBN 0394726979.
  4. ^ a b Lewit, Eugene; Terman, Donna; Behrman, Richard (1997). "Children and Poverty: Analysis and Recommendations" (PDF). The Future of Children. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-10-11. Retrieved 2008-04-04. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. ^ National Coalition for the Homeless (2007). "NCH Fact Sheet #12" (PDF). Retrieved 2008-04-04. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  6. ^ a b Zuckerman, Diana (2000). "Welfare Reform in America: A Clash of Politics and Research". National Research Center for Women and Families. Retrieved 2008-04-03. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help) [dead link]
  7. ^ Gilliam, Franklin (1999). "The 'Welfare Queen' Experiment: How Viewers React to Images of African-American Mothers on Welfare" (PDF). Nieman Reports. 53 (2). UCLA: Center for Communications and Community. Retrieved 2008-04-03.
  8. ^ Hays, Sharon (2004). Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform. Oxford University Press, USA. p. 122. ISBN 0195176014.
  9. ^ Thompson, Tommy; Bennett, William. "The Good News About Welfare Reform: Wisconsin's Success Story". Retrieved 2008-04-03.
  10. ^ DeParle, Jason (January 5, 1994). "Clinton Puzzle: How to Delay Welfare Reform Yet Seem to Pursue It". The New York Times. Retrieved October 28, 2010.
  11. ^ a b c Gillon, Steven (2008). The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation. Oxford University Press, USA. p. 177. ISBN 978-0195322781.
  12. ^ O’Connor, Brendon (2001). "The protagonists and ideas behind the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996: The enactment of a conservative welfare system". Social Justice (Winter 2001).
  13. ^ Skorneck, Carolyn (July 31, 1996). "Clinton Says He Will Sign Welfare Overhaul; House Passes It". Associated Press.
  14. ^ Gingrich, Newt (1998). Lessons Learned the Hard Way: A Personal Report. HarperCollins Publishers. pp. 74–85. ISBN 978-0060191061.
  15. ^ 2008 Indicators of Welfare Dependence Figure TANF 2.
  16. ^ "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996". Retrieved 2008-04-03.
  17. ^ a b Soss, Joe (2002). Success Stories. South End Press. p. 65. ISBN 0896086585.
  18. ^ Piven, Frances Fox (1998). The Breaking of the American Social Compact. New Press. p. 169. ISBN 1565844769.
  19. ^ Ehrenreich, Barbara (2003). A Step Back to the Workhouse?. NYU Press. p. 504. ISBN 0814756549.
  20. ^ Ehrenreich, Barbara (2002). "Chamber of Welfare Reform". The Progressive. Retrieved 2008-04-04. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  21. ^ September 4, 2006, editorial on page 7
  22. ^ Sawicky, Max (2002). "The Mirage of Welfare Reform". WorkingUSA. 6 (3): 55–69. doi:10.1111/j.1743-4580.2002.00055.x.

Further reading

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