Witnesses Highlight Needed Steps to Build on the Successes of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Witnesses before the 21st Century Competitiveness Subcommittee today called on Congress to build on the successes of the 1996 welfare reform law to further reduce welfare dependence, strengthen work requirements, and assist families with quality child care. 

On the first day of the 109th Congress, Republican leaders introduced the Personal Responsibility, Work and Family Promotion Act (H.R. 240), legislation based on President Bush’s 2002 reform blueprint to reauthorize the 1996 welfare reform law.  The Education & the Workforce Committee, which played a key role in 1996 in crafting the work requirements and reforming the way child care assistance is provided to low-income families through the CCDBG, is expected to hold a full committee markup and vote on H.R. 240 in early April.

“Welfare reform opponents suggest that the decreases in welfare caseloads and child poverty during the late 1990s were the result of a healthy economy, not the welfare reform law,” said Subcommittee Chairman Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-CA).  “But history shows that this argument simply is not true.  During the long economic boom in the 1980s, welfare caseloads actually rose.  And, during the recent recession of 2001, welfare caseloads held steady or continued to decline in many areas.”

“The fact is that the 1996 reform law’s work requirements made the crucial difference in maximizing opportunities for welfare recipients to participate in the workforce.  States now have the flexibility to create incentives for families to go to work,” said McKeon.  “The success of the 1996 welfare reform law is beyond dispute.  The challenge for Congress this year is to build on that success – by putting even more Americans on the path to self-reliance – when the law is reauthorized this year.” 

While the 1996 reforms reduced welfare caseloads, Wade Horn, the assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, described how a majority of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant recipients are still not working for their benefits. 

“Despite the success in moving families from welfare to work, a majority of adult TANF recipients are not engaged in employment-related activities,” said Horn.  “In FY 2003, states reported that only 31 percent of families with an adult recipient participated in the required 30 hours of TANF work activities.   We need to reverse this trend so that all TANF recipients are given the opportunity to become self-sufficient.”

“A key component of our reauthorization proposal is to maximize self-sufficiency through work,” Horn said, emphasizing the importance of strengthening work requirement to help move more welfare recipients into productive jobs.  “States will be required over time to make certain that the percentage of TANF recipients engaged in work and productive activities grow and that the primary focus is on participation in work – subsidized or unsubsidized employment, on-the-job training, and supervised work experience or community service.”

“Reauthorization should maintain pressure on states to move the remaining recipients toward work,” said Larry Mead, professor of politics at New York University, also emphasizing the need to ensure recipients are engaged in work or work-related activities.  “That in my view mainly requires fixing problems in TANF that have shielded many recipients from a need to work at all.”

Mead also noted that child care funding under the President’s reform proposal would be sufficient to meet the needs across the country.

“Federal funding for child care across all programs rose from $8.9 billion to $14.1 billion from 1994 to 1999, or by 60 percent.  And this increase occurred in the face of sharply declining welfare caseloads,” Mead said.  “I have seen no systematic evidence that lack of child care has impeded states’ ability to move recipients off welfare and into jobs. Arguments to the contrary are unpersuasive.”

Casandra Fallin, executive director of the Baltimore City Child Care Resource Center, commended the President’s proposal embodied in H.R. 240 to make improvements to the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) program.

“[I] applaud the Committee’s proposal to increase the quality set-aside from four percent to six percent.  Research shows that both the education and training of child care workers are the biggest single indicators of quality,” said Fallin.  “There are over 2.3 million child care workers in the United States, most of whom have little or no formal education.  Yet studies show that caregivers who have completed even a 120 hour training program exhibit higher levels of sensitivity and are more involved with the children they care for.   Despite this, 30 states require no previous training before child care workers begin work and only minimal training after they begin caring for children.”

Fallin also cited her support for proposals in H.R. 240 to increase collaboration at all levels of government to enhance child care, encourage of public-private partnerships; and increase access to care for certain populations such as children with special needs.

Curtis Austin, president of Workforce Florida in Tallahassee, Florida, described how one-stop job training centers, the business community, and economic development organizations in the state of Florida partnered together to succeed in moving welfare recipients into successful employment because of the 1996 law.

“In the past five years, the public employment system in Florida has trained more than 225,000 people to be more productive as they compete in the 21st Century Economy,” said Austin.  “Workforce Florida has used state level funds (federal and state funding) to target high skill, high wage occupations, training over 127,000 employees with appropriations of more than $100 million matched with more than $400 million in local and private sector resources to truly partner with the business community for success of all Floridians, including those who began as welfare clients.”

Austin made several recommendations to further strengthen welfare reforms, including providing states with additional flexibility and unlocking surplus funds that currently can be used only to pay cash assistance, and not for child care, job search, transportation, and training.

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