Monday marked two decades since a president signed a major piece of social legislation that’s proven durably successful and popular: the 1996 welfare-reform law. The legislation cut poverty rates (especially for children) dramatically, got millions of poor Americans to work and may have even played a role in cutting teen pregnancy.
To mark the occasion, the American Enterprise Institute, the Progressive Policy Institute, the University of Maryland’s public policy school and the Secretaries’ Innovation Group brought together some of the key men and women who made this extraordinary achievement possible (and at least one who tried to kill it).
What did key Republican congressional staff, two welfare-focused former governors, Clinton administration employees and highly experienced state welfare administrators have to say about how welfare reform got passed, how its implementation went and where we should go from here?
Let’s start with those reform-minded Republican governors: Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and John Engler of Michigan. If you’ve never watched two middle-aged Midwesterner dads reminisce about the good old days of competing over who could do the most to fix their state welfare systems like they’re bantering about a legendary Packers-Lions game, well, you’re missing out.
One reason these two men came to care so much about an issue that often goes unloved by Republicans is that they had a political mandate for reform in their states. Which is lesson one about getting big welfare reform done:
1. It takes political momentum
Engler and Thompson had more than just a passion for caring about the poor; they also were in charge of two states with notoriously over-generous, dysfunctional welfare systems. Thompson recounted how when he was governor it appeared poor Americans from all across the country were coming to Wisconsin to settle or just collected fraudulent welfare checks — enough, supposedly, that cab drivers waited at the bus station in Madison to take people from Chicago straight to the welfare office.
Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, left, pictured with Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), changed the welfare system in his state and served as an example to the federal government. | Photo: AP
That particular phenomenon was never confirmed as a large-scale problem, but the fact that there was even a debate about it spoke to a real political issue: voters were deeply dissatisfied with a system that allowed people to remain on welfare indefinitely, collecting cash payments without working.
Since that time, with cash welfare increasingly rare in America, the issue just doesn’t have the political salience it once did, even though poverty rates have returned to pre-reform levels and participation in the food stamps program has exploded over the past eight years.
Republicans are revisiting anti-poverty programs because they see Democrats neglecting the issue or offering the same stale ideas. (And they see it as a rebranding opportunity to boot.) But that’s not what helped get big changes enacted in the ’90s; it was a crucial public priority. Politicians looking to make progress these days will need to put in steady time toward making a case for a new round of reforms, and realize the last big push involved pointing out not just that the system could serve people better, but that it was riven with waste and abuse.
2. The feds and the states both need to do their part
One of the questions moderate and conservative welfare reformers often don’t agree on is how much the federal government should force upon the states, and how much states should be left to decide on their own. Tweaks to welfare during the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, for instance, often allowed states to implement work requirements if they wanted; then the 1996 law imposed tough requirements and time limits for cash welfare from the federal level.
Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, one of the architects of the 1996 law and a panelist, takes an especially hard line on this: states rarely take the initiative on good conservative ideas and waste huge amounts of federal money, he says. He’s certainly got a point. Moreover, he’s clashed with both House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) over proposals of theirs that would give more power to the states.
At the same time, though, conservatives know that state flexibility is important. “Conservative micromanagement isn’t any better than liberal micromanagement,” Engler argued, and states need to be able to experiment and craft local solutions.
How do we square this circle? One point of consensus is that we need to know more about what works before we impose it from the federal level. If the federal government is going to start requiring work in exchange for food stamps, for example, as many welfare reformers would like it to, we should make sure we’ve tested the idea and verified that it works.
That’s exactly how reform came about 20 years ago: federal waivers under the Reagan administration helped lay the foundation for Michigan and Wisconsin to show that requiring work could be very effective; then the Clinton-era law imposed those requirements from the federal level. Fights over state and federal prerogatives will never go away, but that’s at least one blueprint that should work going forward.
3. We need to do better at getting people to work
One of the most significant successes of the 1996 reform law is how many parents who’d previously been dependent on welfare soon found work, enabling them to support themselves rather than relying mostly on government. That kind of self-sufficiency, even if it still involves drawing on some other government programs, is a real victory against poverty.
However, it didn’t work for everyone: plenty of former welfare recipients didn’t find work, and slipped through the cracks. There are certainly many poor Americans — those who receive cash welfare and those who don’t — who could work but aren’t anywhere close to landing a job. It’s not easy for people with a spotty work history, limited skills and perhaps a criminal record to find work.
Government programs can and should help solve that problem. By and large, they haven’t. A number of the panelists involved in passing welfare reform lamented that states never started programs intended to help find work for welfare recipients (through counseling, résumé building, subsidized job offers, etc.).
Most troublingly, states use the dollars that before 1996 went to long-term cash welfare on a variety of random priorities, like child-care and tuition assistance.
Just getting vulnerable members of society engaged in full-time work has huge secondary benefits and deserves special focus. As Eloise Anderson, Wisconsin’s welfare secretary, said that helping a man find a job makes him more marriageable, for instance. Many unemployed men aren’t reachable through welfare programs only available to mothers with children, but federal and state governments can add work programs to child support and prison reentry programs in order to generate the same benefits.
States and the federal government should be requiring people to get jobs wherever it makes sense, but they should also be offering a helping hand to make it happen. The costs can be significant, but the benefits should be durable and, potentially, huge. Which is why . . .
4. We shouldn’t over-obsess about cost
Did you know that the Congressional Budget Office almost killed welfare reform?
As Robert Rector pointed out, the CBO’s models, while some of the best out there, often don’t capture things that we can be pretty sure are going to happen — for instance, that cash welfare rolls would drop significantly after the bill was passed. So the 1996 legislation also included politically controversial cuts to other programs, testing Democrats’ support and nearly sinking the whole bill. This is a controversial historical topic, but there’s no question those cuts were in the bill partly to make it look fiscally responsible — when the reforms to cash welfare itself were fiscally responsible, too, if not from the view of the CBO models.
Fiscal responsibility is essential, but so is making sure government actually works to solve some of the most intractable social problems. Former U.S. Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.) recounted how in the late 1990s he turned this issue on a group of reporters who pressed him about the cost of a bill intended to revive deeply impoverished areas. The much more important question, Talent pointed out, is not what the law would cost, but whether it would actually help turn around America’s toughest neighborhoods. If it did, he said, wouldn’t it almost certainly be worth it, and probably pay for itself?
Such logic can be perverted, of course: Democrats often like to argue welfare spending — Obamacare, food stamps, whatever — partly pays for itself because it provides economic stimulus, helps improve kids’ future outcomes, and so on. But those claims aren’t what Talent is talking about: His point is that if a program can be shown to have huge benefits for society, the mere fact that some models say it raises the federal deficit shouldn’t be the end of the story.
So, to apply Talent’s point to welfare reform: conservatives could stand to worry a little less about whether welfare reform will, by government bean-counter standards, decrease what the federal government spends on welfare every year, which runs to the hundreds of billions.
They at least should be as focused on whether reform sustainably increases social welfare through encouraging work, marriage, family formation and self-sufficiency.
If we succeed in doing that — as we did with the 1996 law — the numbers should take care of themselves.
Patrick Brennan is a contributor for Opportunity Lives. You can follow him on Twitter @ptbrennan11.
The post Four Lessons from the People Who Made Welfare Reform Happen appeared first on Opportunity Lives.