Human Services News

The Urban Institute"

Writers and critics of the landmark 1996 welfare reform bill took part in an Urban Institute roundtable event with federal officials, state and local human service practitioners, researchers, and analysts to mark the legislation's approaching 10th anniversary.

Mostly hailed by participants as a bipartisan achievement that shrank welfare rolls and put single mothers to work, welfare's transformation from an entitlement program to a block grant that imposed time limits on assistance also left many families with children in poverty.

Rep. Clay Shaw, the Florida Republican who chaired the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources that wrote the historic 1996 legislation, spoke of how it helped break the cycle of poverty, gave states great flexibility, and encouraged more two-parent families. Welfare reform was "a rescue program," he said, that underscored the strength of "the human spirit."

Not so, countered Wendell Primus, the former official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), who resigned in 1996 in opposition to President Clinton's decision to sign the welfare reform bill.

Primus, now a senior policy adviser to House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California, echoed many at the roundtable by largely crediting a booming economy in the late 1990s and the expansion of the earned income tax credit with the single-parent exodus from welfare to work.

Both Ron Haskins, an author of the bill and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Wade Horn, HHS assistant secretary for children and families, argued that states could be doing more with their federal dollars to bolster working families.

With more government money than ever going toward encouraging stronger unions between low-income parents, Horn argued that "doing nothing produces nothing" and that providing low-income couples with the same skills many wealthier couples possess is only fair.