Which president welfare

Specifically, they could add work requirements for eligible adults via federal-government waiver, further restricting eligibility. As my colleague Kriston Capps reports , the Department of Housing and Urban Development is seriously considering work requirements for people receiving housing assistance.

While his Republican colleagues in Congress have blanched somewhat at the idea— fearing another prolonged fight with Democrats after losing multiple rounds of Obamacare repeal last year—pressure from states and the White House might force the issue. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has pressed the Department of Agriculture to approve plans to drug-test certain cohorts of SNAP recipients and require them to work; he plans to go forward with both programs in A more meager program, TANF, took its place.

TANF expanded Reagan-era welfare reforms that created a loose requirement for certain beneficiaries to engage in a training, education, and work program. TANF transformed that initiative into a much more aggressive work requirement , which narrowed the number of exempt adults, reduced the range of accepted activities to qualify for benefits, largely excluded education and classroom training as qualifiers, and set firm hours-worked standards.

But TANF offered states a loophole to avoid being stripped of funds: The percentage of people they had to get to work would decrease by the percentage of people that leave the program. In all, these measures created an ever-shrinking program with strong incentives on all sides to reduce the number of people served over time—with rather predictable results. A recent study from the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows just how predictable those results have been.

Just 10 years ago, it was only two states. The actual size of the grant gradually decreases as inflation rises, meaning the grant disappears over time. But the ample flexibility of the TANF block grant allows states to use it essentially as a slush fund for filling holes in education, work training, and anti-poverty programs that were once paid for only by the state.

As those programs become more reliant on federal dollars, the core TANF responsibilities—including cash assistance and child-care funding—diminish. In essence, the block grant slashes state safety-net funds at three different levels: at the level of federal welfare support, at the level of state matching funds, and at the level of state funding for other programs. By , mother's pension programs were operating in all but two states. They varied greatly from state to state and even from county to county within a state.

Administered in most cases by state juvenile courts, mother's pensions mainly benefitted families headed by white widows. These programs excluded large numbers of divorced, deserted, and minority mothers and their children. Few private and government retirement pensions existed in the United States before the Great Depression.

The prevailing view was that individuals should save for their old age or be supported by their children. About 30 states provided some welfare aid to poor elderly persons without any source of income.

Local officials generally decided who deserved old-age assistance in their community. The emphasis during the first two years of President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" was to provide work relief for the millions of unemployed Americans. Federal money flowed to the states to pay for public works projects, which employed the jobless. Some federal aid also directly assisted needy victims of the Depression.

The states, however, remained mainly responsible for taking care of the so-called "unemployables" widows, poor children, the elderly poor, and the disabled. But states and private charities, too, were unable to keep up the support of these people at a time when tax collections and personal giving were declining steeply.

In addition to old-age pensions and unemployment insurance, the Social Security Act established a national welfare system.

The federal government guaranteed one-third of the total amount spent by states for assistance to needy and dependent children under age 16 but not their mothers. Additional federal welfare aid was provided to destitute old people, the needy blind, and crippled children.

Although financed partly by federal tax money, the states could still set their own eligibility requirements and benefit levels. This part of the law was pushed by Southern states so they could control the coverage made available to their African-American population. This is how welfare began as a federal government responsibility. Roosevelt and the members of Congress who wrote the welfare provisions into the Social Security Act thought that the need for federal aid to dependent children and poor old people would gradually wither away as employment improved and those over 65 began to collect Social Security pensions.

But many Americans, such as farm laborers and domestic servants, were never included in the Social Security old-age retirement program. Also, since , increasing divorce and father desertion rates have dramatically multiplied the number of poor single mothers with dependent children. Since the Great Depression, the national welfare system expanded both in coverage and federal regulations. From its inception, the system drew critics.

Some complained that the system did not do enough to get people to work. Others simply believed the federal government should not administer a welfare system.

As the system grew, so did criticism of it, especially in the s and '90s. In , candidate Bill Clinton, a Democrat, ran for president promising to "end welfare as we know it. Why did most states adopt "mother's pension" programs after ?

Only Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Mexico were poorer. Those receiving TEA must work or volunteer 35 hours a week, although the federal requirements are only 20 hours a week. The way that Arkansas treats its poor is not exactly a break with tradition, Ernie Dumas, a long-time Little Rock political columnist and historian told me. In the early part of the 20th century, Arkansas was already among the poorest states in the nation; it also had the lowest taxes in the nation, so funds for substantial anti-poverty initiatives were not available.

Bill Clinton legitimately wanted to help the poor when he was governor, Dumas said. Dumas remembers seeing Clinton around town, always talking to people about their lives and how he could improve them. When he ran for president, Clinton frequently talked about visiting welfare offices in Arkansas and meeting recipients. But the welfare-reform bill he signed, which had been pushed by a Republican Congress, left many in his home state without public help. The state focused on reducing the welfare caseloads by disqualifying people, rather than on helping people get a job, he said.

By law, the state is supposed to assess recipients when they apply for TEA and refer them to a service that can help them find a job, go back to school, or get vocational training. Raquel Williams knows how difficult it is to go through the process of applying for and receiving TEA. A year ago, Williams was steadily employed in Texarkana, Texas, in a state unemployment office.

She had trouble in her job search from the start, but their problems multiplied when he was shot on December So Williams started looking for a job.

She has work experience. So she applied for TEA. Right away, Williams told me, she felt as though the system was not there to make her life any easier, let alone help her find work. She could get compensated for the gas money she used getting to the volunteering position, she was told, but only at the end of the month. She kicks herself for following her key principles of Faith, Family, and Work—if she had just left her husband and stayed in Texas, if she had lied on a job application that asked if she smoked, if she had just kept the old job, she would have been fine.

Many of the people who do find jobs end up in low-paying ones with no room for advancement, Huddleston said. Luke Shaefer and Kathryn J. The number of families with children who reported that the only benefit they received was SNAP grew percent between and Between and , even as the welfare rolls were shrinking and more one-time recipients were moving to work, extreme poverty was increasing.

Living in extreme poverty has very real consequences for families, Shaefer said. Reduced TANF access in states is associated with higher food insecurity, increased child homelessness, a jump in foster-care placement, and more juvenile detention, according to soon-to-be-published research by Shaefer and colleagues. Families are often forced to sell their food stamps, their plasma , their bodies, to get access to cash to survive on, he said.

Welfare reform had big goals of moving people to self-sufficiency by training them to work. But it did little to create job opportunities or the types of programs that help people stay in jobs once they get them.