On February 10, the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources held a hearing on proposals to reauthorize the 1996 welfare reform law (P.L. 104-193). Since its expiration in September 2002, Congress has approved eight extensions of the 1996 law. The most recent extension will expire on March 31, 2005.
Highlighting achievements under the current welfare law, Chair Wally Herger (R-CA) stated, “Since enactment in 1996, work among welfare recipients has more than doubled. Welfare dependence has been cut in half, and more than one million children have been removed from poverty. We want to continue and expand those gains to help more single parents move toward financial stability and independence and a brighter future.” He added, “It is a disgrace that a successful program is languishing through eight short-term extensions of current law. Had our 2002 bill been enacted, by now States would have received $1.8 billion in additional child care funds. Instead, child care funding has stayed the same, and work by welfare recipients has actually dropped.”
Ranking Member Jim McDermott (D-WA) said that the goal of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program “should be to provide vulnerable Americans with the opportunity to reach economic security and self-sufficiency,” adding, “TANF ought to stand for: Toward A New Future, because that’s what I want for these people…a path to skills and new economic opportunity.” Explaining that the Republican bill (H.R. 240) is the same legislation considered in the 107th and 108th Congresses, Rep. McDermott offered his own proposal (H.R. 751) to reauthorize the 1996 law: “One unique feature of our bill is a provision that would allow States, at their option, to be judged solely on their progress in moving welfare recipients into employment into jobs. Other improvements in our bill include increased access to skills-training, and restored benefits to immigrants who have come to this country legally. Toward A New Future. That’s what TANF means to Democrats and that’s where Americans will end up under our bill.”
Testifying before the subcommittee, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) shared her experience as a welfare recipient at age 29: “I tell you this story in part to combat the crude stereotype of welfare recipients as hopeless cases who are leeching off the system. There are a lot of success stories like mine. At its best, welfare is a lifeline, not a lifestyle…as an emergency support that helps people until they can put their lives together and stand on their own two feet. Believe me, no one wants to be on welfare.” Rep. Woolsey argued that a welfare reauthorization bill should include education and job training for recipients, adjusted benefits based on the cost of living in a particular area, and funding to address the shortage of safe and affordable child care. She offered her own proposal, the Balancing Act, which would include “expanded family and medical leave, universal voluntary preschool, improved school nutrition, better after-school programs and benefits for part-time and temporary workers.”
Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services Wade Horn said that the Bush administration’s welfare reauthorization proposal, embodied in H.R. 240, “is guided by four critical goals that will transform the lives of low-income families: strengthen work, promote healthy families, give States greater flexibility, and demonstrate compassion to those in need.” He explained that the proposal would maintain the current level of $16.5 billion for TANF block grants, replace the current caseload reduction credit with an employment credit, establish demonstration projects to integrate welfare and workforce assistance programs, and reform child support enforcement programs so that more money is collected and directed to needy families. With regard to child care assistance, Assistant Secretary Horn stated, “Our proposal supports maintaining the historically high level of funding for child care, including $2.1 billion for the Child Care and Development Block Grant and $2.7 billion for Child Care Entitlement a total of $4.8 billion for what is referred to as the Child Care and Development Fund or CCDF. In addition, States continue to have the flexibility to use TANF funds for child care both by transferring up to 30 percent of TANF funds to CCDF, and by spending additional TANF money directly for child care.”
Assistant Secretary Horn detailed the administration’s proposal to support healthy marriages, explaining that $100 million would be provided from the discontinued Out-of-Wedlock Birth Reduction Bonus and another $100 million would be redirected from the High Performance Bonus. He also noted that $40 million would be provided “for the promotion and support of responsible fatherhood and healthy marriage programs to reverse the rise in father absence and its subsequent impact on our nation’s children,” adding, “This funding will provide for demonstration projects to test promising approaches to promote and support involved, committed and responsible fatherhood, and to encourage and support healthy marriages between parents raising children.” Finally, Assistant Secretary Horn explained that the proposal would reauthorize the State Abstinence Education Program, stating that grants under the program “have helped people to develop the self-discipline to say ‘no’ to sex. They help people develop inner strength, help them to take charge of their lives, and redirect their energies into healthy and productive choices. While the evidence is still being collected, we are seeing the benefits of a strong abstinence message, and it is clear that the State program needs to be reauthorized.”
Lisalyn Jacobs, vice president for government relations at Legal Momentum, focused much of her testimony on the proposal to support healthy marriages, stating, “Emphasis on marriage and family formation sidesteps the underlying causes of poverty, particularly the poverty of women and children such as lack of job training and education, ongoing sex and race discrimination, violence and lack of childcare. At a time of huge budget deficits and high unemployment it is irresponsible to spend over a billion dollars on untested, unproven marriage promotion programs, which is what the proposed House bill would spend over the next 5 years.” Citing the high incidence of domestic violence among welfare recipients, Ms. Jacobs argued that the proposal should include specific protections for women who have been abused: “Programs that push poor women into marriage with the fathers of their children may inadvertently legitimize abusive situations; similarly, programs that discourage divorce may increase the already deep shame and social pressure to remain with the abuser that women who are married and are being abused often feel.” Ms. Jacobs said that “at a minimum, Congress should require all states to screen for domestic violence, refer individuals to services, and should invest TANF dollars in caseworker training, a study of best practices with respect to addressing domestic violence in TANF, and dissemination of those best practices to all states to help them address this very real barrier to economic security.”
Explaining that many women leaving welfare find themselves in low-paying jobs, Ms. Jacobs encouraged Congress to consider the importance of nontraditional employment training, stating, “Not only do nontraditional jobs provide higher entry-level wages, but they also provide career ladders to higher wages…Nontraditional jobs also provide women with increased access to a full range of benefits, such as health care, family leave, sick leave, retirement plans, and paid vacation. Finally, nontraditional jobs can provide women with tremendous job satisfaction.” With regard to child care funding, Ms. Jacobs noted that many women are sanctioned when they cannot find child care or are forced to rely on inadequate child care to meet work requirements. She argued that “the proposal to raise the work requirement hours for women with infants and toddlers that is contained in H.R. 240 is unconscionable. The work hours for single parents with pre-school age children should not be raised.” Finally, Ms. Jacobs stressed the importance of the Family Violence Option (FVO) in the 1996 law, which allows women to participate in activities that help them escape domestic violence: “Experience with the FVO has indicated that caseworker training is desperately needed so that caseworkers will understand how to talk to women who are victims of violence and that better screening techniques are needed. A mandatory FVO requirement would both add violence protection for women who are victims and also enable oversight of the way in which the FVO is implemented.”
A senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector, explained that the healthy marriage initiative “would be preventative not reparative. The programs would seek to prevent the isolation and poverty of welfare mothers by intervening at an early point before a pattern of broken relationships and welfare dependence had emerged. By fostering better life decisions and stronger relationship skills, marriage promotion can increase child well-being and adult happiness, and reduce child poverty and welfare dependence.” Arguing that marriage promotion programs would reduce the incidence of domestic violence, he stated, “Such programs help women steer clear of dangerous and counterproductive relationships. Moreover, domestic violence is less widespread among low-income couples than is generally assumed. For example, three-quarters of non-married mothers are romantically involved with the child’s father at the time of the non-marital birth: Only 2 percent of these women have experienced domestic violence in their relationship with the father. In general, domestic violence is more common in cohabitating relationships than in marriage: Never-married mothers, for example, are twice as likely to experience domestic violence than are mothers who have married.” Mr. Rector suggested that Title X family planning clinics could provide referrals to “life planning, marriage, and relationship training,” stating that, “The goal of such programs would be to encourage young adult women to delay childbirth and to develop stable marital relationships before bringing children into the world. The potential for outreach through the Title X clinics may actually be greater than through maternity wards. Expanding healthy marriage services to cover this time prior to a child’s conception may considerably increase the effectiveness of future programs.”
