Two state governors testified before the Senate Finance Committee at an April 10 hearing on welfare reform. Govs. John Engler (R-MI) and Howard Dean (D-VT) represented the National Governors’ Association and presented their views on the President’s welfare proposal as well as their recommendations for the reauthorization of the welfare reform law (P.L. 104-193).
Gov. Engler praised Congress for setting up the goals in the current law and for leaving the strategies to the states. “As a result of the changes we’ve made in our states, unprecedented numbers of single women with children have moved into the workforce,” he said.
He told the committee that the “flexibility of the TANF block grant was the cornerstone of the 1996 reforms,” and he urged that the flexibility be maintained in the reauthorization. He also said that most Governors agree that welfare recipients should be engaged in work preparation or employment activities, but they believe that “states should have greater flexibility to define what counts as a work activity.”
Additionally, he said that programs such as child care, child support, housing, and Medicaid are “increasingly interconnected with welfare reform initiatives in the states,” and he looked forward to “working with the committee to develop the most effective ways to eliminate barriers to, and to create incentives for, greater coordination of related programs and the seamless delivery of services.”
Gov. Dean also urged the committee to continue providing flexibility to the states in the reauthorization process. However, he criticized the Administration’s proposal to increase the work requirements for TANF clients from 30 to 40 required hours. This would “significantly erode the primary TANF purpose of increasing states’ flexibility to operate a program designed to meet the four TANF purposes.”
“Forty hours would be an enormous burden,” he said. “Leave the system the way it is, that’s my message,” he urged the committee. “If you make the rules too rigid, states are going to play a game to satisfy the bureaucrats in Washington,” he added.
“There seems to be two issues at the core,” said Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA). “Can I interpret that the 40-hour requirement would not be a problem if there’s enough flexibility and enough money?” he asked.
“Welfare reform has been an enormous success,” responded Gov. Dean. “Leave it the way it is,” he said, indicating that a majority of governors “all have a problem with” the 40-hour requirement.
On the second panel, Arlene McNamee of Catholic Charities also criticized the increased work requirements in the President’s proposal. She told the committee that the “40-hour work week is no longer the standard in the U.S.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “the average number of hours worked per week by production or non-supervisory workers was 34.1.” For the kinds of paid jobs that TANF clients qualify for “in the service industry and retail sector, average weekly work hours are even lower at 32.7 and 29 respectively.”
Highlighting the importance of child care, she said, “Lack of affordable, quality child care is perhaps the biggest obstacle to retaining a job and advancing in the workplace.” She urged the committee to “increase the CCDBG budget by at least $1 billion each year as part of the TANF reauthorization.”
Speaking more favorably about the President’s plan, Lawrence Mead of Princeton University testified that his recommendation would be to “strengthen the work requirement further.” Additionally, he thought the Administration’s policy to eliminate the caseload reduction credits to states “was the most important single change that reauthorization must make.” Under current law, states are required to have 50 percent of their cases engaged in work, he said. “But the law also allowed states to count against those targets any percent by which their caseloads have fallen since 1995,” he explained, and added that the caseload reduction credit “cut the standards that most states actually faced to trivial levels.”
