Does Obamas Plan Gut Welfare Reform?
Posted on August 9, 2012
A Mitt Romney TV ad claims the Obama administration has adopted a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements. The plan does neither of those things.
- Work requirements are not simply being dropped. States may now change the requirements revising, adding or eliminating them as part of a federally approved state-specific plan to increase job placement.
- And it wont gut the 1996 law to ease the requirement. Benefits still wont be paid beyond an allotted time, whether the recipient is working or not.
Romneys ad also distorts the facts when it says that under President Obamas plan you wouldnt have to work and wouldnt have to train for a job. The law never required all welfare recipients to work. Only
29 percent of those receiving cash assistance met the work requirement by the time President Obama took office.
Under the new policy, states can now seek a
federal waiver from work-participation rules that, among other things, require welfare recipients to engage in one of 12 specific work activities, such as job training. But, in exchange, states must develop a plan that would provide a more efficient or effective means to promote employment, which may or may not include some or all of the same work activities. States also must submit an evaluation plan that includes performance measures that must be met or the waiver could be revoked.
Ron Haskins, a former Republican House committee aide who was instrumental in the 1996 overhaul of the welfare program, told us the Obama administration should not have unilaterally changed the work-requirement rules. But Haskins said the Romney claim that Obamas plan will gut welfare reform is very misleading.
I do not think it ends welfare reform or strongly undermines welfare reform, said Haskins,
co-director of the Brookings Institutions Center on Children and Families. Each state has to say what they will do and how that reform
will either increase employment or lead to better employment of recipients.
