What is the status of welfare reform today? I will take "welfare reform" to mean primarily the changes in family aid made by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The act replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Children (TANF), in which eligibility for welfare was much more strongly conditioned on work by the adult recipients than it had been before.

Reform attained its chief goals, to raise work levels on welfare and to reduce dependency. Among poor mothers, work levels soared in the 1990s, although some of that gain was lost in ensuing recessions. Cash welfare rolls plummeted by over two-thirds and grew very little in the recent hard times. Reductions in poverty were less dramatic, but still sizable, again with the gains reversing in the 2000s.

Evaluating Welfare Reform

Reform did not, however, assure that poor mothers who left welfare for jobs would have enough to live on. The combination of earnings with food stamps and wage subsidies was usually enough to lift a family out of poverty, but only if the mother worked steadily and full-time. Nor did reform assure that a working mother would be able to move up to higher pay over time. Few former welfare mothers work steadily, and more needs to be done to help them do that.

The leading criticism of reform has been that some 40 percent of mothers leaving cash aid did not go to work and have been left with little apparent support. Some think these “disconnected” mothers are in trouble, but so far no systematic evidence has emerged to show this. More inquiry is needed to find out how these mothers are coping. Most likely, most of them have found other means of support, such as living with other adults who are working or on other government benefits.

Another criticism is that some states have placed so many conditions on TANF that they have effectively closed the door to aid. In these places, applicants for aid have to produce so much documentation and search for jobs so strenuously up front that few can ever get on the rolls, even if they meet the income rules. If the federal government pays states to run a welfare program, then they must do so and not effectively deny aid to eligible recipients. Congress should investigate this issue when TANF is next reauthorized.

Some think that the TANF rolls should have grown more during the recent recession. The fact that they did not suggests that many who needed aid failed to get it. Here I disagree. Even during the downturn, low-wage jobs remained widely available. The scarcity has mostly been in middle-class jobs that demand more skills and work history than most poor adults have. Static welfare rolls do not demonstrate hardship, but rather that cash welfare is now a last resort, as it should be. Many poor families, it is true, have claimed food stamps, where work demands are weaker than in TANF, and it may be time to strengthen those requirements.

Strengthening Welfare Reform

How to improve welfare reform? I would pay higher wage subsidies to low-income working mothers, but conditioned on some minimum of working hours, such as 20 hours a week. The Earned Income Credit Tax (EITC) currently lacks such a threshold. More importantly, I would institute “welfare reform for men.” Low-income men should also get better wage subsidies, but conditioned on working full-time and paying their child support judgments, if any. They should have to work more hours than mothers because the latter more often have children to worry about. On the other hand, men’s work programs should be prepared to guarantee jobs, as was seldom necessary in welfare reform, because poor men are less employable than poor women. Work programs able to enforce work for men who are already obligated to work can be built into the child support and criminal justice systems, a process that is already underway.

The current election features a clearer choice about the scale of government than the nation has recently seen, but welfare is not part of that issue. Rather, reform helped trigger that debate. Welfare reform was not about changing how much government does for people, but about enforcing the work expectations that go along with those benefits. The social visions of both right and left in America presume a working population. For both persuasions, the success of reform was an important victory. With more poor mothers working, it became easier to argue for less government—or for more. Without reform, we probably would not have seen recent expansions in federal health programs—or the criticism of them on the right. Welfare is now off the front burner, so that broader issues about opportunity and equality can move on. That is a step forward for American democracy.