LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Welfare Reform: States
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President Clinton vetoed conservative welfare reform twice before Republican resolve finally secured his signature on legislation that held cash welfare to a five-year limit and imposed work requirements on its recipients. Welfare was no longer to be an automatic handout that destructively subsidized unemployment and non-marriage. The liberal “compassion” that had imposed social decay on generation after generation of the poorest Americans was to be replaced with a system that encouraged self-sufficiency and responsibility. The Republicans’ stated goals were to reduce dependency, child poverty, and illegitimacy, and to increase employment. A decade later, these ambitious goals have been met.
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Welfare reform is the name for a policy change in countries with a state-administered social welfare system to reduce dependence on welfare, as demanded by political conservatives. A movement to change the federal government's social welfare policy which shifted responsibility to the states and cut benefits.
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House Speaker Newt Gingrich has remarked that block granting should unleash "51 state experiments" in welfare reform. How the nation will accommodate to, or learn from, these experiments... is not clear. Currently, if a state desires a waiver from federal regulations to introduce its own approach to welfare, it must submit to the federal government a plan for monitoring and evaluating the outcomes of this experiment. Results are then available for other states to use in designing their programs. Most governors and many federal administrators believe the current waiver process is too time-consuming. Oregon, for example, had to wait a year for its welfare and work program to be approved.
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Based on focus groups convened with welfare recipients in Northern, Central and Southern California, this report gives voice to women's experiences with welfare reform two years into their time clocks. The report reveals that women are not getting the individualized treatment they need to move into jobs that will enable them to be self-sufficient. Instead they experience difficulties getting information about available services, overloaded caseworkers, skeptical employers and pressure to take temporary, low-wage jobs. The Broken Promise offers recommendations to the Legislature, state and county administrators, advocates and the media to make welfare-to-work “work”.
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Welfare reform celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, and celebrates seems the right word. As most know, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families ended the much-despised Depression-era federal entitlement to cash benefits for needy single mothers, replacing it with short-term, work-oriented programs designed and run by individual states. Its success has surprised just about everyone.
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If the kind of social progress brought about by welfare reform had been caused by a liberal policy, its architects would be enjoying Kennedy School sinecures and lionizing portrayals in a major motion picture. But the rebels who changed the welfare status quo were conservative intellectuals and officeholders. The only tribute to them is the facts, recounted in congressional testimony by the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector, the intellectual godfather of reform, and in Work Over Welfare, a new book by Ron Haskins, a former staffer on a key congressional committee.
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