LEAVING WELFARE FOR THE WORKFORCE
President Trump wants to lift ‘ millions’ off social services, but the numbers are more complicated than they seem
President Trump’s plea this week to get millions of welfare recipients back to work sounded like a Republican clarion call from the early 1990s.
After all, sweeping welfare reform under the Clinton administration in 1996 has sharply reduced U. S. welfare rolls.
Yet Trump, in his first address to Congress on Tuesday, said “millions lifted from welfare to work is not too much to expect,” repeating a message he has voiced several times since he was elected in November.
Are there still millions of people who can work but don’t?
Maybe, depending on how the president defines “welfare.”
The number of welfare recipients has fallen steadily the past two decades. There were 638,000 adults and 2.8 million children on Temporary Assis-
638K adults on welfare in fiscal 2016 4M adults on welfare in fiscal 1997
tance for Needy Families ( TANF) in fiscal 2016. That’s down from 4 million adults and 8.7 million children in 1997, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities ( CBPP).
With fewer than 1 million adults on the rolls, it doesn’t sound like there’s much chance to get millions back to work.
The 1996 welfare law required recipients to be working, looking for a job or getting training. It capped how long they could get benefits and restricted immigrants’ eligibility.
In exchange, states received a fixed annual amount — a total of $ 16.5 billion nationally — in federal block grants for TANF, and they got more flexibility in how they used the money. Before, they got varying amounts each year based on need.
With unemployment below 5% and employers struggling to find workers, there would seem to be ample opportunity for welfare recipients to get jobs. Yet many of them don’t have the required skills to work, don’t qualify for disability even though they are ill, or don’t know how to job hunt, says LaDonna Pavetti, vice president of family income support for CBPP.
Here’s the rub, and at least partial support for Trump’s goal:
Before welfare reform, the vast majority of the federal grants were earmarked for cash payments and a small amount was for work- related activities such as training and help with job searches, child care and emergency aid, CBPP says.
But today 25% of the money is used for cash payments, 17% for child care, 10% for work activities and related support and the rest for other things, Pavetti says. Those include other state services for poor families, such as pre- K education and child welfare, which are legal but largely run counter to the purpose of the reform bill.
“States do not focus on helping people find a job,” says Ron Haskins, one of the architects of the welfare reform legislation and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. And many states are not strictly enforcing the work mandate, Haskins says.
At the same time, the share of poor families receiving welfare has fallen to 23% from 68% two decades ago, Pavetti says, partly because many can’t or won’t meet new bureaucratic requirements under the law.
So Trump and Congress could force states to devote more of the money to job searches and training, an approach Haskins advocates. But Pavetti says states would strenuously fight the loss of the money they’re using for other services.
Even if the government coaxed all 638,000 adult welfare recipients back to work, that would still fall short of the “millions” Trump targeted Tuesday.
A possible explanation: Trump was using the term “welfare” broadly to include the tens of millions of Americans on programs such as food stamps. Their ranks have fallen the past few years but are still up significantly from pre- recession levels.
Work requirements for food- stamp recipients also could be strengthened, Haskins says. But most are already working.