On September 21, the Senate Finance Committee held a hearing, “Welfare Reform: A New Conversation on Women and Poverty.”
“Last week, the Census Bureau told us that poverty last year was the highest since 1994,” said Chair Max Baucus (D-MT). He continued, “Last year, nearly four million more Americans fell into poverty. More than a million of them were children. Poverty went up among all types of families – two‐parent households and single‐parent households alike. But nearly one in every three households headed by a single woman is living in poverty. Today we’ll discuss preventing poverty, across the spectrum. And we’ll focus on the strong but vulnerable women with dependent children who make up such a significant part of the TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] caseload. More than four out of every five TANF families with an adult are headed by a single woman. And seven in ten of those mothers are caring for a child under the age of six. In this Great Recession, TANF has not responded as other safety net programs have. TANF has not automatically expanded, as food stamps and Medicaid did. It’s time to take another long, hard look at TANF.”
Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-IA) said, “The makeup of the TANF caseload has changed dramatically. Take for example the increase in TANF child-only cases. Child-only cases are those where the adult is not receiving cash welfare and the assistance is aimed solely for the assistance of the child. These types of cases are increasingly becoming a larger and larger percentage of the welfare caseload. The reason that this is important is that it’s not clear whether these children are best served under the current system. For example, we worked on a bipartisan bill two years ago that allowed states to establish a ‘kinship’ care option for youth in foster care. It might be that some of these children in child-only welfare cases could be better served in a permanent kinship care arrangement…Due to the fact that the demographics of the TANF caseload have changed and the fact that a major use of the TANF block grant is going toward services not directly associated with basic cash assistance, it might make sense to recalibrate TANF to meet the changing population served by this program.”
Dr. Vivyan Adair, associate professor of women’s studies at Hamilton College, discussed the role of higher education in moving low-income women out of poverty. She said, “Indeed, in 1987, the year that I entered college, around the nation almost half a million welfare recipients were similarly enrolled in institutions of higher education as a route out of poverty. Prior to welfare reform in 1996, tens of thousands of poor single mothers quietly accessed postsecondary education to become teachers, lawyers, social service providers, business and civic leaders, and medical professionals.” Dr. Adair continued, “[T]he Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) work requirements, part of the 1996 PRWORA, [the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (P.L. 104-193)] drastically limited poor women’s opportunities to participate in postsecondary education programs while receiving state support. Unlike previous provisions in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and…education training programs in existence when I first went to college, TANF restrictions from 1996 did not allow higher education to be counted as ‘work’ and required a larger proportion of welfare recipients to engage in full-time recognized work activities. This work-first philosophy emphasized rapid entry into the labor force and penalized states for allowing long-term access to either education or training. As a result of the dramatic overhaul of welfare policy in 1996, welfare recipient students left college for low-wage jobs in record numbers. Even as the nation began to embrace the conviction that access to education is the pathway to social and economic mobility, poor women were denied access to education that could have positively altered the course of their lives and those of their children.”
Kay Brown, director of Education, Workforce, and Income Security at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), discussed the implications of welfare reform programs on TANF caseloads, saying, “Research on how families are faring after welfare reform has shown that, like those who receive TANF cash assistance, families that have left welfare, either for work or for other reasons, tend to remain low-income and most depend, in part, on other public benefits. As we noted in a 2005 report, most of the parents who left cash welfare found employment and some were better off than they were on welfare, but earnings were typically low and many worked in unstable, low-wage jobs with few benefits and advancement opportunities. There is evidence that some former TANF recipients have had better outcomes; for example, a 2009 study found that, in general, former TANF recipients in three cities, especially those who had left TANF prior to 2001, had higher employment rates and average income levels than they had while they were on TANF. However, even among working families, many rely on government supports such as the EITC [Earned Income Tax Credit], Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, and other programs to help support their families and lift them out of poverty, as most parents who recently left welfare are not earning enough to be self-supporting. In addition, a considerable body of work has documented families who are often described as ‘disconnected’ from the workforce. It is not yet known whether or to what extent the recession has led to an increase in the number of these families.”
During his testimony, Gordon Berlin, president of MDRC, formerly known as Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, echoed concerns about disconnected workers, especially women. He said, “Of equal concern is the growing problem of disconnected low-income single mothers who report that they are neither working nor receiving public assistance, and thus have no reliable source of cash income to support them and their children. The proportion of such families has been growing from roughly a tenth of low-income single mothers in 1990 to as many as a fifth or even a fourth by 2005. These numbers have likely grown over the last five years. Available evidence suggests that these women face a range of barriers to work – limited work history, low education levels, domestic violence, depression, or the responsibility of caring for a sick child or adult. Many will experience severe poverty – that is, income below 50 percent of the federal poverty level for their family size. The consequences for children of spending some part of their childhood under conditions of severe economic deprivation are worrisome.” With regard to work-first requirements and education Mr. Berlin added, “The debate need not pit work against education. A strong body of research demonstrates that the most effective welfare-to-work programs employ a ‘mixed strategy’ that encourages some people to find work immediately and others to enter education and training. The challenge is targeting the right intervention for the right participant. Here’s what we know…A ‘mixed strategy’ that tailors services to the needs of individual recipients – some participants to begin by looking for work and others to start with education and training – has proven more effective than more rigid approaches that simply assigned all participants to either a job-search-only program or a required education and training-only program with little regard to their individual needs.”
Wes Moore, author of The Other Wes Moore, also testified.