A Challenge for Obama on Anniversary of Welfare Reform

Sixteen years ago this week, President Clinton signed the 1996 bipartisan welfare reform which he lauded as “ending welfare as we know it.” This anniversary offers President Obama a unique opportunity to honor the historic achievement.

At the heart of the 1996 law was a simple principle: no one in America should get money from the government for doing nothing. We knew the welfare system of the past was corroding the work ethic, destroying families, bankrupting our country, and most tragically of all, entrapping the poor.

That’s why we put strong work requirements at the center of the reform. We would help people get back on their feet, and after two years, they had to get a job.

At the time, critics on the left said the policy would turn millions of poor people out of their homes. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan characterized the proposal as “the most brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction.”

And as a state senator from Illinois, our current president opposed it too. Barack Obama said he “did not entirely agree with it and probably would have voted against” it. He later said he was “not a huge supporter” of the reforms.

But contrary to the dire predictions of the Left, welfare reform proved to be one of the most successful social policies in American history. Two-thirds of welfare recipients got a job or went to school. Within 4 years, 4.2 million people rose up from poverty. In five years, child poverty was at an all-time low, having dropped by 25 percent.

The work requirement was the key to achieving these gains.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama acknowledged this fact when he said at Saddleback Church pointed to welfare reform as an issue he’d been wrong about: “I was much more concerned ten years ago, when President Clinton signed the Bill, that this would have disastrous results,” he said...”It worked better than a lot of people anticipated.”

So he told us as a candidate.

But last month, President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a memo announcing it would grant states waivers on the work requirements.

The HHS memo declared the authority to “waive compliance with [work requirements] and authorize a state to test approaches and methods other than those set forth in [the section pertaining to work requirements], including definitions of work activities and engagement.”

The memo then proceeds to give examples of “projects states may want to consider” – most of which are attempts either to dilute the work requirements or expand the definition of “work”.

Apparently the Obama administration didn’t believe the bureaucratic change would be noticed. When challenged, however, they denied attempting to weaken the requirements (an authority which the memo asserted but which is explicitly prohibited in the law). And having just asserted the authority to undercut the requirements, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney stated angrily that “any request from any state that undercuts the work requirement in welfare reform will be rejected.”

The apparent conflict between the Obama administration’s memo unilaterally empowering itself to waive the work requirement and the Obama White House’s denial that will ever take advantage of this new authority present the President with an opportunity on this 16th anniversary of the law: If he has no intention of waiving the requirements, he should denounce the memo and he should direct the secretary of HHS to officially rescind it.

Then we’ll know for sure if the president truly believes work should remain at the center of welfare reform.

Your Friend,
Newt Gingrich