Gutting ‘Workfare’ at Taxpayers’ Expense

Liberals in the House of Representatives voted unsuccessfully to jettison the federal work requirements established in the 1996 welfare-reform law. Even worse, as the losing side of the 250–164 vote late last week, they actually voted to increase the national debt to accomplish this.

Here’s the background. In 1996, Congress passed the popular welfare-reform law that replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a new program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). The law, for the first time, required some able-bodied welfare recipients to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving aid. The result: Welfare caseloads were cut in half, employment surged, and black child poverty hit a historic low.
But the left wing of the Democratic party has always hated the 1996 reform. Opponents included a state senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. A few years later, U.S. senator Barack Obama opposed reauthorization of the welfare-reform law and denounced the law’s work requirements on the Senate floor. Then, as president, Obama appointed some of the nation’s most zealous welfare-reform opponents to “oversee” the TANF program.
Unable to overturn the law in Congress, these appointees sought to gut it through a bureaucratic dirty trick. On July 12, the Obama administration issued an edict that illegally “waived compliance” with the work provisions. States would be free to ignore them.

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/328324/gutting-workfare-taxpayers-expense-robert-rector