Yes, Obama Did Gut Welfare Reform

Earlier, I wrote about how the Obama administration gutted welfare reform. Now, the New York Times is claiming that the Obama administration did not gut welfare reform or open the door to waiver of its work requirements for welfare recipients. But as journalist Mickey Kaus notes, a passage in the Times’ own editorial helps confirm that the Obama administration has indeed opened the door to the evisceration of welfare reform’s work requirements. Welfare reform’s work requirements, unlike other provisions in the 1996 law, were specifically designed not to be waivable, but the Obama administration has now instead declared that they can be waived, thus violating the 1996 welfare-reform law. As the Times itself noted, the Obama administration’s expansion of waivers came in response to a request for waivers by the State of Nevada. Nevada expressly advocated a waiver of the requirement that welfare recipients work. For example, as the Times observed, Nevada suggested that “those families hardest to employ . . . be exempted from the work requirements for six months while officials worked with them to stabilize their households.”

As Kaus notes,

***–Here are the exact words in Nevada’s letter:

              TANF Performance Measures and Possible Waiver Opportunities …

               Exempt the hardest-to-employ population for a period of time (i.e. six months) to allow time for their barriers to be addressed and their household circumstances stabilized; …

Note that “six months” isn’t an upper limit on the “exempt” period. Could be sixteen months. Note also that the NYT makes it sound as if Nevada might actually be requiring welfare recipients do something during this period–”while officials worked with them.” But the actual Nevada letter doesn’t say anything except that they need “time for their barriers to be addressed.”

More generally, Nevada proposes a broad, excuse-laden “progression” system in which all recipients with “employment barriers” are given “more time and assistance”–translation, more welfare with fewer obligations to work or train for work or look for work. What are “employment barriers”? They include lack of child care, transportation, drug addiction, “special needs such as clothing and tools,” and lack of “job seeking/retention skills.” Obesity can also be a “barrier.”

As the Heritage Foundation notes,

In the past, state bureaucrats have attempted to define activities such as hula dancing, attending Weight Watchers, and bed rest as “work.” These dodges were blocked by the federal work standards. Now that the Obama administration has abolished those standards, we can expect “work” in the TANF program to mean anything but work. The new welfare dictate issued by the Obama Administration clearly guts the law.

The Obama administration’s move baffled Kaus, who voted for Obama in 2008.  But perhaps it shouldn’t have baffled him, since it reflects Obama’s longstanding antipathy to reforms of the welfare system aimed at reducing dependency on welfare and requiring welfare recipients to work. “For example, in the years immediately after passage of the law, Barack Obama himself pledged to do all he could to undo it,” noted the Washington Examiner. As the Examiner‘s Chief Political Correspondent, Byron York, noted, on July 12, the Obama administration ‘released an official policy directive rewriting the welfare reform law of 1996’” to allow the “Department of Health and Human Services to waive the work requirement at the heart of welfare reform.”

Obama also gutted welfare reform in other ways, such as pushing through a stimulus package that rewarded states for promoting welfare dependency, giving state governors an incentive to water down any work requirements for welfare recipients. As Kaus noted in 2009,