What Happened to Welfare?

By Christopher Jencks

American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare

by Jason DeParle

Viking/Penguin, 422 pp., $25.95; $16.00 (paper)

A few weeks after announcing his bid for the presidency in 1991, Bill Clinton promised that if he were elected he would "put an end to welfare as we know it." Although many Americans refer to any program for the poor as "welfare," most voters who cared about the issue knew that Clinton was talking about only one of these programs, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). This was the program that had been providing cash assistance to single mothers since the 1930s. Clinton's promise became his principal campaign issue, defining him as a Democrat who was ready to abolish "the dole."

After Clinton was elected, he kept this promise. In 1993 he began approving waivers that allowed states to impose stiffer work requirements on AFDC recipients. In 1996 he ignored his cabinet and over their objections signed a Republican bill that replaced AFDC with a new program known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). TANF included federal work requirements for welfare recipients and time limits on recipients' benefits, but the fine print gave states almost complete control over these mat- ters. Most governors and state legislatures concentrated on cutting the welfare rolls, which was popular with voters. They did this mainly by insisting that those receiving welfare also work, which forced many to leave the rolls immediately, and by making it much harder for new recipients to qualify for benefits.