When President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law in 1996, he codified a range of ideas for changing government assistance to the poor that had been emanating from think tanks and the broader research community for several decades. Especially since Charles Murray's book Losing Ground was published in 1984, written while Murray was affiliated with the New York–based Manhattan Institute, the merits of a cash-based government entitlement for single mothers with children had been under heavy assault, criticized as a system that promoted overdependence on government support and a propensity toward having children out of wedlock. The welfare law enacted in 1996 had features that responded to Murray's by then twelve-year-old critique, along with many elaborations on it published by him and others in the succeeding years. The new law's general approach and many of its specific provisions were informed by the work of think tanks. The final law was the synthesis of work by experts, advocates, and ideologues during the 1980s and 1990s, many based at think tanks that embodied the spirit of all three.

The welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s was one clearly open to the contributions of policy researchers. The work of those who fashioned themselves experts on the issue was tremendously important in bringing critiques of the cash assistance system to the attention of policy makers in the 1980s; many of the reform ideas developed in books and articles during the late 1980s and early 1990s formed a foundation for early policy proposals.