Anticlimax as prologue

By most accounts, 2002 was expected to be a landmark year for welfare reform in the United States (US). The Congress was scheduled to reauthorise Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Food Stamp Program (FSP), the major safety net programmes for families with children. In truth, not much was achieved, and the intense scrutiny of the welfare programme that many predicted Congress to apply (cf Blank and Haskins, 2001, pp 3-4) never occurred. FSP was refunded with only modest change, and substantive action on TANF was put off to 2003 and beyond. After six years of experience with the system created by the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and what was surely the largest social policy research effort in world history, the country was left with pretty much what it had: a deeply fragmented, incoherent system neither motivated by, nor structured in light of, a vision of the social assistance Americans might want.

This anticlimax was the product of many factors. One was a gift of the economy: the decline in welfare caseloads, brought about by the longest sustained economic expansion in American history, stifled the concern about burgeoning dependency that had motivated the reform effort in the early 1990s. A second was fiscal: the 1996 reforms and subsequent legislation flooded states with federal money. No governors wanted to kill, or even redress, the treasury goose that was laying the golden grants. A third was a matter of perception: despite substantial evidence to the contrary, national opinion makers continued to claim that the laboratories of federalism, called states, were successfully mixing federal resources and grass-roots acumen to forge a new, work-oriented welfare order. To its credit, the second Bush administration attempted in its reauthorisation proposals to increase state accountability. However, in the end the administration, constrained by a burgeoning federal deficit and focused more on terrorism than social welfare, turned away from aggressive reform.

This is good news for the myriad scholars and research organisations dependent for their livelihoods on the persistence of welfare conundrums. Welfare reform, as Americans have known it, is far from dead and is probably set for a new lease on the resources of government and philanthropic institutions. But for most of the country's citizens the prospect of another half-decade of welfare deja-stew is surely depressing.