Chapter 3
Change They Believed In
In 1988, President Reagan signed the Family Support Act (FSA), the most significant welfare reform passed by Congress in two decades. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic senator from New York who had served both a Democratic president and a Republican one, claimed primary authorship for the law. Like Moynihan’s own career, the Family Support Act was bipartisan. As with the Moynihan Report of 1965, his 1988 bill, the FSA, was the object of protest by many liberals and intersectional feminists.1 Reagan attempted to soften the demeaning messages about African Americans and women that had helped produce FSA by promising the law would “lead to lasting emancipation from welfare dependency.” While underlining the preference in FSA for married couples raising children with a patriarchal family division of labor, President Reagan insisted that “single parent families also share[d] in the message of hope underlying this bill.”2 Indeed, alongside the terrifying aspects of FSA for welfare parents, which included a waged work mandate, a renewed requirement that women participate in paternity establishment and child support collection, and consequences delivered to fathers who lacked steady income to pay child support, there was a promising side to the law. For those who wanted to further their educations or were ready to combine waged and unwaged work more than they had been doing, the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) initiative under FSA might help.3 The states were to receive $6.8 billion over seven years from the federal government to finance efforts to provide job opportunities. They would receive additional funds to cover child care and children’s health care costs while parents were in what was conceptualized as a “transitional” period from welfare receipt to permanent family support via the waged labor market.4 The law forbade states to require mothers of children under six to participate “unless child care is guaranteed and participation is on a part-time basis.” Perhaps most significantly, it specified that if recipients were “attending a school or course of vocational or technical training … such attendance may constitute satisfactory participation in the Program so long as it is consistent with his or her employment goals.”5
President Reagan did not acknowledge Moynihan for his role in creating the Family Support Act. But he did single out one increasingly renowned Democrat, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas.6 Clinton had headed the National Governors Association and cochaired its Task Force on Welfare Reform. Consistent with the bipartisan shift across the twentieth century toward viewing poverty as a disease or disorder, Clinton and his task force cochair, Republican governor Mike Castle of Delaware, renamed their effort the Task Force on Welfare Prevention.7 In congressional testimony shortly after states began to implement FSA, Clinton repeated a misleading and racially tinged old saw about the history of welfare and its recipients. “When welfare was first instituted,” he claimed, “the typical recipient of welfare was a West Virginia miner’s widow,” a white woman, in other words, who married before bearing children and whose husband pursued waged work under notoriously unsafe conditions.8 He contrasted this white widow with “a class of permanently dependent individuals, sometimes passing their dependency from generation to generation.”9 The data made it clear that this “class” was vanishingly small: according to the state-of-the-art Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), less than 1 percent of the U.S. population received welfare for ten years consecutively and depended on welfare for over half of their family income.10 The PSID data and others also indicated that, while similar conditions might produce similar rates of poverty for parents and children, welfare receipt was not “passed down” from mother to child in the way that biological traits can be passed down.
As a practiced state-level welfare reformer, Clinton rehearsed many of the arguments that would ultimately shape the bill he signed while in the White House. He complained that welfare “had become fundamentally a substitute child support system” and proposed to place more of the burden of financial child support on low-income parents.11 He did not propose time limits on receipt of economic assistance or ending the entitlement status of family economic aid. However, his rhetoric pushed policy in that direction by inveighing against the idea of an entitlement or right to welfare. “This program,” he argued about FSA, says to everybody, “‘We don’t want to maintain you. We don’t think you have a right to anything other than assistance in return for your best efforts.’”12 Governor Clinton’s rhetoric regarding the Family Support Act helps explain the centrality of similar arguments to his presidential bid and agenda once he took office. It also helps explain why Clinton ultimately signed the legislation that a Republican-majority Congress presented to him in 1996. But it raises a question as to why the Family Support Act, to which Clinton contributed with apparent pride, failed politically. Indeed, by the presidential primary season in 1992, FSA had become in Clinton’s rhetoric evidence of the kind of old-fashioned Democratic Party thinking against which he defined himself.13
Contrary to prior accounts that have emphasized the degree to which President Clinton was pressured in the middle 1990s by Republican governors and a Republican Congress to sign the 1996 welfare bill into law, we find that, long before he was president, Bill Clinton developed his political persona and built the national dimensions of his career around welfare reform.14 Welfare was the central issue to which he devoted his efforts within the National Governors Association. The “New Democrat” wing of the party articulated its politics as maverick and innovative, committed to fiscal responsibility instead of a “tax and spend” approach. This was effective branding but deceptive politics and policy. The newness of Bill Clinton’s version of New Democratic politics implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) rested on a willingness to offend African American and feminist constituency groups along with liberals who believed the best way to reduce inequality was to tax those with excess wealth and assist those with too little. Despite the fact that Clinton was a leading state-level advocate for FSA, welfare reform continued to be an emblematic and defining issue for Clinton and other New Democrats as they took power within the Democratic Party.
E.T., Phone Home
Before the Family Support Act became an object of political vitriol, national politics briefly focused on “E.T.,” the Massachusetts Employment and Training program. E.T. was the heart of Governor Michael Dukakis’s social policy portfolio and part of his bid for the presidency in 1988. Initiated in the early 1980s, E.T. was one of several local and state-level “get-tough” welfare policies, which promised to turn the unpopular Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program from one of maternal and child support into one that moved women into the waged labor market. The major difference between E.T. and both the Family Support Act and PRWORA was that participation in E.T. was voluntary.15 Massachusetts officials and the social science evaluators of the program found that there was sufficient interest among parents who received AFDC benefits to fill a completely voluntary program of employment and training. A mandatory program would have overwhelmed the state bureaucracy and swamped the portion of the labor market to which people with limited educations had access. Evaluators discovered, moreover, that the most expensive and bureaucratically challenging aspect of the program was fulfilling its pledge to provide child care for parents who participated. If Dukakis’s administration followed the mandate in the state statute that created E.T., to ensure that children received care, then it could not afford to accommodate more participants than the number who volunteered. Moreover, given the costs of child care, training, and assistance in finding employment, the program did not save the state as much money as political leaders had hoped it would. Administrators of the California welfare-to-work program similarly found that education and literacy levels were so low among many AFDC parents that the costs of adult education and pinched employment options limited (or, in certain counties, apparently erased) the savings from welfare reform.16 For welfare reformers who wanted to improve recipients’ earnings potential, E.T. and other welfare-to-work policies held promise. But they did not do much to help state administrations plug gaps in their budgets. They required unpopular spending to help a disdained population.17
Politicians such as Moynihan, Reagan, and Clinton did not debate the social scientists who found that E.T. and similar programs could work if properly funded but also