Moving from Welfare to Poverty
The most famous promise of 1990s welfare reformers was that the new policy would “end welfare as we know it” by moving recipients “from welfare to work.” TANF’s work provisions teach the work ethic by requiring labor market engagement but do little to assure recipients that compliance will win them economic security. PRWORA specified new, severe limits on the amount of time a parent who participates in TANF can spend educating herself before being mandated to work in the formal labor market. It makes no provision for improving wage prospects of low-income mothers, by offering paths to training for the relatively high-paying jobs that are typically dominated by men, such as those in construction and the skilled trades.76 What’s more, PRWORA did not include an entitlement to child care and deemed that work requirements could be satisfied through unpaid labor—workfare—or through taking care of another recipient’s children. TANF’s work discipline ensures that women with limited education or outdated skills will not be able to get jobs whose wages meet their and their children’s needs.
Accordingly, even as low-income single mothers’ participation in paid employment increased to conform to the requirements of TANF, millions remained in poverty, trapped in low-wage jobs. Assessing the income and security effects of TANF for low-income single-mother families in 2002, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research reported that post-PRWORA, more than three-quarters (78 percent) of employed low-income single parents were concentrated in four typically low-wage occupations, with 44 percent working in services.77 The Working Poor Families Project reported in 2014 that the occupational isolation of single mothers in low-wage jobs continues, with many working as cashiers, maids and housekeepers, administrative assistants, and waitresses, while the largest percentage works in home health care.78 The TANF regimen of “work for work’s sake”—without attention to living wages, job supports such as paid sick days and child care, and education or training for better paying jobs—tracks low-income mothers, on TANF or “timed-off,” into sex-segregated, low-income, career-ladderless fields such as home health care, which offered a median income in 2016 of $22,600.79
Welfare reformers withdrew the lifeline public assistance had provided to poor mothers and their children without offering an alternate path to economic survival. Instead, they enacted an exaggerated performance of discipline for discipline’s sake, aimed at a grotesque caricature of poor single mothers.80
When they utilized racialized gender ideology to propel the legislative movement for welfare reform, Democrats and Republicans inflicted long-lasting damage. We will explore the consequences of TANF more fully in later chapters but summarize them here as a way to take the measure of the law: In TANF, policy makers endorsed a mix of racism, sexism, reproductive injustice, and a lack of faith in government capacity that has been subsumed in policy discourse, with disabling effects.81 PRWORA both reflected and distorted perceptions of the U.S. welfare state and removed poverty from the lexicon of polite policy conversation, even among the fiercest critics of income inequality. Old Democrats, New Democrats, and progressive Democrats alike focus on improving conditions for the middle class, to the exclusion of working to end, or even mitigate, poverty.82 Meanwhile, Republicans of all stripes call for reducing government, not poverty—or they claim that reducing government is the way to reduce poverty. Both parties revel in the 1996 bipartisan argument that poor mothers and children should bear responsibility for their own economic vulnerability.
The mechanisms of disdain for poor families that characterize TANF policy now permeate other antipoverty policies. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as the food stamp program, was perhaps most deeply inscribed with the restrictive and demeaning impulses behind “welfare reform.” SNAP benefits were never in cash, always only in food, and therefore not as controversial as income assistance grants under AFDC or, later, TANF.83 But SNAP beneficiaries and TANF participants are subject to similar suspicion, aspersions, and controls. PRWORA instituted new restrictions on this strand of the safety net for impoverished legal immigrants and unemployed able-bodied adults without children at home. This last group is subject to time limits and mandatory work requirements. Childless adults face potential sanctions for nonparticipation in work programs, although they are not granted educational or training services. Unemployed, nonparenting, able-bodied adults are limited to three months of SNAP assistance in a three-year period.84 At the height of the recession, this time limit was suspended in many states and localities, and maximum benefits increased somewhat. However, at the end of 2013, although many still faced unemployment or underemployment, the federal government reactivated the draconian terms for program participation.85 Unchallenged, the powerful PRWORA paradigm and the invidious discourses that underpinned it strangled debate when the recession that began in 2008 drove the numbers of SNAP beneficiaries skyward.
Blaming the poor for their poverty and disdaining their need was codified in TANF policy and related aspects of PRWORA. Reauthorizing the policy under President George W. Bush in 2006, Republicans expanded the scope of governmental sex and gender regulation, exposed disparaged groups to heightened disciplinary treatment, and further impoverished the poor.86 TANF reauthorization escalated marriage promotion and fatherhood incentives; invited states to wither cash assistance even further by spending more on programs that aim to change behavior rather than on income that sustains human dignity; and ratcheted up the work requirements that penalize poor single mothers for remaining single and poor.
Democrats opposed some of the Republican-initiated changes to TANF and voted against the omnibus Deficit Reduction Act that included TANF reauthorization. But as we discuss in later chapters, the return of Democrats to power in 2009 did not temper the harsh practices of welfare reform. Democrats contributed proposals to adjust welfare rules to economic reality but never really deviated from the 1996 TANF paradigm. President Obama, in fact, reprised TANF’s focus on patriarchal family forms by making fatherhood promotion the mainstay of his antipoverty policy.
Even federal programs for disabled people, once thought to be the quintessence of aid to the “deserving poor,” became soft targets in the wake of welfare reform.87 Although impoverished parents lost entitlement to TANF with enactment of PRWORA in 1996, disabled adults who met program criteria (some of whom are, of course, parents) remained entitled to assistance through SSI, or, if they had sufficient work histories, Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). Indeed, the federal government implicitly encouraged those who could not meet TANF work requirements because of impairments to recategorize themselves as disabled in order to get help.88
By 2017, the lifeline extended to disabled poor people was in serious jeopardy. President Trump’s proposed domestic budget included a $72 billion cut in programs serving people with disabilities, chiefly SSDI and SSI.89 Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney introduced the proposal with rhetoric strongly reminiscent of 1990s anti-welfare discourse, with a broader but still familiar emphasis on eliminating fraud through a new regime of work requirements to “increase labor force participation” by the severely disabled.90 Waving the “work, not welfare” banner, Mulvaney condemned slackers and scammers he seems to think infest basic assistance programs: “If you’re on food stamps, and you’re able-bodied, we need you to go to work. If you’re on disability insurance and you’re not supposed to be—if you’re not truly disabled, we need you to go back to work.”91
TANF’s disciplinary mechanisms may have infiltrated the safety net more generally, but the indignities of the safety net continue to burden single mothers disproportionately, especially black, Latina, and Native American single mothers. Over a third (35.6 percent) of all single mothers with children under age eighteen live in poverty—and well over a third of black (38.8 percent), Latina (40.8 percent), and Native American (42.6 percent) single