House Bill Raises Welfare Work Requirement

Then she hops on a bus for the 20-minute ride to Catholic Community Services, where she spends 20 hours a week studying for her high school equivalency degree and meeting the activity requirement for her monthly $379 welfare check. She has just enough time to get back home to settle her sons in after school. Double the activity hours, as the House bill would do, and the Fieldses could be in trouble, she said.

"Right now, it's a struggle to make sure my kids get picked up on time, make sure they do their homework," she said. "They have to realize you still have to discipline your kids."

Another welfare recipient, Amy Lee Durkee, 33, has cobbled together enough pre-nursing school studies and advocacy work at the family resource center at San Francisco's City College to meet California's welfare work rules. On top of that are the visits to her case worker, her studies and caring for her 8- and 4-year-old kids.

"Most of us, we want to work hard, to go to school, to get good jobs, to get ourselves and our families out of poverty," she said. "Just telling us, work 40 hours a week somewhere, anywhere, that's not helping."

The changes in the House bill involve multiple layers to ensure that states stick to tougher work rules. Under the requirements imposed in 1996, states are supposed to have half their welfare recipients working to avoid sanctions that eat into their welfare block grants, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Welfare recipients have to work, do community service or take vocational education classes for 20 hours a week. They are also expected to be out of the house 10 more hours a week, in education, volunteer or community service programs.

A quirk in the 1996 law gave states an incentive to cut their welfare rolls, by giving them "credits" that lessen the work requirements in proportion to the amount states lower their welfare rolls. Since such rolls have plummeted, virtually all states have collected enough credits so that no state has to impose the 30-hour work requirement.

To avoid sanctions under the changes in the House bill, states now would have to have 70 percent of their welfare recipients working, not 50 percent. The credits from past welfare roll reductions used to offset that percentage would be wiped out. Future declines in welfare rolls could be used to lower the 70 percent threshold, but HHS's Horn said the administration wants a "hard floor" of 50 percent at work.

Those at work would have to work longer. The 20-hour work rule would be raised to 24 hours, while additional activities would jump from 10 hours a week to 16. That 40-hour total would apply to all adults, including mothers such as Shontice Fields, with children younger than 6, who now must work only half that time.

Horn emphasized that states would be given broad latitude to decide which activities count toward those 16 hours. They could include getting substance abuse treatment or attending a child's soccer game, he said, just as long as the activities get people out of the house.

Opponents say the complexity of all these changes will lead to havoc in state governments and hardships to parents.

"What kind of bureaucracy is going to be set up to make sure you're out of the house 40 hours a week, and who's going to pay for the child care?" asked Helen Blank, director of public policy at the National Women's Law Center. "It's punitive. It's crazy."

But supporters say the changes are vital if the government is serious about lifting able-bodied adults out of poverty and into work.

"The left likes to say we have all these working poor families, but the reality is, the typical poor family with children works only 800 hours a year," not the 2,080 hours a full-time job entails, said Robert E. Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "That's why they're poor."

For additional child-care needs, the bill provides $500 million in added funds over five years -- half the amount an earlier House welfare bill included and a fraction of the $8.3 billion the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said would be needed to help parents meet the additional work requirements.

But Republicans say the CBO estimate is inflated. In 1996, CBO estimated that the welfare reform law would shortchange the cost of work requirements by $13 billion through 2002. Instead, as welfare rolls shriveled and welfare payments dropped, the states found themselves with $6 billion in unspent welfare block grants. Some $2 billion in surplus funds still exist and could be spent on child care if states so choose, if the welfare changes pass, Horn said.

Besides, Horn said, a provision stipulates that individuals are not to be penalized for refusing work because they lack child care.

Critics of the changes are undeterred by the experience of the last welfare restructuring. From their 14.3 million peak in 1994, the welfare rosters have dropped to about 5 million -- with 3 million of those children, Georgetown's Edelman said. Those declines freed up big sums for child care, job training and other assistance, but the trend cannot continue at that pace.

Federal funding for child care had been effectively frozen since 1996, already forcing more than half the states to cut back on assistance, especially for families that have worked their way off welfare and are increasingly left on their own, Blank said.