Bill Clinton's first presidential term was a period of extraordinary change in policy toward low-income families. In 1993 Congress enacted a major expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income working families. In 1996 Congress passed and the president signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This legislation abolished the sixty-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program and replaced it with a block grant program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It contained stiff new work requirements and limits on the length of time people could receive welfare benefits.Dramatic change in AFDC was also occurring piecemeal in the states during these years. States used waivers granted by the federal Department of Health and Human Services to experiment with a variety of welfare strategies, including denial of additional benefits for children born or conceived while a mother received AFDC, work requirements, and time limits on receipt of cash benefits. The pace of change at the state level accelerated after the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation gave states increased leeway to design their programs. Ending Welfare as We Know It analyzes how these changes in the AFDC program came about. In fourteen chapters, R. Kent Weaver addresses three sets of questions about the politics of welfare reform: the dismal history of comprehensive AFDC reform initiatives; the dramatic changes in the welfare reform agenda over the past thirty years; and the reasons why comprehensive welfare reform at the national level succeeded in 1996 after failing in 1995, in 1993-94, and on many previous occasions. Welfare reform raises issues of race, class, and sex that are as difficult and divisive as any in American politics. While broad social and political trends helped to create a historic opening for welfare reform in the late 1990s, dramatic legislation was not inevitable. The interaction of contextual factors with short-term political and policy calculations by President Clinton and congressional Republicans -along with the cascade of repositioning by other policymakers -turned "ending welfare as we know it" from political possibility into policy reality.
R. Kent Weaver is a senior fellow in Governmental Studies at the Brookings Institution.
"A definitive account of the most startling change in the American welfare state.... Mr. Weaver's book will remain the authoritative history of one of the 20th century's most stunning revolutions in social policy." -Thomas Main, Baruch College, Wall Street Journal, 12/4/2000 |"This book is well-written, meticulous in its use of research, extensively documented, and comprehensive in its coverage of the process leading to welfare reform." -Sanford F. Schram, Bryn Mawr College, Political Science Quarterly, 4/1/2002 |"An encyclopedic, prodigiously researched volume that bids fair to become the standard work on reform of the United States welfare system in the final decades of the twentieth century.... provide(s) a rich intellectual and policy history for the legislation that Clinton ultimately signed in 1996." -Russell L. Riley, University of Virginia, Congress & the Presidency, 10/1/2001 |"The book is a useful chronology of the developments that culminated in the 1996 Personal Responsibility Act.... Weaver offers helpful summaries of the most important issues in welfare." -Brendan Conway, Philanthropy Roundtable, 7/1/2001 |"Weaver has produced a very readable account of welfare reform and the final victory.... This incredibly thorough and detailed history will interest professionals in the social services as well as historians and political scientists." -D.R. Jamieson, Ashland University, Choice, 7/1/2001 |"['Ending Welfare as We Know It'] present[s] us with insightful and fresh analyses of the welfare reform policy process.... [The book] has a lot to offer to students and scholars in a variety of fields.... The analysis [is] informed by solid theoretical frameworks and grounded in the realities of welfare reform.... I strongly recommend ['Ending Welfare as We Know It']." -Mary Ann E. Steger, Northern Arizona University, Journal of Politics, 8/1/2002
