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 mothers. Even as the postrecession poverty rate declined a bit—to 12.7 percent overall in 2016—single mothers and their children remained singularly at risk of economic deprivation and insecurity.92
“Who bears the brunt?” Representative Patsy Mink asked as her colleagues were fashioning welfare reform in the middle 1990s. Ultimately, it is the people who can least afford to.
Chapter 2
Welfare (Reform) as We Knew It
In 1997, Philadelphia journalist David Zucchino published a volume of finegrained reporting on the daily life of a woman named Odessa Williams on the eve of welfare reform. His book, The Myth of the Welfare Queen, depicted Williams, a grandmother and great-grandmother, as a person of nearly endless resourcefulness. Zucchino chronicled her persistent efforts to maintain minimally decent food, clothing, and shelter for the people who depended on her for help—a group that included grown children who could not find work that paid adequate wages and school-aged grandchildren whose parents were in prison or addicted to drugs. The book demonstrated that, despite Williams’s work, her skills, and even some good luck, she and her family did not make it on welfare. Without the occasional help of a neighborhood moneylender who charged usurious interest and, in the midst of the high-wire act that was Odessa Williams’s effort to make Christmas for her family, a no-interest loan and unreported cash grant from a visiting journalist, her finances would have tumbled to earth.1
As depicted by Zucchino, Williams was a savvy citizen. She knew as much about how to maximize her own and her children’s public benefits as she did about how to stretch a dollar at the supermarket—and she knew how essential to their well-being the benefits and the thriftiness both were. Cash grants under Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which she received on account of her and some of her grandchildren’s disabilities, plus food stamps to spend on groceries, were not nearly enough to cover the basics. With periodic bits of cash she earned driving neighbors home after shopping and small amounts her wage-earning relatives contributed, Odessa Williams almost got by. However, an endless river of emergencies threatened to sweep her family’s security away. Small cash needs, such as $3.00 for a granddaughter’s school trip, or $10.00 for composition books without which a grandson would receive failing grades, posed serious challenges when every dollar was otherwise accounted for. More substantial emergencies, such as a child’s or grandchild’s need for bail money, would have been devastating without the moneylender and other informal supports that flew beneath the radar of the welfare department.
In retrospect, perhaps the most remarkable thing about Odessa Williams’s story was that it occurred entirely before “welfare reform,” that is, before Congress and President Clinton approved PRWORA. Her experiences not only refuted what the title of Zucchino’s book termed “the myth of the [Cadillac-driving, profligate] welfare queen.” They illuminated the precarious living of a welfare recipient who cared for her family under circumstances that would later seem wildly accommodating. Williams faced a stringent budget and constant emergencies. But no one turned her away from the welfare office when she returned after a lapse of years to support her grandchildren; no lifetime limit of benefits for five years (or a shorter period, under the state discretion permitted under TANF) prevented her from rescuing the children from their addicted mother or the alternative of public foster care. She spent nearly all her time attending to her family’s basic needs, including their needs for medical attention and income, which required long waits at the clinic and public aid office. But Williams did not also need to juggle government-approved “work activities,” which were demanded for rising numbers of TANF participants. Her cash grants never covered the minimum her family needed, but at least Williams received cash. After the welfare reform of the middle 1990s, states could withdraw cash support, as did the state of Wisconsin, for example, which turned the whole program into a “work-first” low-wage employment agency.2 And before the anti-welfare crescendo of the 1990s, no one accused a recipient like Williams of “double-dipping” by receiving welfare for children while also receiving SSI to alleviate the expenses associated with disability.3
The published account of the experiences of Odessa Williams teaches two important lessons about welfare reform. First, Williams’s challenges speak to the limitations of the old system, before TANF. People whose economic advancement was blocked in a thousand ways by poverty, sexism, racism, and poor health found it difficult to survive under the old system and nearly impossible to change the patterns of their lives. There were multiple villains here. But some of the problems Odessa Williams and her family encountered resulted from the public aid system as it was created in the early twentieth century. Others were the results of moralistic and cost-saving reforms implemented in the years immediately before passage of PRWORA. We also learn from Odessa Williams’s story that the changes of 1996 were enormously consequential. For all the imperfections of the old system, all the ways it failed to counteract the negative effects of late-twentieth-century political economy and the compromises of its best principles that politicians allowed, it was still markedly different from what came later. From the perspectives of impoverished clients like Odessa Williams, it was unquestionably better before PRWORA than after. Zucchino underlined the point by including in his book numerous scenes in which Williams followed congressional and state legislative debates. Despite her challenges, Williams saw welfare as a gift from the Almighty, who enabled her many vulnerable family members to hold body and soul together. She was stunned by the proposals that ultimately became PRWORA, and by the cuts that were contemplated in the middle 1990s by her own state government in Pennsylvania. She predicted that her family and friends would capsize in their
