Wedding Bells and Welfare Bucks

Attention, Single Mamas: George W. Bush has a proposal for you: a marriage proposal. That's right, he wants you to get married. You're particularly encouraged to don a bridal veil if you're on welfare and/or parenting as part of an unmarried couple. If you act now, you might even be able to get hitched before Congress makes its decisions about Bush's plan to fund marriage initiative and abstinence-only education programs with welfare dollars. The Administration is proposing the allocation of $400 million for marriage initiatives ($300 million at the federal level, with an additional $100 million dollar bonus for states that get the most women married or have 'successful' marriage initiatives), and $135 million for abstinence education, to be drawn from welfare funds.

These marriage initiatives are part of Bush's proposal for the reauthorization of the nation's welfare laws. In late February, Bush unveiled his welfare plan during a speech at a Catholic church in Southeast Washington. In his speech, Bush stated that the welfare policy should focus on the creation and maintenance of stable families, announcing that his "administration will give unprecedented support to strengthening marriage." As Washington Post staff writer Amy Goldstein reported, the White House plans to require states to include "explicit descriptions of their family-formation and healthy-marriage efforts" in the welfare plans they submit to the federal government. The House passed Bush's welfare legislation (HR 4737) in May, and the Senate is working on its welfare reform bill now, with hopes to have its work finished in July.

The proposal for welfare reauthorization put forth by the Bush Administration builds upon the "success" of the 1996 reforms. Bush's proposal calls for tougher work standards, which would require welfare recipients to work 40 hours per week (supposedly, in 1996, states had the option of allowing 20 hours of work and 10 hours of flexible activities, and states chose to enforce 30 hours of work instead, allowing two of those days to be used for narrowly-defined education and training activities), allocating $400 million for marriage promotion campaigns, and spending $135 million on abstinence education. Increased spending for childcare (for mothers and fathers who have to work those 40 hours), or for training or education for welfare recipients, aren't part of this proposal.

What's Happening with Welfare Now

In order to better understand Bush's proposals for welfare reauthorization, as well as their potential effects, it's a good idea to revisit the 1996 reforms that created the current welfare systems in place across the U.S. Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWOA) in 1996. This new law replaced existing welfare programs with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which was enacted with the stipulation that Congress would have to reauthorize TANF by the end of September 2002. The TANF law defined primary objectives for welfare reform as "promoting job preparation, work, and marriage; preventing and reducing the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and encouraging the formation and maintenance of two-parent families." In this formulation, states were able to define who constituted a family, and what types of assistance different family units might receive (note that the language of the law does not require that parents be married, only that they share parenting responsibilities in the home). Immigrants (even those with children who are U.S. citizens) are ineligible for any assistance, regardless of their familial status.

The TANF reforms set a five-year lifetime limit for welfare recipients (such that if an individual or family has received five years' worth of benefits, they will be ineligible for future assistance), and increased work requirements, while simultaneously creating stricter definitions of countable "work" activities. Under TANF, single parents must work 30 hours per week, and parents in two-parent families must work 35 hours per week (though in many states, like Montana, two-parent families have to work up to 60 hours a week to qualify for assistance) to be eligible for welfare assistance. Parents cannot receive TANF funds while pursuing further education or training, unless this training is part of a vocational education program or is specifically applicable to the recipient's job, and is supplemental to 20 hours of other work activity. Recipients cannot count parenting/childcare, literacy education, ESL courses or college study as work activities. While TANF does provide some childcare benefits, and may waive work activities requirements for parents who cannot find adequate childcare, recipients are often not informed about these benefits.