Congress updates welfare-reform law

After more than three years of stalled bills, Congress passed an update of the 1996 welfare-reform law this week.

The bill maintains $16.5 billion a year for needy families, boosts basic child care funding by $1 billion and designates $150 million a year for marriage and responsible-fatherhood programs.

The reforms are part of the deficit-reduction bill that passed the House 216-214 on Wednesday, after clearing the Senate in December. President Bush is expected to sign the overall bill soon.

Wade F. Horn, assistant health and human services secretary for children and families, praised two aspects of the bill.

“First of all, it ensures that more states will be running effective welfare-to-work programs,” he said, explaining that under the old rules, states could meet federal work-participation rates easily without requiring much work-related activity from welfare recipients.

Under the new rules, states will have to “ramp up” their programs to ensure that more recipients do “countable” activities each week, such as going to work, getting training or conducting job searches, Mr. Horn said.

He also said the bill will, for the first time, provide “dedicated federal resources” for marriage education services so couples “can learn the skills to form and sustain healthy marriages.”

Democrats and liberal groups, however, decried some reforms.

The new work rules could force states to deny assistance to many families, especially two-parent families, said Democratic Reps. Charles B. Rangel of New York and Jim McDermott of Washington, who are members of the House Ways and Means Committee.

In addition, they said, the new child-care funds won’t keep pace with inflation and the bill doesn’t have new funds for work programs.

The Children’s Defense Fund predicted that as many as 250,000 poor children will be left without child care and that countless others will be harmed by new funding rules concerning child support and foster care.

Republicans said their rule changes were needed to “close loopholes,” end “double dipping” by state child support agencies and clarify foster care eligibility rules.

More remains to be done on welfare reform, said Rep. Wally Herger, California Republican and chairman of the House Ways and Means human resources subcommittee. The new bill, for instance, doesn’t alter work rules for welfare recipients sufficiently or address funding for other, discretionary child-care programs.

Still, marriage advocates were elated by the Wednesday vote.

“It’s a good and exciting and energizing thing when we can start spending money on preventive, empowering education instead of continuing to spend it all downstream trying to pull families out of the river,” said Diane Sollee, founder of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education.

She said the new marriage funds will be a top agenda item at the coalition’s conference in June.