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Heritage
Foundation
Clinton
Is Wrong on Welfare Reform
Last
night, in his nationally
televised speech, former President Bill Clinton said the charge that
President
Obama has gutted welfare reform was “a real doozy.”
Clinton,
who vetoed welfare reform
twice before signing the welfare reform law in 1996, echoed the Obama
Administration and media “fact checkers,” who have sworn that Obama’s
Health
and Human Services Department (HHS) is actually trying to strengthen
the work
requirements of the law by doing away with them.
The
fact is that the Administration
has gutted welfare reform, and Heritage has detailed reports on exactly
how—and
what the consequences will be. Heritage expert Robert Rector, who
helped write
the 1996 law, answered Clinton this morning in no uncertain terms:
The
Obama Administration will put
in mothballs the formal purpose of welfare reform—to reduce the number
of
people dependent on government benefits. The Administration will
abandon the
legislative performance goal that encourages states to reduce welfare
caseloads. It will weaken the “work participation” standards that
require some
30 percent of able-bodied Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
(TANF)
recipients to engage in work activities for 20 to 30 hours per week.
This
week, the nonpartisan
Government Accountability Office (GAO) also gave notice to the
Administration
that this type of law change must go through Congress.
After
Heritage’s Rector and Kiki
Bradley broke the story July 12 that HHS was gutting the work
requirements by
allowing states to obtain waivers, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and
Representative Dave Camp (R-MI) asked the GAO to review the
Administration’s
actions. Heritage legal experts Todd Gaziano, Robert Alt, and Andrew
Grossman have
already detailed why the Administration’s actions are illegal—HHS has
no
authority to grant the type of waivers it is creating.
The
GAO told the lawmakers on
Tuesday that the law changes should have been submitted to Congress...
Heritage
Foundation has provided reference
links to the above statements and more… for the links and the rest of
the
article click here.
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