Ford, Gerald (Administration)

President Gerald Ford assumed office in August 1974 after the tumultuous Watergate scandal forced President Richard Nixon to resign from office, and as the worst recession since the Great Depression deepened in the United States. Ford was a fiscal conservative, who sought to move away from the Keynesian ideas that had been prominent in American policy making for several decades. While Ford attempted to restrain spending on poverty programs in areas such as food stamps, he also signed into law the earned-income tax credit (EITC), one of the most prominent programs to combat poverty in the last few decades. This entry focuses on Ford’s efforts to combat poverty in the United States, in which his work on social policy was most prominent.