Welfare Reform

U.S. Welfare before 1996

Welfare reform has many roots. Historically, the United States has been reticent to fully establish an adequate or permanent social welfare safety net for all of its citizens. Welfare as a social or policy issue is burdened by notions of value and hierarchy: Those seen as needing it most (women, children, ethnic minorities) are often the least valued by the power elite in U.S. society. Furthermore, publicly provided welfare has always been connected to the needs of the U.S. economy; in times of economic booms, welfare rolls tend to contract.

Toward the close the of 20th century, U.S. welfare was a cobbled-together system of minimal supports, which included the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Food Stamps, Medicaid, and other assorted programs that were usually administered by each state and varied significantly by region. In general, welfare, though minimally funded, was virtually guaranteed to those who could prove their eligibility; this is generally called entitlement programming.

Access to the major U.S. social welfare programs was expanded significantly during the 1960s and 1970s to include more women and people of color, especially in southern regions where some states had simply not allowed African Americans to receive aid. The public generally perceived that spending on social welfare was increasingly straining the sluggish economy and contributing to U.S. industrial decline. Attitudes of patriarchy and racism no doubt contributed in part to public calls for ending or drastically altering government support for the poor.

In 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency, the central tenets of the federal policy began to change under the influence of political conservatism. One of the pivotal aims of the Reagan administration was to reduce the size and role of the federal government, especially in social service spending, and to redistribute federal authority to state and local governments; this has been termed devolution.

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