Nixon, Richard (Administration)

Welfare Reform

Nixon considered the welfare system the biggest failure of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and identified welfare reform as his Republican administration's highest domestic priority. During the 1968 presidential campaign, he promised to remake a system he considered inefficient, unfair, and demeaning. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention he said, “What we need are not more millions on welfare rolls, but more millions on payrolls.” His address reflected the public mood, for a poll showed that 84 percent of Americans believed that too many able-bodied people received welfare.

After entering the White House, Nixon focused on the issue. He observed that equivalent families obtained vastly different amounts of financial assistance depending on where they lived. For example he noted that through varying state contributions, a family in one state would receive only $39 a month in benefits while a family of the same size in another state would receive $263 a month.

He found that families without a father in the home received larger payments. Accordingly he felt this encouraged fathers to abandon their families. He noted that from 1961 to 1967, 93 percent of new households on welfare were fatherless and complained about the high rate of illegitimacy in welfare households. He learned that many received more money on welfare than working at the minimum wage and felt that the program penalized responsibility and self-sufficiency and discriminated against the working poor.

Nixon also thought the system was plagued with fraud and fostered racial resentment between poor working whites not receiving benefits and unemployed blacks on welfare. Nixon's objections also reflected his disdain for the federal bureaucracy and contempt for the social worker community, both of which he believed benefited from the status quo.

In every budget Richard Nixon proposed, appropriations for all “human resource programs” were greater than defense spending.

Nixon directed his staff to devise a completely new program that would abandon the broad-based services approach to welfare, whereby the poor received a host of services and assistance (Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children). After months of study and debate within the administration, a process in which Nixon was intensely involved, the president unveiled his stunning Family Assistance Plan (FAP) during a televised speech on domestic policy on August 8, 1969. Its original working title was the Family Security System, but that name was discarded because it sounded like a New Deal enactment. What Nixon offered was bold and in his view risky, but he also felt it was the only true reform with any prospect of winning the support of the Congress and the American people.

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