Welfare-to-work isn’t gutted

Opinion: August 13, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

Chicago Tribune: Republicans complain that the Obama administration is moving to gut the highly popular 1996 federal law that put strict time limits on welfare payments and required recipients to find work. Mitt Romney, on the stump and in a new TV ad, says this is more evidence that the White House is promoting a “culture of dependency.”

“That is wrong,” Romney said in Elk Grove Village, Ill., last week. “If I am president, I will put work back in welfare.”

What launched all this talk was a July 12 directive from the Department of Health and Human Services that announced the states could apply for waivers to rules governing Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — welfare.

HHS says several states — including California, Connecticut, Minnesota, Utah and Nevada — asked about getting waivers to promote “employment and self-sufficiency.”

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican, said his state’s request for a waiver “stems from a desire for increased customization of the program to maximize employment among Utah’s welfare recipients.” Brian Sandoval, Nevada’s Republican governor, issued a similar statement.

Maximize employment? Hmm. Where’s the problem with that?

HHS is inviting states to suggest better ideas to move people from welfare to work. It is not unilaterally scrapping the requirements that welfare recipients find work.

If states try to game the system to water down those rules and the administration lets them do that, then critics will be right to scream.

The 1996 law, signed by President Bill Clinton to the chagrin at the time of many Democrats, sharply cut welfare rolls and helped to enhance job skills of former recipients. Any waiver application that hints that recipients can stay on welfare for as long as they please without finding work should be quickly and emphatically rejected by HHS.

On welfare-to-work, we see no evidence of a gut job. Let’s find out what the states have in mind.