Learn something for a change.
… .What is it that the administration’s July guidance suddenly seeks to change? At the core of the 1996 law are “participation rate requirements” that ensure that 30 to 40 percent of able-bodied TANF recipients must engage in any of 12 different “work activities” for 20 to 30 hours per week. The administration would exempt states from this requirement and encourage them to operate under alternative performance measures. For example, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has said that to bypass federal workfare requirements, a state would have to “move at least 20 percent more people from welfare to work compared to the state’s past performance.”…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-obama-has-gutted-welfore-reform/2012/09/06/885b0092-f835-11e1-8b93-c4f4ab1c8d13_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f2f3e18921ed
But Obama was not satisfied with rolling back the work requirement just for the food stamp program. On July 12, 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services issued an “information memorandum” inviting states to apply for waivers to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.
Buried in that memo was a single paragraph functionally gutting the federal welfare system’s overall work requirement.
The old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program also had nominal work requirements. But thanks to pages and pages of loopholes in the statute, any governor could use those loopholes to evade the work requirement.
The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act changed all that by vastly simplifying what did, and did not, qualify as “work” for welfare’s work requirement.
It also set strict new work-participation rates for states that, if not met, would lead to reduced federal funding. It was these strict new welfare-to-work requirements that the Left always hated. …
So they put the definition of “work activities” for determining welfare eligibility in a separate section of the bill, Section 407, and explicitly said that Section 407 could not be waived.
But that is exactly what the Obama welfare memo did. It claimed that Section 1115 of the welfare reform law, a section granting the HHS secretary the power to grant waivers for state “demonstration projects,” also empowered waiving Section 407.
Notably absent from Section 1115’s list of sections of the welfare reform law that the HHS secretary may waive is Section 407.
Once Section 407 was killed, states were free to redefine “work” under the welfare law. In the past, states have successfully labeled such activities as “personal journaling,” “motivational reading” and “weightless promotion” as “work,” thus allowing them to receive full federal funding without actually getting anyone off welfare and into a job. If the Obama welfare memo stands, the 1996 welfare reform law will have been repealed by executive fiat. …
