Work over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law, by Ron Haskins. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2006, 450 pp., $32.95 hardcover.

Abstract

August 22, 2006, marked the tenth anniversary of President Clinton’s signing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, called, as Washington insists, PRWORA. PRWORA famously replaced welfare as we knew it, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Welfare policy history is told in many books; Work over Welfare is surely one of the best and most likely to become part of the enduring record of what many consider a watershed event in American social policy. Students of the policy-making process, the Congress, welfare programs, and welfare policy analysis should read it. This review tells why, and counsels caution—not about buying the book, but about buying the story. The author, Ron Haskins, is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and a consultant at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. From 1986 to 2000, he was a staff member of the Resources Subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives, first as welfare counsel to the Republican staff and eventually as staff director. He held the director post during the struggle over welfare reform that erupted during the Clinton administration’s first term. As is widely appreciated and absolutely confirmed by this book, Haskins served as architect, strategist, tactician, contractor, and day-and-night laborer in building the new law that the House of Representatives and Senate passed with extraordinary bipartisan majorities. No one is more qualified to write an “inside story” on the legislative politics and process of welfare reform. Haskins delivers what the book’s subtitle promises. The first of 15 chapters sets the stage by outlining American social policy at the beginning of the 1990s, identifying liberal (mostly Democratic) and conservative (mostly Republican) perspectives, summarizing key issues, and listing six factors that contributed to making 1996 the “moment of reckoning” when national social policy made a “complete U-turn.” The issues were long-term dependency and illegitimacy; the former and even possibly the latter were linked to separation of benefits from work. Contributing factors were (1) the failure of prior reform efforts, most notably the Family Support Act of 1988, to reorient public assistance toward work; (2) President Clinton’s emphasis during the 1992 campaign on the need for radical “welfare reform—ending welfare as we know it”; (3) Republican seizure of