A quarter-century after welfare reform, there’s bipartisan interest in improving the system. But the Biden administration’s initial foray has needlessly picked a fight with conservatives over abortion. A gratuitous attempt at advancing leftist ideology by singling out crisis pregnancy centers will make the goal of improving federal anti-poverty programs harder, not easier, to achieve.
In the mid-1990s, Congress passed bipartisan welfare reform that converted the old cash welfare program into buckets of money that went to state and local agencies, known as block grants. Part of the appeal of block grants in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) was their ability to give states flexibility in designing anti-poverty programs. In theory, states would be able to act as laboratories of democracy and design programs that responded to local needs and led to greater self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, some of that flexibility has been abused.
The most egregious stories make headlines: You might have heard about the $5 million in TANF funds earmarked for a new volleyball stadium on the campus of the University of Southern Mississippi, thanks to lobbying from former NFL star Brett Favre (his daughter, as it turns out, was on the team).
But more mundane examples provide a case for reform as well. As recently as 2021, the state of Arizona used 61 percent of its federal TANF block grant to fund child protective services — effectively using federal money aimed at supporting low-income parents to investigate them instead. Nationally, states spend nearly as much of their
