Trump calls on his Cabinet to propose stronger work requirements for welfare across the board.
By Tara Golshan Apr 10, 2018, 7:55pm EDT
President Donald Trump is making a big push to expand work requirements in the nation’s social safety net, calling on his administration to propose tougher rules for America’s most vulnerable population to benefit from welfare programs.
Trump signed the Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility executive order privately Tuesday, ordering secretaries across the government to review their welfare programs — from food stamps to Medicaid to housing programs — and propose new regulations, like work requirements.
The executive order calls on federal agencies to enforce current work requirements, propose additional, stronger requirements, and find savings (in other words, make cuts), and to give states more flexibility to run welfare programs.
“Since its inception, the welfare system has grown into a large bureaucracy that might be susceptible to measuring success by how many people are enrolled in a program rather than by how many have moved from poverty into financial independence,” the executive order reads.
The order calls on the Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Education departments to use the next 90 days to submit a report with their recommended policies to the White House.
The order doesn’t yet set any new policy, but it does reflect a hardline conservative view of the nation’s entitlement system — one that welfare experts say relies on faulty arguments and could cut off the nation’s neediest from lifesaving safety net programs.
Trump’s executive order implies tougher requirements for safety net programs
The text of the executive order calls for a review of all welfare programs across agencies, something a senior White House official calls a push for a “coordinated” effort across federal and state agencies to reform the welfare system.
But the result could be recommendations that propose drastic changes to programs like Medicaid, which offers health care for low-income individuals; food stamps; and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which gives poor families financial aid. The administration is also looking at housing programs, the White House official said.
Agencies are ordered to follow nine “Principles of Economic Mobility” to guide their proposed policy changes, including adding work requirements, giving states more flexibility — usually in the form of block grants — consolidating duplicative programs, and encouraging involvement from the private sector.
Put together, this order outlines much of the conservative welfare agenda, which has long promoted cutting welfare programs, either through pushing people off the federal rolls with harsher work requirements or block-granting funding to the states, giving them more purview over how to allocate money to welfare programs.
Trump has long called for tougher requirements to receive welfare benefits but hasn’t been specific on what policies he would like to see and which programs he’d like to target. His order is now calling on his administration to iron out the specifics.
The White House is citing faulty evidence that work requirements work
White House adviser Andrew Bremberg told reporters that Trump’s executive order is meant to “highlight the success” of President Bill Clinton’s 1996 reforms to TANF. Those reforms added work requirements to TANF and fundamentally adjusted how the program’s funding worked, giving money to states in a lump sum and allowing the states to allocate their funding as they saw fit. In the early years, Clinton’s TANF reforms were extremely popular.
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