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Monday, August 07, 2006
TANF and Budget Reconciliation in Today's Post
Welfare recipients who are working toward college degrees may lose their benefits, according to today’s Washington Post. Key quote:
Having grown up on welfare, Rochelle Riordan had vowed never to ask for a government handout. That was before her hard-drinking husband kicked her and their young daughter out of their house near Lewiston, Maine, leaving her with a $300 bank account, a bad job market and a 15-year-old car held together in spots with duct tape.
Maine's welfare agency, she heard, was offering help for poor parents to go to college full time. With the state paying for day care and $513 a month in living expenses, Riordan, 37, has been on the dean's list every semester at the University of Southern Maine, expecting to graduate and start a social work career next spring. But this summer, her plans -- and Maine's Parents as Scholars program -- suddenly are on shaky ground; under new federal rules, studying for a bachelor's degree no longer counts by itself as an acceptable way for people on welfare to spend their time.
So did Congress really mean to keep welfare recipients out of college and in low-wage jobs? Maybe not. The new regulations that could eliminate the Parents as Scholars programs came out of the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act. House leaders slipped the TANF reauthorization into the conference report of this filibuster-proof budget reconciliation bill to force the Senate to approve it. The House had previously voted for reauthorization, but Senate conservatives could never get enough votes together to pass the more severe changes to TANF that the House wanted.
As a result, TANF reauthorization was never, as this Center for Community Change report shows, amended or debated in the Senate. Bad process, in this case, may have helped create a bad bill.
Washington Post: Welfare Changes A Burden To States
Posted by Matt Lewis
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