Implications for Reauthorization

Expand the Role of Education and Training
The challenge for policymakers is to find ways to maintain the employment orientation that underlies reform's success, while opening the door to additional education and training. Results from carefully designed tests of job-search-first programs, education-first pro-grams, and mixed-strategy programs provide strong support for the idea that education and training have an important, although probably subsidiary, role to play in the future of welfare reform. More

Add Services for the Hard-to-Employ
To make further progress in reducing welfare caseloads, states will have to develop effective programs to overcome the barriers to employment of the hard-to-employ. Thus, as caseloads have fallen and as the five-year time limit approaches, states increasingly find themselves working with people who have a range of persistent, multiple, and, sometimes, severe employment barriers, such as substance abuse and depression, that make it difficult for them to get and keep a job. More

Enhance States' Flexibility to Reward Work and Benefit Children
Although poverty reduction was not a TANF goal in 1996, most states' conforming leg-islation included earnings supplement provisions designed to reward work and raise family income. Now the new bill is proposing to make improving the well-being of children an addi-tional overarching purpose of TANF. New research evidence shows that earnings supplement programs increase employment and income and that, when the supplements are generous, elementary school-aged children benefit (although adolescents do not). More

Set Reasonable Participation Standards
The states' dramatic success in reducing caseloads has made the question of how to set participation standards in welfare reform's next phase potentially one of the most contentious issues related to TANF reauthorization. Some observers would like to end the point-for-point caseload reduction credit because it sends the message that caseload reductions are the main goal of TANF. The administration wants to end the credit to keep the states under pressure to perform. Not surprisingly, states would like to remain free of the participation standard and therefore would prefer to keep the caseload reduction credit in force. More

Require Midterm Review of Time-Limit Policies and the Adequacy of the 20 Percent Exemption
The House-passed bill recommends few changes in the law's time-limit provisions, an approach consistent with research findings to date of no evidence that the imposition of time limits have resulted in significant harm. But the final time-limit story has not yet been told, since relatively few welfare recipients have reached either the federal or a state time limit. In 16 states, time limits only begin to kick in this year; and in eight of those states, time limits will not expire until July 2002 or later. More

Invest in Learning and Sustaining Innovation
Congressional support for research has built a remarkable body of knowledge about what works - for families and children as well as for government budgets and taxpayers - with respect to welfare-to-work strategies, earnings supplements, and, to a lesser extent, time limits. Indeed, to an important degree, TANF's very success builds on a body of research that demonstrates the value of employment-focused work-first programs. New research findings are poised to play a similar role as states search for ways to fulfill TANF's new overarching pur-pose: to improve child well-being. More