Pirog

Pirog, one of the nation’s leading scholars on public assistance for families in need and child poverty, is a Rudy Professor of public and environmental affairs on the IU Bloomington campus. An IU faculty member in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs since 1983, Pirog is the founder and co-director of the IU Institute for Family and Social Responsibility. Pirog also is the new editor-in-chief of the premier scholarly journal in her field, The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Q. Eight years after the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, how are Indiana families doing?

A. I can’t really answer that. No one has done a recent follow-up study to address that question. We do know that Indiana (welfare) case loads have gone back up, but that’s happened across the board, in every state. Really, that’s a function of the economy.

Q. Critics of the 1996 reform act claim it was extremely effective in removing families from welfare rolls, but it didn’t do enough to address poverty. What is your opinion?

A. It (the reform act) was great at getting people off welfare. And the initial studies showed a decrease. The last round of studies all occurred at the end of the 1990s, during a sustained period of economic growth. When the economy entered a recession, the environment changed dramatically. If we repeat those evaluations now, quite likely the outcomes would be significantly different at this point than the first rounds.

There was a lot of concern that some families would be left in the lurch. That didn’t happen to the extent some people had suggested. Many people got employment during the ’90s and were able to make the transition from welfare to work—that all took place during a period of strong economic development. Welfare recipients, many times, are the last hired and first fired, and they oftentimes have more trouble maintaining employment. When the economy is strong and employers are begging for workers, it is a very different environment than we have now. When there’s a surplus of labor, welfare families encounter less favorable conditions. There are fewer accommodations.

Q. A key portion of the 1996 act was inclusion of work requirements. What are your thoughts on efforts to increase the level of work required by welfare recipients?

A. Increasing the work requirement for single mothers would be detrimental. There already are a lot of barriers for single mothers to sustain employment: transportation, child care, mental health and educational levels. Every time you ratchet up the work requirement for single mothers, more and more women say ‘I can’t do it, I will forgo my portion.’ That’s why we are seeing an increase in child-only cases.

Q. How does child care fit into the puzzle?

A. In the late 1990s, after the economy was growing, and there were fewer welfare families, states had additional money. The money was put into child care. Since welfare caseloads are going back up, due to recession, states have been forced to cut back childcare funds. This is making child care harder to fund, for a larger group of welfare families.

Q. Do you support efforts to tie marriage into welfare reform efforts?

A. Marriage, or re-marriage, is a good exit from welfare for some women. Marriage raises family income and oftentimes is a path out of poverty for a lot of women. I’m not aware of current legislation that ties marriage to welfare reform.

Q. Is a stronger economy the answer?

A. A better economy is a nice cure, but the government needs to revisit welfare reform, too. Instead of ratcheting up work requirements, I think we need to set a more realistic expectation concerning what low income families can do, especially in a time of recession.  

Maybe we could consider alternatives to work that might fulfill the work requirement. Let’s make allowances for investing in human capital, skill training and more voluntary unpaid opportunities.

I think what happens in the next round is contingent on the election. I doubt we’ll see much movement, especially with on-going national security concerns and the war in Iraq. Those national concerns have taken the spotlight off welfare reform as a top policy. And that’s not surprising, not at all. I think it is perfectly understandable, but there needs to be some attention given to the plight of welfare recipients. What we need to remember is that two-thirds of the caseloads are children. We shouldn’t have to do these annual appropriations. Instead we need actual reauthorization of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families).

Editor’s note: More information on this subject may be accessed at this U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Web site:
http://aspe.hhs.gov/

The IU Institute for Family and Social Responsibility:
http://www.spea.indiana.edu/fasr/