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Project Description

N/A

Project duration: Jun 1995 - Sep 1997

Sites studied include N/A

Sample Characteristics and Sites Studied

Federal legislative, budgetary, and administrative changes in welfare law.

Recent Findings in Brief

10/01/97: Confronting the New Politics of Child and Family Policy: P.L. 104-193: Challenges and Opportunities

• The well-being of children and their families is a proper (we would say the proper) yardstick in considering implementation of PRWORA. However, since the reforms had only a limited research base and since there are participants in the debate who began with diverse value perspectives, the application of this yardstick is not always clear cut.
• As there was the legislative intent, the main locus of action will be the states. There are no serious proposals challenging the "devolution." It is therefore important to clarify the leverage, the resources, and the opportunities available to the states. If the reforms are to "pay off" it will be through state creativity.
• Our orientation remains nonpartisan, both because this follows from our funding source and because the distribution of political power and prerogatives at both the federalism and the state levels I such that optimum results require initiatives within both major parties and a maximum of bipartisan cooperation.
• Inevitably, legislation and broad-ranging and complex as PWRORA will have created problems and difficulties for the state and for program participants…Where we stress the need to focus on the opportunities for creative state initiatives resulting from the devolution, we cannot ignore the problems and obstacles created for the state and their residents.
• Whatever the president's expression of interest in some corrections, it is unlikely that the Congress will support major changes.
• The end of an entitlement to assistance, the greater flexibility for the states, and the revised prerogatives and responsibilities of the DHHS leave serious vacuums with regard to information about problems in implementing the new law and with regard to national trends, program impacts, innovation and experiments, and technical assistance. It is in the nature of the reform that the country must now count upon intergovernmental organizations, professional associations, and major research centers, leading states and their governors and commissioners to fill these gaps and offer new types of leadership.
• Finally... there is need for a more realistic assessment of the roles of the major voluntary sectarian and nonsectarian nonprofit social service organizations.

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