The investigative arm of Congress has found that the Obama administration circumvented Congress in removing the work requirement from welfare reform.
The findings from the Government Accountability Office were trumpeted by members of the House Ways and Means Committee, who are upset with the removal of the work requirement (see earlier story). The findings echo those reached by The Heritage Foundation, which started issuing materials on this matter in July.
Heritage research associate Rachel Sheffield shares the information discovered by her organization.
"The Obama administration on July 12th issued these waivers to the work requirement, part of the TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] law, and essentially by doing so was sidestepping the law, sidestepping the Congress and promoting their own policies, which are gutting the successful welfare reforms of 1996," she details.
Sheffield offers a few examples of these successes.
"After welfare reform was passed in 1996, we saw the welfare rolls drop by 50 percent within just five years," she notes. "We also saw the poverty rate decline. The child poverty rate plummeted, particularly the poverty rate for African-American children, which declined to its lowest level in U.S. history."
Critics of the work requirement removal have also pointed out that President Obama said he was in favor of the work requirement during his 2008 campaign for the White House. A video of those remarks began making its way around the Internet following the administration's recent changes to welfare reform.