Media “Fact Checkers” Promote Obama’s Gutting of Welfare Reform

Since Heritage's Robert Rector and Kiki Bradley broke the story on July 12 that the Obama Administration had gutted the work requirements from the 1996 welfare reform law, the Administration has denied it. In recent weeks, media "fact checks" have popped up all over declaring The Heritage Foundation's scoop "False."

Major media—most recently, CNN—have carried water for President Obama's defense of rewriting the welfare reform law. Since these supposed government watchdogs are playing the lapdog, Heritage will continue to provide the facts and do the investigative reporting.

Rector has already debunked the Administration's claims that it did not gut welfare reform and that Republican governors tried to do the same thing in 2005. Now, he is taking apart the Administration's defense of its new waiver policy piece-by-piece in a new series of papers.

The Claim: New Rules Will Still Increase Work

CNN's "fact checkers" claim that "In some small way, the waivers might change precisely how work is calculated but the essential goal of pushing welfare recipients to work—something both Democrats and Republicans agreed to in the 1990s—remains the same."

This is exactly Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's defense: that waiving welfare's work requirements for states under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program will still require states to get welfare recipients into jobs. She maintains that the states will have to "commit that their proposals will move at least 20 percent more people from welfare to work compared to the state's past performance."

The Facts: Bogus Measures of Success

Rector meets this claim head-on in his new paper, "Ending Work for Welfare: Bogus Measures of Success."

This standard is vague, first of all, since states do not actually need to fulfill it but merely "demonstrate clear progress toward that goal no later than one year" after they are exempted from the old TANF work standards. Nonetheless, at first glance, this goal looks fairly impressive.

President Obama's HHS will exempt states from the federal work requirements if they increase by 20 percent the number of TANF cases that lose eligibility due to increases in earnings, a measure called "employment exits." There are four reasons why a 20 percent increase in the number of employment exits, although it sounds impressive, is a very weak or counterproductive measure of success in welfare reform.  Cont. Reading