Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was a federal assistance program in effect from 1935 to 1996, which was administered by the United States Department of Health and Human Services. This program provided financial assistance to children whose families had low or no income.[1]
This program grew from a minor part of the social security system to a significant system of welfare administered by the states with federal funding. However, it was criticized for offering incentives for women to have children, and for providing disincentives for women to join the workforce. In 1996, AFDC was replaced by the more restrictive TANF program.
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The program was created under the name Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) by the Social Security Act of 1935 as part of the New Deal; the words "families with" were added to the name in 1962, partly due to concern that the program's rules discouraged marriage.[3] By 1996 spending was $24 billion per year. When adjusted for inflation, the highest spending was in 1976, which exceeded 1996 spending by about 8%.[4]
Since 1962, the Department of Health and Human Services has allowed state-specific exemptions as long as the change was "in the spirit of AFDC" in order to allow some experimentation.
Early in the program, there were concerns about whether this program encouraged unwed motherhood.[3] In the 1960s through 1980s, Nobel Prize winning physicist William Shockley argued that AFDC and other similar programs tended to encourage childbirth, especially among less productive members of society (particularly blacks, whom he considered to be genetically inferior to whites[5]), causing a reverse evolution (dysgenic effect), founded on the premises that: there is a correlation between financial success and intelligence; and that intelligence is hereditary.[6] Shockley[7] was influential in bringing recognition to this hypothesis among the public and Congress.[6]
In 1984, libertarian author Charles Murray suggested that welfare causes dependency. He argued that as welfare benefits increased, the number of recipients also increased; this behavior, he said, was rational: there is little reason to work if one can receive benefits for a long period of time without having to work.[8] His later work and that of Richard J. Herrnstein and others suggested possible merit to the theory of a dysgenic effect,[9] however, the data are not entirely clear.[10] Right or wrong, this argument was among the stepping stones leading to the modification of AFDC toward TANF.[11]
In 1996, President Bill Clinton negotiated with the Republican-controlled Congress to pass the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act which drastically restructured the program. Among other changes, a lifetime limit of five years was imposed for the receipt of benefits, and the newly-limited nature of the replacement program was reinforced by calling AFDC's successor Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Many Americans continue to refer to TANF as "welfare" or AFDC.
In light of the results, by 2006 the welfare reforms appeared to be less controversial. The New Republic suggested, A broad consensus now holds that welfare reform was certainly not a disaster—and that it may, in fact, have worked much as its designers had hoped.[12] More recent results, notably taking into account the effects of the Financial crisis of 2007-2010 and taking place after the lifetime limits imposed by TANF may have been reached by many recipients, suggest instead that the reforms have not been as successful as originally believed.[13]
Part of the reason that welfare reform became so popular was because of changing views and demographics of welfare and poverty. In 1935, when the legislation was first enacted, the dominant view was that women should stay home for the benefit of their children; by the late 20th century, staying home with children was seen as a privilege and most mothers should have the obligation to work. Furthermore, in 1935, most of the single-mother beneficiaries of welfare were widows; by 1988, most of these women with children were either unmarried or divorced.[3]