Welfare Reform in America: A Clash of Politics and Research

Diana Zuckerman, Ph.D.
National Center for Policy Research on Women and Families

    The 1996 welfare reform law radically changed welfare as we knew it, after many years of debate and concern across the ideological spectrum. Research should have provided essential information to revise the program, but instead, research was used as an ideological weapon to support conflicting points of view. President Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it," but his welfare reform plan was superceded by the election of a Republican majority of the House and Senate in 1994. The resulting welfare bill included key elements from the Republican Contract with America. The purpose of this article is to describe how political pressures resulted in a dramatic change in law, despite doomsday predictions and almost no solid information about the law's likely impact.

    The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) radically changed welfare as we knew it and data on its impact on the most vulnerable Americans are just becoming available. The purpose of this article is to describe how cultural and political pressures resulted in such a dramatic change in law, despite doomsday predictions from many experts and organizations and almost no solid information about the law's likely impact.

    The controversial passage of PRWORA was the culmination of many years of debate as well as concerns expressed across the political spectrum about the extent to which the welfare system should be considered a failure or an essential safety net. On the right, there were many years of anecdotes about "welfare queens" driving fancy cars and buying steaks with their food stamps and teaching their children that welfare made working unnecessary. These anecdotes were part of President Reagan's standard speech on the topic (Shields, 1981), and "dismantling the welfare state" was an important priority for his political heirs, many of whom became leaders in the Republican-controlled Congress in January 1995 (Krauthammer, 1994). On the left, there was an assumption that welfare saved innocent lives but also a growing concern about the deteriorating conditions in the inner city, where welfare dependence was sometimes a way of life being handed down from generation to generation, often accompanied by drug abuse, violence, teen pregnancy, and other social ills.

    Research should have provided essential information to help determine how the welfare system should be changed, but instead, research was used as an ideological weapon to support conflicting points of view. For example, research results based on nationally representative government surveys were used by both sides: They could be used to prove both that most families on welfare were on it for short periods of time and that there was a hard-core group of families that stay on welfare for many years (Pavetti, 1996). Similarly, the statistics could be used to show that teen pregnancies were statistically significant predictors of long-term welfare and poverty (GAO, 1994, pp. 94-115) or that many welfare recipients were the victims of a crisis and just needed help for a few months before they were able to support themselves (Greenberg, 1993).

    As a candidate for President, Bill Clinton positioned himself as a moderate Democrat who promised to end "welfare as we know it." As President, he appointed several well-respected welfare experts to high-level policy positions as assistant secretaries in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), most notably David Ellwood and Mary Jo Bane. Despite the Clinton administration's efforts to devise a welfare reform plan that would reduce welfare dependence while providing a safety net for society's most vulnerable, President Clinton signed legislation that made radical changes that many feared would seriously jeopardize the well-being of single mothers and their families (Bane, 1997).

    How did this happen? This article describes how political and public pressures and compelling anecdotes overpowered the efforts of progressive public policy organizations and researchers, resulting in legislation focused on getting families off welfare rather than getting families out of poverty. The article will be based on the documented legislative history of the welfare reform legislation, as well as media coverage, articles published by policymakers, and the author's vantage point as a congressional staffer and White House policy advisor during the years preceding welfare reform and as a policy director for a nonprofit advocacy organization during the year of welfare reform.

Welfare Reform as a Presidential Issue

    As a presidential candidate, Bill Clinton made it clear that he would not defend the welfare system but instead would work to change it. As governor of Arkansas and an officer of the National Governors' Association, he had already staked out a position aimed at moving families off welfare. As President, he quickly appointed experts to work on welfare reform, with particular focus on toughening child support laws and requiring welfare recipients to prepare for self-sufficiency (Koppelman, 1993). Although the public and policymakers were ready for major changes in the welfare system, many did not realize that a law passed in 1988, the Family Support Act, already had strengthened child support collection and ordered states to require able-bodied recipients to enter remedial education or job training projects. President Clinton had been instrumental in negotiating that legislation as an officer of the National Governors' Association, and the bill was expected to help single mothers and to encourage more women to move from welfare to work. However, the weakened economy of the late 1980s led to a surge in the welfare rolls instead, with the size of those rolls increasing 25% from 1989 to 1992. As a result of the recession, states were unable to provide matching funds to claim their full share of the federal funding for Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS), a training program. The law did not seem to be working, and the pressure to "do something about welfare" grew.

     As a candidate, Clinton had promised to reform health care as well as welfare, and as President, he decided to focus on health care reform legislation first. This was a logical choice, because the lack of affordable health care was a major disincentive for single mothers who wanted to move from welfare to work. The Clinton administration strategy was to first pass a law that would make health care affordable for the working poor, so that it would be easier to make the other legislative changes necessary to reduce the welfare rolls. Improving access to health care would help those families that would lose Medicaid when they left welfare for low-level jobs that did not offer health insurance as a benefit.

     The public seemed ready for these kinds of changes, but the Clinton administration was concerned about the cost. In order to move single mothers from welfare to work, it would be necessary to provide job training, child care, and other services for many of them. The cost of those programs and services would initially be high, and it was expected that the savings as families moved off welfare would not be great enough to make up for those extra costs. Since President Clinton had also promised to cut the country's enormous budget deficit, and since a major goal of welfare reform was to save money and make the federal government smaller, it did not seem politically feasible to expect taxpayers to pay more for welfare reform than they were paying for the existing welfare system, even in the short term. To save money, the Clinton plan included a slow phase-in of the program, which caused some conservative critics to accuse the administration of not being serious about reform (Ellwood, 1996).

Congress and Welfare Reform

     For a variety of reasons, President Clinton had difficulty obtaining the support of his own party on welfare, health care, and other issues. As a moderate "New Democrat," his positions often seemed too conservative for the more liberal Democrats and too liberal for the more conservative ones, most of whom were southern and concerned about reelection as the Republican Party gained support in the South. Conservative Democrats developed their own welfare reform plan with a faster phase-in. In addition, conservatives from both parties were concerned that the Clinton plan did not sufficiently address out-of-wedlock childbearing and provided too many federal requirements instead of giving the states the autonomy to decide about welfare reform (Ellwood, 1996).

     Why did the Clinton plan fail? Ellwood (1996) speculates that they should have tried to pass welfare reform before health care reform instead of afterward. Ellwood points out that the Clinton welfare reform plan got little attention because it was introduced during the summer of 1994, when health care reform was on center stage. As someone involved in health care reform legislation in the Senate at the time, I believe that the problem with the timing was not lack of attention but rather the weakened credibility of the Clinton administration because of the barrage of criticism aimed at its health care proposal. Ellwood also speculates that the President's promise to "end welfare as we know it" was a potent sound bite but did not address the concerns of many Democrats about whether the new system would be better than the old. Ellwood believes that the phrase "2 years and you're off" was even more destructive, because it implied no help at all after 2 years, which he says is "never what was intended." I agree that these were problems, and in addition, the tension and lack of trust between the congressional Democrats and the Clinton administration contributed to the view of many Democrats that the Clinton welfare plan was too controversial and would make them politically vulnerable.

     As a congressional staffer working for Democrats during the Reagan and Bush administrations, I saw firsthand how the Democrats were accustomed to an adversarial relationship with the White House, which carried over into the Clinton years. Many of the Democratic staff during President Clinton's first term had rarely worked cooperatively with the White House on social issues and were accustomed to working with the very liberal leadership of many congressional committees, especially in the House of Representatives. They also were accustomed to relying on progressive advocacy organizations for information, such as the Children's Defense Fund and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. It was therefore not surprising that many of the senior Democratic members of Congress and their staff tended to side with those progressive organizations in their skepticism about President Clinton's welfare reform plan. Nevertheless, prior to the November 1994 election, there was reason to believe that at least some of the President's welfare plan would become law.

     The 1994 election, which resulted in the Republican takeover of the House and Senate, changed all that. The result was that every congressional committee was chaired by a Republican instead of a Democrat and composed primarily of Republicans rather than Democrats. Instead of being chaired by the most liberal Democrats, the committees that would vote on welfare reform were now chaired by conservative Republicans. Although the Republicans had only a small majority in the House, they had the control of committee chairmanships and a disproportionate proportion of the votes. This meant that the Republican leadership had tremendous power to control the welfare reform bill.

     Even more important than the leadership of the congressional committees was the leadership of the House of Representatives, which changed from a liberal Democrat to Newt Gingrich, an outspoken critic of "big government," especially for social programs. Gingrich had been a major architect of the Contract With America, which specified that welfare should be available for only 2 years and that benefits should not be available to minor mothers or for children born to mothers on welfare. The shellacking that the Democrats experienced in the election was perceived as a mandate for the Contract With America (Merida, 1994), including a more punitive welfare reform plan than the one the Clinton Administration had proposed.

     Meanwhile, state governors demanded more say about how money in the new welfare program would be spent, resulting in a bill that looked more like a block grant than a social program. This had the political benefit of getting Congress off the hook: It would not have to make the difficult political decisions about restrictions and instead could put those decisions in the hands of the state governments.

     The media were also influential and tended to focus on the shortcomings of the welfare program that was in place, Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). For example, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series about a welfare mother, Rosa Lee Cunningham, and her eight children and 32 grandchildren, authored by an African American reporter and published in The Washington Post and as a book in the fall of 1994, generated tremendous attention in Washington. The series, which included eight days of front-page lengthy articles about "a three-generational family of welfare-dependent petty criminals" (Dash, 1994, p. C1), was particularly powerful because it was a sympathetic portrayal by a liberal newspaper, and yet the underlying message was the failure of the welfare system. This series was compelling to Democrats in a way that Reagan's welfare queen stories never were; after reading about the drug addiction, welfare dependence, jail time, and failure of so many members of Rosa Lee's family, readers were likely to conclude that any efforts to change the welfare system were better than staying with the system then in place.

     Meanwhile, the think tanks and advocacy organizations that try to influence Congress were making their voices heard. Charles Murray's book Losing Ground was a rallying cry for many conservatives throughout the welfare debate because it argued that government welfare programs had encouraged high unemployment rates and served as a disincentive to marriage (Koppelman, 1996). On the other side, progressive advocates quoted researchers like William Julius Wilson, who concluded that the decline in well-paying manufacturing jobs and a rise in lower paying service jobs has been disastrous for inner-city Black men and was the root of ghetto problems such as crime, low marriage rates, and drug use (Koppelman, 1996).

    Progressive organizations used government statistics to support their views, but their strategies were not always credible. For example, one strategy was to estimate how many more children and families would be thrown into poverty under the new plan by examining how much income current welfare recipients had in addition to their welfare benefits. If the other income was below the poverty level, the assumption was that the family would be in poverty. These estimates assume that a single mother on welfare would not look for or find a job if she no longer could rely on welfare to support herself and her family, an assumption that is not based on research or even on common sense. Although it may be true that single mothers on welfare might have a difficult time finding or keeping a job, it is certainly likely that the lack of welfare benefits would provide a powerful incentive to try and that many of these women would manage to find jobs and would have new incentives to try to keep them.

    Progressive organizations also provided research results that could be used in support of the more punitive welfare reform plan as well as against it. For example, a progressive nonprofit organization claimed that its research proved that welfare mothers were not "lazy, dependent, and passive" because 4 out of 10 welfare recipients were shown to have worked at paid jobs during a 2-year period while they were on welfare (Spalter-Roth, Hartmann, & Andrews, 1992). The data provided in this report could also be used, however, to support the negative stereotypes it intended to counteract, because most of the women on welfare did not earn any money, and the definition of working welfare recipients was based on working at least 600 hours over a period of 2 years, which is the equivalent of less than 2 months of full-time work per year.

    As the ideological battle continued around it, Congress was under tremendous pressure to pass a welfare reform bill. The 1994 elections were frightening for many Democrats, many of whom were young children when the House of Representatives was last controlled by Republicans 40 years earlier. President Clinton's standing with the public was at an all-time low, with only 41% of the public approving of his job as President (Balz, 1994). The pundits were speculating whether either the President or the Democrats were "relevant" (Malone, 1994). As a Democratic staffer who moved to the White House during this time, I heard from many former colleagues that liberal members of Congress feared that their days were numbered and that they would lose their next elections if they did not move to the center to reflect the public mood.

    Throughout 1995 and 1996, the Republican majority controlled the policy agenda and welfare reform was their cause. In that political climate, it would have been very difficult for progressive organizations to succeed in their public education and lobbying efforts, regardless of research results. It was especially difficult for liberal legislators to suggest that welfare mothers should be able to stay home and care for their children when nationwide 55% of mothers with children under the age of 3 were employed, most of them full time (Pavetti, 1997). To make matters worse, the progressive organizations did not have solid research findings to support their opposition to the Republican leadership's welfare reform bill, other than frightening but questionable statistics describing the number of children who would fall into poverty if their mothers were thrown off welfare. This left the most progressive members of Congress with little ammunition to use against the most conservative proposals. The slim Republican majority in Congress was joined by enough Democrats to create a substantial majority for the welfare reform bill that passed in 1996.

    The bill that Congress eventually passed is lengthy and complicated, but the introductory section includes "findings" that explicitly show the ideology behind the legislation. There are 10 findings, and the first three set the tone:

1. Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.

2. Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children.

3. Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children.

    The bill's focus on marriage and responsible parenthood reflects the Republican Party's ties to the Christian right as well as the growing disenchantment with government programs throughout the country in the early and mid-1990s. The rest of the findings, however, use research data to support this focus, and many of the statistics are ones that have been employed by experts across the ideological spectrum to support public policies aimed at reducing teen pregnancy, reducing poverty, and other goals that are as popular among liberal Democrats as conservative Republicans, as well as everything in between. For example, the next finding pointed out that "only 54 percent of single-parent families with children had a child support order established and, of that 54 percent, only about one-half received the full amount due" (U.S. Congress, 1996, p. 6).

    Another major concern was the growth of welfare. The fifth finding points out that the number of individuals on welfare had more than tripled since 1965 and that more than two-thirds were children. The number of children on welfare every month increased from 3.3 million in 1965 to 9.3 million in 1992, although the number of children in the United States declined during those years. The legislation also points out that 89% of the children receiving AFDC were living in homes without fathers and that the percentage of unmarried women nearly tripled between 1970 and 1991.

    The next finding includes details regarding pregnancies among unmarried teens and concludes "if the current trend continues, 50 percent of all births by the year 2015 will be out-of-wedlock" (U.S. Congress, 1996, p. 7). The findings recommended that strategies to combat teenage pregnancy "must address the issue of male responsibility, including statutory rape culpability and prevention" and points out that most teen mothers "have histories of sexual and physical abuse, primarily with older adult men."

    Despite the clear ideological underpinnings of the bill, some of the findings could be embraced by both political parties. For example, the bill correctly points out that unmarried teenage mothers are more likely to go on welfare and to spend more years on welfare. It also points out that babies of unwed mothers are at risk for very low or moderately low birth weight, for growing up to have lower cognitive attainment, lower educational aspirations, and for child abuse and neglect. They are more likely to grow up to be teen parents and to go on welfare and less likely to have an intact marriage.

    The costs of teen parenting were delineated, with an estimate that "between 1985 and 1990, the public cost of births to teenage mothers under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, the food stamp program, and the Medicaid program" (U.S. Congress, 1996, p.8) was $120 billion. In a climate of deficit reduction and support for smaller government, that estimate was extremely compelling.

    The welfare reform bill includes nine sections, referred to as "titles," and several are more generous than would have been expected given the Republican control of Congress and the Republicans' opposition to "big government." For example, Title VI on child care authorizes increased federal money so that child care is more available and affordable. President Clinton, however, expressed considerable concerns about Title IV, which banned most legal immigrants from most federal benefit programs, and Title VIII, which cut the food stamp program across the board and also restricted food stamps to unemployed adults without disabilities or dependents to 3 months out of every 36.

    The welfare reform law had a great deal of support from governors around the country, because it gave them enormous flexibility regarding the spending of federal funds. The rationale was that states could experiment with new approaches, under the assumption that what works in a rural state, for example, might not work in a more urban environment. Heavy subsidies for day care or job training might be useful in some areas, for example, but unnecessary in others.

Why Not Wait for Data?

    Although data were quoted in the welfare reform bill, there were no convincing data to predict what would actually happen if the bill passed. A "natural experiment" was taking place, however, that could have answered those questions. Between January 1987 and August 1996, 46 states had received approval for waivers to experiment with AFDC and welfare-to-work programs (GAO, 1997). Since welfare reform represented such a dramatic change in policies, with many lives at stake, it would have been logical to delay a federal welfare reform law until the data were analyzed from those programs. For example, by May 1997, the General Accounting Office, which is a research branch of Congress, had published a report entitled Welfare Reform: States' Early Experiences with Benefits Termination, based on a study conducted at the request of Senator Pat Moynihan. The study found that the benefits of 18,000 families were terminated under waivers through December 1996, most of them in Iowa, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin. More than 99% of these families failed to comply with program requirements; for example, some wanted to stay home with their children or were unwilling to do community service or work for low wages (GAO, 1997). These findings could have been used to design a welfare reform process that protected some of these families, but the bill was passed before the data were available.

    Instead, the little research that was already completed was used to push welfare reform forward. For example, Vermont had applied for waivers to the welfare requirements, and its welfare restructuring project was the nation's first statewide demonstration of time-limited welfare (Zengerle, 1997). In 2 years, Vermont raised the number of welfare parents with jobs from 20% to 26% and increased their average monthly earnings from $373 to $437. Of course, it was also important to note that Vermont increased its social services budget by 50%, in part to create new jobs. Welfare recipients who were unable to find jobs in the private sector were eligible for 10 months' employment in public jobs or working for nonprofit organizations. It also would have been logical to note that Vermont has relatively few welfare recipients and that its experience is likely to be different from most other states. Nevertheless, this study was used to show the success of welfare reform.

The Final Battle

    Congress was supporting the PRWORA by a large margin, starting with 60% support in the House in early July 1996 and followed by 74% in the Senate. Although Democrats and moderate Republicans made some revisions to the bill, it was less generous than the original Clinton proposal in many ways. Progressive advocates faced a dilemma: Should they continue to try to improve the bill as the House and Senate worked out the differences between their versions of the legislation, or should advocates reject the bill as "unfixable" and instead urge President Clinton to veto it? I attended coalition meetings of advocacy organizations, including one held with White House officials, and found there was no clear agreement on how to proceed. Until the last minute, many still hoped that the bill would be vetoed. Meanwhile, the House and Senate worked out their differences and passed a veto-proof bill, and President Clinton signed it. Mary Jo Bane resigned in protest from her position at HHS a few weeks later (Mitchell, 1996). Ellwood had left the administration to return to Harvard the year before.

The Reality of Welfare Reform

    Although the welfare reform bill that passed in 1996 was radical and potentially devastating to poor families, the booming economy since that time and political compromises have resulted in a law that no longer seems as extreme or partisan as it once did. For example, in the short term, almost every state received more federal funds under welfare reform than it did prior to reform (Nightingale & Brennan, 1998). Perhaps most important, the Clinton administration was able to influence the bill through regulations. The final regulations, announced in April 1999, contain exceptions to the rules that make the bill less rigid. For example, states may continue to provide welfare benefits for longer than 60 months to up to 20% of the welfare caseload based on hardship or domestic violence, and the 20% limit can be exceeded if there are federally recognized "good cause domestic violence waivers" (Schott, Lazere, Goldberg, & Sweeney, 1999). In addition, states will be penalized if they sanction a single parent caring for a child under age 6 if the parent can demonstrate his or her inability to obtain child care.

    Research results are finally coming in from across the country. The Urban Institute (Loprest, 1999) reports that most adults leaving welfare between 1995 and 1997 got a new job or increased earnings. They also report that former welfare recipients work more hours than employed near-poor mothers who were not previously receiving welfare. Nevertheless, many families are doing poorly since welfare reform was implemented, and the number of children in extreme poverty (less than half the poverty level) has increased (Sherman, 1999). Between 1995 and 1997, the aver-age income of the poorest 20% of female-headed households fell an average of $580 per family, primarily due to the loss of food stamps and other government benefits (Primus, Rawulings, Larin, & Porter, 1999).

    Research had little impact on the passage of welfare reform in 1996, although statistics were used by both sides in the national debate. Is it possible that new research on the impact of welfare reform will influence welfare policies in the future? The studies in this issue provide very useful information about the barriers to success for welfare mothers who attempt to move into the workforce on a permanent basis, with important implications for how policies can maximize success and minimize tragedy for vulnerable families. Now that the costs of the welfare program have been drastically reduced and the national annual budget deficit has turned into a surplus, these studies may manage to attract the attention of policymakers. Unfortunately, welfare reform has made national policy changes in this area even more difficult, because decisions are now made in 50 different states, rather than by the federal government.

 

References

Balz, D. (1994, December 8). President, Democrats fare poorly in opinion poll. Washington Post,p.A6.

Bane, M. J. (1997). Welfare as we might know it. American Prospect, 30, 47-53.

Dash, L. (1994, November 2). Rosa Lee and me: What one family told me-and America-about the urban crisis. Washington Post, p. C1.

Ellwood, D. T. (1996). Welfare reform as I knew it: When bad things happen to good policies. American Prospect, 26, 22-29.

General Accounting Office (GAO). (1994). Teenage mothers least likely to become self-sufficient. GAO/HEHS-94-115. Washington, DC: GAO.

General Accounting Office (GAO). (1997). Welfare reform: States' early experiences with benefit termination. GAO/HEHS-97-74. Washington, DC: GAO.

Greenberg, M. (1993). What state AFDC studies on length of stay tell us about welfare as a "way of life." Washington, DC: Center for Law and Social Policy.

Koppelman, J. (1993). Helping AFDC children escape the cycle of poverty: Can welfare reform be used to achieve this goal? National Health Policy Forum, 627, 2-9.

Koppelman, J. (1996). Joblessness, the urban underclass, and welfare reform: A discussion with William Julius Wilson. National Health Policy Forum, 691, 2-6.

Krauthammer, C. (1994, November 11). Republican mandate. Washington Post, p. A31.

Loprest, P. (1999). How families that left welfare are doing: A national picture. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.

Malone, J. (1994, December 15). Clinton to describe tax cut plans in talk tonight. Atlanta Journal and Constitution, p. A1.

Merida, K. (1994, December 28). Last rites for liberalism? Democrats' legacy now symbolizes their woes. The Washington Post, p. A1.

Mitchell, A. (1996, September, 12). Two Clinton aides resign to protest new welfare law. New York Times, p. A1.

Nightingale, D. S., & Brennan, K. (1998). The welfare-to-work grants program: A new link in the welfare reform chain. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.

Pavetti, L. (1996, May 23). Time on Welfare and Welfare Dependency. Testimony before the House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, 104th Congress.

Pavetti, L. (1997). How much more can they work? Setting realistic expectations for welfare mothers. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.

Primus, W., Rawulings, L., Larin, K., & Porter, K. (1999). The initial impacts of welfare reform on the incomes of single-mother families. Washington, DC: Center of Budget and Policy Priorities.

Schott, L., Lazere, E., Goldberg, H., & Sweeney, E. (1999). Highlights of the final TANF regulations. Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Sherman, A. (1999). Extreme child poverty rises sharply in 1997. Washington, DC: Children's Defense Fund.

Shields, M. (1981, November 21). Guess Who's in Charge? Washington Post, p. A31.

Spalter-Roth, R. M., Hartmann, H. L., & Andrews, L. (1992). Combining work and welfare: An alter-native anti-poverty strategy. Washington, DC: Institute for Women's Policy Research.

U.S. Congress. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (1996) [On-line]. Available: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=104_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ193.104

Zengerle, J. S. (1997). Welfare as Vermont knows it, American Prospect, 30, 54-55.

    DIANA M. ZUCKERMAN is the President and Director of the National Center for Policy Research for Women and Families. She is a psychologist who was formerly a researcher and faculty member at Vassar, Yale, and Harvard before moving to Washington, D.C., to work on Capitol Hill. Zuckerman worked on federal health and social issues as a professional staff member in the House of Representatives and the Senate between 1983 and 1995 and as a senior policy advisor for the Clinton White House from 1995 to 1996. During and since the welfare reform legislative process, she has worked as a national policy director for nonprofit women's advocacy and research organizations.

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