Ending Welfare and Poverty As We Knew Them: TANF at Ten

Let us consider Zakiya Kyle, a 26 year-old single mother with two sons and former welfare recipient in South Los Angeles in 1997, the first year after passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA, 1996). PRWORA was lauded by President Bill Clinton to “end welfare as we know it” (Weaver, 2000). The primary means of ending welfare was PROWRA’s Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), a block grant program which premised assistance on work-before-welfare. TANF replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, the primary national cash income support system for poor families with children originally created by the Social Security Act in 1935 (Trattner, 1999).