Statement by President Bill Clinton on Governor Mitt Romney’s New Television Advertisement
New York, NY-Governor Romney released an ad today alleging that the
Obama administration had weakened the work requirements of the 1996
Welfare Reform Act. That is not true.
The act emerged after years of experiments at the state level,
including my work as Governor of Arkansas beginning in 1980. When I
became President, I granted waivers from the old law to 44 states to
implement welfare to work strategies before welfare reform passed.
After the law was enacted, every state was required to design a plan
to move people into the workforce, along with more funds to help pay for
training, childcare and transportation. As a result, millions of people
moved from welfare to work.
The recently announced waiver policy was originally requested by the
Republican governors of Utah and Nevada to achieve more flexibility in
designing programs more likely to work in this challenging environment.
The Administration has taken important steps to ensure that the work
requirement is retained and that waivers will be granted only if a state
can demonstrate that more people will be moved into work under its new
approach. The welfare time limits, another important feature of the
1996 act, will not be waived.
The Romney ad is especially disappointing because, as governor of
Massachusetts, he requested changes in the welfare reform laws that
could have eliminated time limits altogether. We need a bipartisan
consensus to continue to help people move from welfare to work even
during these hard times, not more misleading campaign ads.
No comments:
Post a Comment