HHS News Release

HHS Announces Welfare Caseload Continues Unprecedented Decline and Releases Employment Retention and Advancement Grants
HHS Secretary Donna E. Shalala today announced that welfare caseloads have declined to approximately 8.4 million recipients and slightly over 3 million families as of June 1998.

At the same time, Secretary Shalala announced grants to 13 states to help improve job retention and career advancement for parents on welfare.

Since January 1993, the number of recipients on welfare has dropped by more than 41 percent, including a decline of more than 30 percent since the enactment of the welfare reform law on August 22, 1996. There are 5.7 million fewer recipients on the welfare rolls since President Clinton took office, and 3.8 million fewer welfare recipients since the passage of the 1996 law. The rate of decline remains strong with nearly 2 percent reductions each month, almost double the rate for the same period in 1997.

"Several new state studies as well as data from the Census Bureau are showing that more and more of those adults leaving the welfare rolls are getting jobs," said Secretary Shalala. "Reforming welfare is about making sure families have the tools they need to go to work -- and to stay there. The grants we are announcing today will encourage states to improve their efforts for parents to stay in work and advance in their jobs."

In its newest initiative, HHS is issuing grants to 13 states to provide technical assistance on sharing information about existing job retention strategies for welfare recipients and the methods for evaluating these strategies with current and former welfare recipients. This investment will help states devise successful welfare to work programs.

The states receiving $50,000 planning grants each are: California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington State and Wisconsin. Additionally, a contract will go to The Lewin Group for technical and evaluation assistance to grantees for the purpose of defining, developing, and refining job retention and advancement intervention strategies, expert technical and evaluation assistance, review of field operations of grantees to document job retention/advancement-focused program elements, and other supports.

"These important grants will promote creative state strategies for innovative model programs that will achieve welfare reform's most vital goal that families will obtain stable jobs, increase their earnings and break the cycle of welfare dependency," said Olivia A. Golden, HHS assistant secretary for children and families. "The grants also reinforce the administration's priority for states to compete for the new welfare law's high performance bonus which will reward states for moving welfare recipients into jobs and retaining and advancing in jobs and earnings."

HHS has designed a national welfare reform evaluation strategy that invests resources to build knowledge on the results of welfare reform implementation, to study the critical importance of supports like child care and child support that improve the transition from welfare to work, and to promote successful strategies on how best to help families on welfare keep and advance in jobs. Recent examples of these efforts include rigorous evaluations of the preliminary success of Oregon and Los Angeles County welfare to work programs, a five state review of the shift to "work first" approaches and a report on models of advancing career track jobs for welfare recipients.

The First Annual Report to Congress on the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program released on August 5th, 1998 shows a dramatic increase in the number of welfare recipients who have gone to work. Data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey show that the rate of employment of individuals on welfare in one year who were working in the following year increased by nearly 30 percent between 1996 and 1997. As a result 1.7 million adults on welfare in 1996 were working in March 1997.

The Report to Congress also found that not only has the proportion of welfare recipients working increased, but that families moving from welfare to work also enjoy increases in income. The report also finds that on average states are spending more per person on welfare to work efforts than they did before the passage of the 1996 welfare reform law.

Note: All HHS press releases, fact sheets and other press materials are available at http://www.hhs.gov/news.

Contact: Michael Kharfen, (202) 401-9215