As people who have dedicated our careers to advancing policies that can reduce poverty in America, we are dismayed to now see the return of the disastrous 1990s-era “welfare reform” approach that measures success by how many people are kicked off of public assistance programs, rather than whether fewer people actually need it. Economic research consistently shows that this approach fails to meaningfully address poverty or increase employment. A true anti-poverty agenda would learn from those mistakes, rather than repeat them, and build on what works.
The White House disregards that record of success by seeking to strip away the standards that make it work. Under the guise of giving states more “flexibility,” it proposes to eliminate class size standards while reducing children’s access to needed medical and dental care. This follows President Donald Trump’s previous attempts to freeze Head Start funding in 2025 that impacted 20,000 children in 23 states, and consideration of budget proposals that would have eliminated it entirely.
If this playbook sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen this movie before. In 1996, Congress created Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, a block grant that ended the guarantee of cash assistance for families who need it and handed states broad discretion over the money. One of us, Peter Edelman, resigned from the Clinton Administration in protest.
Instead of going down this path again, the Trump Administration and Congress should advance an anti-poverty agenda centered on two core principles: cash and care.
In much of the country, child care now costs more than rent, a mortgage, or college tuition. Without support, parents often can’t take or keep jobs. When pandemic relief delivered the largest federal investment in child care in our history, our research found it helped more than 400,000 mothers of young children stay in or return to work. When that funding ran out, many were pushed back out of their jobs. Leaders in Washington should be making those types of investments a priority again.
America is still fighting the War on Poverty, and every American, regardless of income, has a stake in winning it. The measure of success isn't how many people we can push out of public programs. It's how many people no longer need them because they have the income, care, and opportunity to thrive. Thirty years of experience should have taught us the difference.
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