Special Report

Despite the furor it is raising in this year’s national political circles, welfare reform isn’t new.

Twenty-five years ago, when Richard Nixon was in the White House, the topic was so hot, three major news magazines featured cover stories about it in the same week. More than 20 bills have been introduced in Congress to reform welfare, and yet the changes proposed and mandated have, for the most part, faltered and failed to reduce a system that many feel is bloated.

“It’s a cauldron that has been bubbling for years,” said Joel Sanders, director of Alabama’s welfare-reform unit at the state Department of Human Resources. “It’s always been there.”

This time, with voter angst building about the programs, it seems the system may finally get a real overhaul. “The change is going to be dramatic,” said Sanders, who acts as a liaison between Montgomery and Washington lawmakers. “Whether the change will have a dramatic effect on caseload or lifestyle (of people receiving benefits) is another matter.” Part of the problem is that the system and its main program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, have outgrown their original intent, experts say, and no longer meet the needs of either recipients or society at large.

Major policy changes will be necessary: More educational programs are needed; people on welfare must be taught a work ethic; cycles of welfare need to be interrupted.

“We’re dealing with a system that was based on laws passed in the 1930s,” said Amanda Reaves, food stamps and public assistance supervisor at the Calhoun County Department of Human Resources.

“That’s when it all started.”

Welfare began as an obscure little program in 1935, when Depression economics drove men to desert their families. In that era, the program was intended mainly to help widows or women in families in which the main wage earner — typically the husband — was incapacitated or absent. If the government paid them, the logic went, the women wouldn’t have to take jobs and leave home.

Nearly 30 years after its beginning, the program served about 13 percent of all poor children and cost a little more than $1 billion to help about 800,000 families, according to government estimates. In the late 1960s and ‘70s, though, there came a shift in the philosophy behind welfare, Sanders said. An actual poverty level was defined, and welfare payments became something to which people were “entitled,” whether they were capable of working or not.

It was assumed, he said, that because people have dignity, they would work and would do whatever they could to get off public assistance.

That didn’t happen.

The welfare rolls swelled. At the same time, more non-welfare mothers entered the work force, killing the 1930s notion that it was unthinkable that women could work and rear children at the same time.

Changing attitudes and trying to convince people on welfare they need to work is hard and sometimes impossible, case workers say.

“You cannot force someone who does not want to work to work,” said Luanne White, a case manager at the Tallapoosa County DHR. “You can’t motivate them.”

By the 1980s, it was common for most families to have two parents holding jobs. The public was full of taxpaying citizens who were struggling to raise families and hold jobs at the same time. It had lost its sympathy for people on welfare, typically single mothers, many of whom had never been married. Today, the widows and abandoned that the program was intended to help head only 1.3 percent of all AFDC households.

In 1992, more than one child in eight and more than 60 percent of poor American children were receiving AFDC payments in any given month, and costs since then have remained steady. More than $90 million was spent on AFDC in Alabama in fiscal 1994, benefiting more than 48,000 families.

“That is clearly a source for anger,” said Mark Greenberg, senior staff attorney with the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington. “There is a mixture of very legitimate concerns and misunderstandings.”

Sorting through those misconceptions will take effort, he said. Even reform advocates urge a cautious revamping of the system.

“The welfare problem has taken many years to get this way,” Ms. White said, “and it’s going to take many years to fix it.”