Welfare reform: Back to the future!

In 1996 welfare policy was radically transformed when AFDC was abolished an d replaced with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, which shifts the fo cus of public welfare from cash maintenance to self-sufficiency. To accompl ish this goal, the new law was also supposed to alter the relationship betw een the state and federal government to permit the states more flexibility in administering their public assistance programs. However, a closer look r eveals that TANF replicates some of the weakest administrative features of pre-welfare reform bureaucracies, namely, the reliance on a clerical work f orce to provide social services and federal oversight through the use of fi scal penalties and performance monitoring systems that bypass human needs b y excessively relying on statistical formulas.