[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 130 (Thursday, September 19, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10965-S10969]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA WELFARE WAIVER
Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, most of my colleagues are well aware that
I have introduced legislation to rescind the portion of the DC welfare
waiver that was recently enacted by President Clinton, because it went
directly in opposition to the welfare bill that was passed
overwhelmingly by this body and the House of Representatives and was
signed by the President and is now the law of the land.
What a lot of people didn't know--I didn't know it--is that when the
President signed the welfare reform bill that had 5-year time limits
for everybody in America, where no longer could you get cash assistance
for the rest of your life--and President Clinton campaigned on 5-year
limits, on limitations of cash benefits, and also on work
requirements--what I didn't know is that the District of Columbia was
granted a waiver, which the President signed a couple of days before,
that allowed the District of Columbia to have a 10-year waiver from
time limits. So there is a 5-year limit in Michigan, a 5-year limit
everywhere else in the country, but not for the District of Columbia,
and there are no work requirements for the District of Columbia.
Frankly, I find that to be very deceitful and misleading by the
administration--to go out and tell everybody,
[[Page S10966]]
hey, we have ended welfare as we know it--and every time I have heard
that line, I applaud, because I know the present welfare system hasn't
worked. It has hurt a lot of people who it tried to help. You don't
need anymore evidence than to look at the District of Columbia. If
anywhere is in need of welfare reform, it is the District of Columbia.
Why in the world would the President, at the same time he is signing
welfare reform for the rest of the country, and bragging about it,
getting great accolades--and it helps his rise in the polls and his
move back toward the political center--suddenly decide to support a
bill that had already passed Congress twice? He vetoed it the first
time. The third time was a charm. He decided to sign it the third time.
But at the same time he signs it, he exempts the District of Columbia
from welfare reform, from time limits, and he exempts the District of
Columbia from work requirements.
Unbelievable. Misleading. Deceitful. All of the above apply to
President Clinton's position on welfare reform. Guess what? He got
caught. I didn't know about the DC waiver when he signed the welfare
bill. Somebody started to tell me about it, and I looked at it and I
said, ``I can't believe it. I can't believe that the same
administration that has said, yes, we are going to have real time
limits, real limitations, real work requirements, would totally exempt
the District of Columbia where 1 out of 6 people is now on welfare.
That is so misleading, it is unbelievable.
Now, I am very pleased that the Department of Health and Human
Services has withdrawn the waiver today. I have a letter that I will
have inserted into the Congressional Record, signed by Mary Jo Bane,
Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, stating that DC's waiver
approval as it pertained to work requirements and time limits has been
withdrawn by HHS.
Why did they decide to do this? I think because they got caught. I
know the House was interested in legislation I introduced, with time
limits that would apply to every State and the District of Columbia. We
were going to pass that. I think the administration realized they were
going to be embarrassed politically for trying to be on both sides of
welfare reform, saying they are for welfare reform and, at the same
time, exempting the District of Columbia. They realized that that
wasn't politically defensible. They figured they better cut their
losses and repeal the waiver. That is my guess.
It is interesting to note--and I will put this in the Record. I
received this. This waiver that protects the District of Columbia from
potential welfare reforms is getting a cool reception from some members
of the city council. Linda Cropp, a DC council member who chairs the
subcommittee on human services, announced Tuesday, at a September 30
hearing on the Federal waiver, that she was concerned that welfare
waiver would make the city a ``welfare magnet'' since there are tougher
standards in nearby jurisdictions.
She is exactly right. If you have tougher restrictions in Virginia
and Maryland, and in every other State, but you have no restrictions
and no limitations on welfare in the District of Columbia, it would be
more than a welfare magnet, it would be receiving welfare recipients
from all around. DC council member Harold Brazil said the waiver
``encourages dependency and ruins initiative.'' He is exactly right. I
will enter that in the Record as well.
I have a couple of articles that dealt with this issue. One was an op
ed piece that was in the Washington Post on September 15, 1996. It is
entitled, ``Welfare as Usual in D.C.; The bureaucrats Conspire to Block
Reforms,'' by Matthew Rees, as well as an op ed article by Naomi Lopes
and Michael Tanner, entitled, ``Welfare Reform Bypass for DC,'' and one
final op ed piece from Investor's Business Daily, ``Will Clinton Undo
Welfare Reform?"
I ask unanimous consent that all of the material I have referenced be
printed in the Record at this point.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Washington Post, Sept. 15, 1996]
Welfare as Usual in D.C.; The Bureaucrats Conspired To Block Reforms
Here
(By Matthew Rees)
It doesn't really matter how you measure the District's
social conditions, because by nearly every standard they are
appalling. The infant mortality rate is the highest in the
nation, the percentage of the population receiving benefits
through Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) is
double the national average, more than one-third of the
children are living in poverty and more than two-thirds are
born to single mothers. With the District leading the nation
in so many of the wrong categories, it could be an ideal
place to gauge the effectiveness of the welfare bill
President Clinton signed last month. Unfortunately, some
last-minute collaboration between the District and the
federal government means the nation's capital will be
experiencing little in the way of genuine welfare reform.
To better understand why the prospects for reform are dim,
you have to go back to Aug. 19. That was the day the Clinton
administration's Department of Health and Human Services
(HHS) issued a landmark announcement, telling the District it
was free to make cash payments to welfare recipients for up
to 10 years so long as the recipients ``made a good-faith
effort to find employment.'' The announcement also declared
that the District would be granted a relatively liberal
definition of what constitutes ``work.'' According to top
District officials, obtaining a driver's license, or
attending self-esteem classes, would meet the work standard.
The net effect of this decision was obvious: It undermined
the welfare legislation the president was about to sign. The
District would have no real obligation to comply with the
bill's five-year time limit on cash welfare benefits, and the
requirement that 50 percent of each state's welfare caseload
be engaged in strictly defined work activities by 2002 would
be considerably watered down. ``If you wanted to send a
message to the District that `we're not serious about welfare
reform,' a 10-year waiver was a pretty good way to do it,''
intones Mickey Kaus, a neoliberal commentator who's written
extensively on welfare.
Some see nothing wrong with the HHS exemption, known as a
``waiver,'' because it gets the District out from under the
new law's mandates and allows for local flexibility. That
would be an attractive argument if the District had followed
the lead of states with pioneering welfare reform projects,
such as Michigan and Wisconsin. Unfortunately, just the
opposite has been the case: The District maintains a welfare
system that is viewed by many welfare experts as one of the
country's least demanding, and least oriented toward reform.
The results speak for themselves.
That's why allowing the District to opt out of major
provisions of the new welfare law is such a grave error. Even
when confronted with scenes straight out of Dickens, the
District government has chosen to maintain the infrastructure
supporting these conditions. The genius of the federal
welfare bill is that while it gives states the freedom to
craft their own public assistance programs, it also gives
them positive and negative incentives to get people off
welfare before five years and require them to go to work
after two years. For the District to even come close to
complying with these demands would require trying new and
innovative approaches to old problems. With the waiver,
however, it's unlikely such approaches will be considered.
The pro-waiver arguments rested on a simple belief: The
District would suffocate under the new rules. It was,
therefore, preferable to preserve the old ones. HHS
spokeswoman Melissa Scolfield justified the waiver with the
explanation that ``we are, of course, sympathetic to the
special situation of the District.''
The shortcoming in this paternalistic approach is self
evident. Given the option of doing nothing versus
implementing reforms that result in some short-term pain for
some greater long-term gain, it's all too easy to choose the
former. The Clinton administration was in a position to
remove this option by denying the waiver request. But far
from discouraging it, top HHS officials saw the District as
an opportunity to subvert Clinton's stated intentions of
ending ``welfare as we know it.'' The waiver was originally
needed because of the welfare reform legislation approved by
Mayor Marion Barry in August 1995. Among other things, that
legislation instituted a ``family cap,'' which meant mothers
on welfare who had additional children would be denied
increased AFDC payments. Teen mothers could also be required
to attend school and live with a parent, guardian or adult
relative. While these are steps in the right direction--
though they appear to have substantial loopholes--they are
not the sweeping reforms the District desperately needs.
Nonetheless the District needed a waiver before it could
proceed because parts of the legislation conflicted with
federal law. Financial constraints meant the waiver
application wasn't submitted to HHS for nearly a year, and it
only happened then because President Clinton announced the he
would sign the Republican welfare bill.
The president's July 31 announcement set off a flurry of
activity at the upper echelons of HHS. Many of the agency's
welfare analysts opposed Clinton's decision--three of them
have resigned in protest--and they immediately set out to
soften the bill's impact, on the District in particular. Top
welfare officials in the District government were alerted to
the consequences of the legislation by Wendell Primus--one of
the HHS officials who has since resigned--and Robert
Greenstein, an influential private welfare analyst.
[[Page S10967]]
HHS helped fill out the waiver and put it through the ``fast
track'' approval process.
Most striking was the waiver's approval time. Republican
governors such as Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and John Engler
of Michigan have been highly critical of waiver delays,
charging that HHS bureaucrats have taken forever to approve
changes that have already been approved by their state
legislatures. Some have been held up for years, yet the
District's sailed through in just 13 days. Mary Jo Bane,
another of the HHS officials who resigned, was one of the
lead staffers who decided that the D.C. waiver--and seven
others--would be granted at the last minute.
This incurred the wrath of Bob Dole, the Republican
presidential nominee and congressional Republicans such as
Representative E. Clay Shaw, chairman of the congressional
subcommittee responsible for welfare legislation. Senator Don
Nickles, an Oklahoma Republican, has gone so far as to
introduce legislation seeking to repeal the waiver, charging
that the administration had approved it only because the
president was ``trying to placate some liberal people who did
not like him signing the welfare reform bill.'' The House
Ways and Means Committee will also be holding hearings on the
matter this week.
Certainly there are reasons for concern about how the
District would fare under a more restrictive system. HHS
officials were sure that the District wouldn't be able to
meet the legislation's work participation rates. Stephen
Fuller, a professor at George Mason University, points out
that the District had a net loss of 15,000 jobs over the past
12 months and has lost 60,000 job over the previous five
years. While there's been healthy employment growth in
Northern Virginia over the past year (25,000 new jobs),
nearly all of this growth has occurred outside the Beltway,
and it's been in sectors such as engineering and business
services.
Another factor is the District's unique demographics:
Welfare populations tend to be concentrated in the inner
cities, but each state's overall percentage of welfare
recipients levels out once it's balanced against the lower
percentage found in rural and suburban areas. The District
has no suburbs within its rapidly declining population of
560,000--the only state with fewer people is Wyoming--and
most of the recent population loss has come from those not on
welfare. In other words, there's good reason to expect the
proportion of District residents receiving AFDC--currently
about 13 percent--to remain stable or increase.
Yet some of these concerns may be exaggerated. The work
participation rates, for example, are nowhere near as
demanding as many analysts have claimed. Indeed, the
District--and all 50 states--have considerable flexibility in
determining how they meet the rates. Because the law contains
an array of loopholes, a state could have work participation
as low as 20 percent--as opposed to the 50 percent rate
spelled out in the legislation--and still be in full
compliance.
When the federal welfare legislation is viewed in this
light, the District's situation doesn't look so dire. The
current work participation rate among District welfare
recipients is 6 percent, and the District program is
recognized as one of the most poorly run in the country. Once
the new rules went into effect, as much as 10 percent of the
caseload could be expected to stop asking for welfare
(studies have shown this has happened elsewhere, probably
because some portion of welfare recipients are already
working in underground jobs). And at least some of the rest
would presumably respond to the threat of having their
benefits cut off and go to work. But extending the waiver for
such a long period of time ensures only that the status quo
will be preserved.
Or, it could get worse. One long-term effect of the waiver
could be that it attracts the poor of nearby states such as
Virginia and Maryland, which do have tough reforms in place.
In Virginia, for example, welfare recipients must go to work
within 90 days of beginning to receive public assistance.
``We want to make sure the District doesn't become a
welfare magnet,'' says D.C. Council member Linda W. Cropp (D-
At Large).
The fear grows out of the District's past experience with
providing relatively generous benefits to the homeless, only
to see the homeless population rapidly expand. The situation
with welfare is similar: The District's 1994 AFDC benefits
were $428 per month for a parent and two children (the 18th
highest when compared to the 50 states). This was $55 a month
higher than in Maryland, and $137 a month higher than in
Virginia, according to a recent study by the Washington-based
Population Reference Bureau. When these figures are mixed
with the generous time limits on the receipt of cash
benefits, and liberal regulations on work, the magnet effect
begins to look plausible.
District and HHS officials emphasize there was nothing
extraordinary about the waiver, which they claim was similar
to those granted other states, such as Wisconsin. But the
Wisconsin waiver is part of a strongly reform-oriented plan,
where the District's is not. The District will allow welfare
recipients to continue receiving cash benefits for a decade
or more, with minimal threat of being cut off. That
guarantees the District will have little or no real incentive
to begin the welfare-to-work experiments found in so many
other states.
At a time when the District's social conditions so clearly
scream out for major changes, it seems tragically misguided
to declare that the nation's capital will be not the first
place where there's welfare reform, but the last.
____
[Briefs from Washington]
Washington.--A waiver that protects the District of
Columbia from stringent welfare reforms is getting a cool
reception from some members of the city council.
Council member Linda Cropp, who chairs the committee on
human services, announced on Tuesday a September 30 hearing
on the Federal waiver.
Cropp said she was concerned the waiver will make the city
a ``welfare magnet'' since there are tougher standards in
nearby jurisdictions.
Under reform legislation passed by Congress, most welfare
recipients who do not find work cannot continue to receive
benefits for more than five years.
The waiver backed by President Clinton and Mayor Marion
Barry gives the city a 10-year exemption.
Councilman Harold Brazil said the waiver encourages
dependency and ``ruins initiative.''
The council members aren't alone. Some Republicans in
Congress have already voiced their opposition to the waiver.
At a hearing Tuesday before the Human Resources
subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee,
Congressman E. Clay Shaw Jr., R-Fla., said if the city plans
to use the waiver to exempt more than 20 percent of its
current caseload, he will move to repeal the exemption.
Democrats countered by saying Idaho, Michigan,
Massachusetts and Washington state have all been granted
similar exemptions.
____
Will Clinton Undo Welfare Reform?
Having shifted right by signing the Republican welfare-
reform bill, President Clinton is now doing all he can to
assure the left that he will ``correct'' the new law.
Machiavelli would be proud.
We can see why Clinton would like political cover on
welfare: the left is dead certain the new law will cause
untold suffering. And the media seem to feel obliged to give
heavy play to anything--instant studies, predictable
resignations--that feeds those fears.
Why is the hue and cry so much greater after the fact? Some
on the left no doubt were surprised when the president signed
the law. Others may think the suffering they expect to see is
necessary, but still feel guilty about it. Now that it's too
late to change matters, they can safely stand on principle--
and demonstrate their purity, too.
Such mixed motives are natural to any large group. Much
stranger are the conflicting signals that come from a single
man: our president.
Clinton has already promised that, if he can't get the
members of Congress to revise the law in the ways he wants,
he'll enforce it as if they had.
Thus, he signed a bill into law, but he's actually going to
implement something else. It's an incredible bait-and-switch,
even for Bill Clinton.
But this is just the culmination of his welfare politics.
In 1992, ``New Democrat'' Clinton vowed to ``end welfare as
we know it.'' But in 1993 and 1994, when his own Democrats
ran Congress, he dropped the ball.
After voters handed Congress to Republicans, the GOP called
Clinton's bluff by sending him a welfare-reform bill not
wholly unlike the one he just signed. Clinton vetoed it.
Congress sent up another: He vetoed that, too.
Enter '96, a campaign year. Republicans drafted a third
welfare-reform bill. Bob Dole prepared to bash Clinton for
delivering three vetoes where he had promised reform. So the
president finally, reluctantly, signed.
As he's done so often before, Clinton thus signaled to the
voters that he'd learned his ways, that he'd moved
permanently to the right. Yet he knows full well that he'll
turn left after the election. With welfare reform, though,
he's signaling left at the same time. Clinton has his hazard
lights on.
The welfare backflip exposes what's fundamentally wrong
with this White House: It governs by fraud. What's more, it
has no shame.
Take Vice President Al Gore's comments on a recent Sunday
talk show:
The vice president admitted the welfare system is ``cruel''
and needs to be changed. Yet, seconds later, he pointed out
that the welfare act's changes do not go into effect until
July 1, 1997--leaving plenty of time for Clinton and a
Democrat Congress to scrap the law.
And if Republicans maintain control, Gore added, Clinton
would use the line-item veto to fix things Clinton and
liberals don't like about the bill.
What things are those? Ask the first lady. Interviewed in
Chicago, she said she didn't like the limits on food stamps
or on payouts to legal immigrants. She said she'll speak out
next year to ``correct'' the welfare-reform bill that her
husband signed.
If the bill was so flawed, why sign it in the first place?
No one held a gun to the president's head. Why not work to
fix it, and sign it later?
The questions are obvious. But such logic doesn't work with
Clinton. Stand on principle? Avoid shame? This politician
never shoots straight: Everything is a bank-shot, or worse.
It's no wonder polls show a majority of us do not trust our
president. How can we? Not only can we not trust him to do
what he says. We can't even trust him to do what he
[[Page S10968]]
does, because he undoes what he does. Next thing, he'll be
telling us that's not what he did.
Accepting the GOP nomination, Bob Dole spoke scornfully of
leaders ``unwilling to risk the truth, to speak without
calculation.'' he went on: ``All things flow from doing what
is right.''
Reforming welfare is right. Now we just need a leader who
will do what is right.
____
[From the Washington Times]
Welfare Reform Bypass for D.C.
(By Naomi Lopez/Michael Tanner)
``Welfare as we know it'' has been ended, right? Well, not
in the District of Columbia. Even as President Clinton was
signing the new welfare reform bill with one hand, with the
other he was simultaneously granting the District, a 10-year
waiver exempting it from most of the requirements in the new
welfare bill, including time-limited assistance and certain
work requirements.
The waiver for D.C.'s ``Project on Work, Employment, and
Responsibility'' (POWER), submitted in early August, was
rushed through the Department of Health and Human Services'
``fast track'' waiver approval process just three days before
Mr. Clinton signed welfare reform into law. As a result,
welfare reform will have only a minimal impact on welfare
dependency in the District and an even smaller impact on D.C.
welfare spending.
For example, the welfare reform bill calls for a five-year
lifetime limit on welfare benefits. Not under the District's
waiver; there would be no cutoff of benefits for any D.C.
resident who could not find a job that pays more than welfare
benefits. The most unfortunate aspect of this exemption is
that the District, aided and abetted by the Clinton
administration, is sending a message that the rules will not
apply to its residents and that cash assistance is still an
entitlement.
While one of the big selling points of the new welfare
reform law was its requirement that welfare recipients work
in exchange for benefits, the District's waiver defines work
activities so liberally as to be meaningless. Attending a
job-training program or engaging in job search (i.e., looking
for work) will be enough to satisfy the District's work
requirement. Thus, welfare in the District will remain pretty
much as we know it. Yet few welfare systems are as badly in
need of reform.
Despite the fact that 1 in 6 District residents are on
welfare, more than a third of District children still live in
poverty. Out-of-wedlock births have reached alarming
proportions. Of the District's more than 50,000 children in
welfare families, 83 percent were born out of wedlock and 10
percent come from broken homes. Only a mere 1 percent of Aid
to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) households contain
two parents. * * *
While one of the big selling points of the new welfare
reform law was its requirement that welfare recipients work
in exchange for benefits, the District's waiver defines work
activities so liberally as to be meaningless. Attending a
job-training program or engaging in job search (i.e., looking
for work) will be enough to satisfy the District's work
requirement. Thus, welfare in the District will remain pretty
much as we know it. Yet few welfare systems are as badly in
need of reform.
Despite the fact that 1 in 6 District residents are on
welfare, more than a third of District children still live in
poverty. Out-of-wedlock births have reached alarming
proportions. Of the District's more than 50,000 children in
welfare families, 83 percent were born out of wedlock and 10
percent come from broken homes. Only a mere 1 percent of Aid
to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) households contain
two parents. Long-term dependency is increasingly the norm as
is second- and third-generation welfare dependence.
D.C. has followed the liberal route of trying to solve its
welfare problems with money. On a per capita basis, the
District has the highest federal social welfare program
spending in the nation. Of the 50 states and District, the
District ranks:
First in per capita federal spending on AFDC, food stamps,
Medicaid, housing assistance, job training under the Job
Training Partnership Act, and community development.
Second on Medicare and state employment services.
Fourth on compensatory education for disadvantaged
children.
Fifth on Supplemental Security Income and the social
service block grant.
Twelfth on child nutrition programs.
The value of the full package of welfare benefits in the
District (including cash assistance, food stamps and
nutrition assistance, housing assistance, Medicaid and so on)
totals more than $22,745 per year for a single mother with
two children. Because welfare benefits are tax-free, a
working person would have to earn nearly $14 per hour to take
home an equivalent paycheck. Indeed, the District's welfare
package is the fifth-most-generous in the nation. Is it any
wonder that so many recipients make the rational choice of
welfare over work?
The welfare reform bill fell far short of what is necessary
to truly end welfare as we know it. But the District, with
the complicity of the Clinton administration, seems unwilling
to make any change in the status quo.
The District government is setting up a social time bomb
that the rest of the nation will, most likely, be responsible
for defusing. In 10 years, the District's waiver will expire
only after it will have promoted and perpetuated a failed and
reckless system. And at that time, the federal government
will be called upon to bail out the District again. By that
time, the damage may be irreversible.
Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, the Washington Post today had an
editorial that was critical of me. Basically, it said, wait a minute,
we granted waivers to other areas. Why would you try and take away
parts of the waiver--they actually said we were repealing the entire
waiver. They were wrong. Why would you do this just for the District of
Columbia if not for other areas?
The legislation I introduced, frankly, did not apply just to the
District of Columbia. It says a 5-year time limit applies to everybody
in the country. There won't be a single waiver to exempt someone from
the 5-year limit. That was the guts of the bill. There would not be a
waiver that would undo work requirements. Those were the two major
elements of the bill. It just so happens that the District of Columbia
was the only waiver request that went directly away from welfare
reform.
There are 30 States, plus the District of Columbia, who have received
welfare waivers. Guess what? All 30, except for the District of
Columbia, moved toward work requirements, toward time limits--most of
which had shorter time limits than 5 years. But not the District of
Columbia; it was a waiver away from welfare reform, a waiver for the
status quo, and it was a waiver, basically, where President Clinton and
the Clinton administration was saying: District of Columbia, you are
exempt from welfare reform. We don't think you need to do it.
I am pleased I finally hear that HHS has rescinded the order. I
believe they did it because it is the political season, and they knew
they were going to take some heat. They made a serious mistake. But we
have to make sure they are not just postponing it for 2 months. We want
to make absolutely sure that there is no way that sometime after the
election, in November or December, they would go ahead and grant a 10-
year waiver. We want to make sure that is not up their sleeve. If we
have to pass legislation to make sure of that, we will do it. There is
no reason in the world why we would work as hard as we did for real
welfare reform for everybody in the country--to end cash assistance as
an open-ended entitlement, a perpetual way of living--and not do it in
the District of Columbia.
I might mention, Mr. President, I think there are some games that
were played. This waiver request by the Clinton administration was
granted in 14 days. I might tell my colleagues that some areas have had
waiver requests pending before the administration for months, some for
years, some for 2 years, all of which were trying to have a waiver from
the old law, which would not allow time limits. Most of the waivers
that States wanted to enact, like Wisconsin, Illinois, Oklahoma, and
others, wanted to have time limits and work requirements. They wanted
people to get off welfare and go to work. They wanted to have learnfare
requirements where children of welfare recipients would be required to
go to school, like every other child. If they didn't have their kids in
school, they would lose welfare payments; or they have to make sure
their kids receive vaccinations, or they might receive penalties.
States have had great initiatives. So this administration has been
very slow on many of those States. As a matter of fact, the President,
in May, made a nationwide radio address complimenting Wisconsin on
their welfare reform and talked about granting their waiver, and this
is great. Guess what? He hasn't granted the Wisconsin waiver yet. That
was months ago. But he granted the DC waiver in 14 days. That was
granted right before signing the welfare reform bill. And the DC waiver
had no time limits. It has a 10-year exemption. How is that fair to the
people in New Hampshire? They are going to have a limitation on how
long they can receive cash payments. The State of Hawaii had a waiver
request granted by the administration in just the last couple of
months, since signing the bill. But the State of Hawaii had a 5-year
limit. Indiana got a waiver request signed, but it was a 2-year limit,
not a 5-year limit. But the District of Columbia comes up and, in 14
days--unbelievable speed for the Department of
[[Page S10969]]
Health Human Services--they get a waiver signed by the President that
says you are going to have a 10-year exemption--10 years, no limit, and
no work requirement. What a sham. What a shame. What a shame that this
President and this administration would be so deceitful as to try to
pull that over on the American people.
I am pleased that the Department of Health and Human Services
realized their mistake. My guess is that the political people said,
``Hey. This could come back to hurt us, or haunt us. Therefore, let us
withdraw it.''
I am pleased that the District of Columbia City Council, which never
requested a 10-year waiver on work requirements, never requested a 10-
year waiver on lifetime benefits--I am pleased that some of the council
members realized that this is terrible. This would be a disaster for
the District of Columbia. So I am pleased that evidently not only are
they going to have some hearings but some Members think it would be a
serious mistake, and they don't want the District of Columbia to become
the welfare capital of the United States.
So I am pleased with the announcement of HHS today. I think the
administration got caught in trying to have it both ways on welfare
reform. To say ``Yes, we need welfare reform with time limits and work
requirements'' while at the same time trying to undo welfare reform--to
exempt work requirements, to exempt time limits--they should be ashamed
of themselves. I am pleased they reversed themselves for about the
fourth time on this issue.
I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.
____________________