[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 32 (Friday, March 12, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2791-S2792]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. ROCKEFELLER:
  S. 2213. A bill to amend part A of title IV of the Social Security 
Act to require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to conduct 
research on indicators of child well-being; to the Committee on 
Finance.
  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. President, I am pleased to introduce legislation 
today designed to enhance child well-being in every State by collecting 
data on a State-by-State basis to provide information to advocates and 
policy makers about the well-being of children. My hope is that this 
legislation could be incorporated into a welfare reform reauthorization 
package. I believe that the Senate should reauthorize our welfare 
program, known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), and we 
should do it soon. But when we reauthorize TANF we must significantly 
invest in child care which is essential for parents to move from 
welfare to work, and to be successful on the job once they leave the 
official welfare rolls.
  In 1996 this body took a bold step forward in reforming welfare. The 
driving force behind this reform was to promote work and self-
sufficiency for families and to provide flexibility to States to 
achieve these goals.
  States have used this flexibility to design different programs that 
work better for families who rely on them. Because of vast variation 
among State programs, there is an obvious need for research on child 
well-being for each State. We currently use the Survey of Income and 
Program Participation (SIPP) to evaluate the progress of welfare. It is 
an important national longitudinal study designed to provide rich, 
detailed data; the kinds of data most useful to academic researchers. 
It does not, however, provide States with good, timely data to help 
them more effectively accomplish the goals set forth in welfare reform.
  This bill, the State Child Well Being Research Act of 2004, is 
intended to fill this information gap by collecting timely, State-
specific data that can be used by policy-makers, researchers, and child 
advocates to assess the well being of children. It would require that a 
survey examine the physical and emotional health of children, 
adequately represent the experiences of families in individual States, 
be consistent across States, be collected annually, articulate results 
in easy to understand terms, and focus on low-income children and 
families.
  The proposed legislation will provide data for all States, including 
small rural States like West Virginia. Further, this bill avoids some 
of the other problems that plague the current system by making data 
files easier to use and more readily available. As a result, the 
information will be more useful for policy-makers managing welfare 
reform and programs for children and families. When we reauthorize 
welfare reform, it will be essential for us to make a modest investment 
in research for every State.
  Several private charitable foundations, including the Annie E. Casey, 
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, and McKnight foundations have 
written Chairman Grassley and Senator Baucus in support of such 
research. These foundations have offered to form a partnership to 
provide outreach and support and to guarantee that the data

[[Page S2792]]

collected would be broadly disseminated. This type of public-private 
partnership helps to leverage additional resources for children and 
families and increases the study's impact.
  One of the most important ways that Congress can demonstrate its 
commitment to welfare reform and attempt to help States reach the goals 
outlined in 1996 is to incorporate a strong research component in the 
welfare reform reauthorization bill. Since each State has used its 
flexibility to creative innovative welfare reform programs, and many 
are quite different, we need State-by-State data on basic aspects of 
child well-being. I hope that my colleagues will support this bill so 
that we can give States the information they need to monitor and 
improve child well-being.
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