[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 31, Number 36 (Monday, September 11, 1995)]
[Pages 1508-1509]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Letter to Congressional Leaders on Welfare Reform

September 6, 1995

Dear Mr. Leader:

    I am glad the Senate has finally come to this important debate on 
welfare reform. The American people have waited a long time for this. We 
owe it to the people who sent us here not to let this opportunity slip 
away by doing the wrong thing or by failing to act at all.
    Over the last two and a half years, my Administration has 
aggressively pursued welfare reform at every turn. We proposed sweeping 
welfare reform legislation to impose time limits and work requirements 
and promote the values of work, responsibility, and family. We have put 
tough child support enforcement at the center of the national welfare 
reform debate: My Administration collected a record level of child 
support in 1993--$9 billion--and I signed a far-reaching Executive Order 
to crack down on federal employees who owe child support.
    We have put the country on the road to ending welfare as we know it, 
by approving welfare reform experiments in a record 34 states. Through 
these experiments, 7 million recipients around the country are now being 
required to work, pay child support, live at home and stay in school, 
sign a personal responsibility contract, or earn a paycheck from a 
business that uses money that was spent on food stamp and welfare 
benefits to subsidize private sector jobs. Today, my Administration is 
granting two more waivers to expand successful state experiments in 
Ohio, which rewards teen mothers who stay in school and sanctions those 
who don't, and in Florida, which requires welfare recipients to go to 
work as a condition of their benefits and provides child care when they 
do.
    I am confident that what we're doing to reform welfare around the 
country is helping to instill the values all Americans share. Now we 
need to pass a welfare reform bill that ends the current welfare system 
altogether and replaces it with one that puts work, responsibility, and 
family first.
    That is why I strongly support and urge you to pass the welfare 
reform bill sponsored by Senators Daschle, Breaux, and Mikulski that is 
before the Senate today. Instead of maintaining the current broken 
system which undermines our basic values, the Daschle-Breaux-Mikulski 
plan demands responsibility and requires people to work. The Work First 
bill will cut the budget by moving people to work, not by asking states 
to handle more problems with less money and shipping state and local 
taxpayers the bill.
    I support the Work First plan because welfare reform is first and 
foremost about work. We should impose time limits and tough work 
requirements, and make sure that people get the child care they need to 
go to work. We should reward states for putting people to work, not for 
cutting people off. We will only end welfare as we know it if we succeed 
in moving people from welfare to work.
    Welfare reform is also about family. That means the toughest 
possible child support enforcement, because people who bring children 
into this world should take responsibility for them, not just walk away. 
It also means requiring teen mothers to live at home, stay in school, 
and turn their lives around--not

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punishing children for the mistakes of their parents.
    Finally, welfare reform must be about responsibility. States have a 
responsibility to maintain their own efforts to move people from welfare 
to work, so that we can have a race to independence, not a race to the 
bottom. Individuals have a responsibility to work in return for the help 
they receive. The days of something for nothing are over. It is time to 
make welfare a second chance, and responsibility a way of life.
    We have a ways to go in this welfare reform debate, but we have made 
progress. I have always sought to make welfare reform a bipartisan 
issue. The dignity of work, the bond of family, and the virtue of 
responsibility are not Republican values or Democratic values. They are 
American values--and no child in America should ever have to grow up 
without them. We can work toward a welfare reform agreement together, as 
long as we remember the values this debate is really about.
    The attached Statement of Administration Policy spells out my views 
on the pending legislation in further detail.
    Sincerely,
                                                  Bill Clinton

Note: Identical letters were sent to Bob Dole, Senate majority leader, 
and Thomas A. Daschle, Senate minority leader.