TANF Extension Act of 2005

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself as much time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, these are going to be the two classic glass-half-empty/ glass-half-full speeches because the chairman has told you the good things that have happened, and there are some. But, today, we have two bad choices in front of us. The first is to support this BandAid approach that has temporarily continued the funding for TANF and the child care development block grants for yet another 3 months. The other alternative is to abandon our most vulnerable citizens until the Republican majority accepts its responsibility to chart a new course that provides a helping hand, not a slap on the wrist.

Now, I deplore these kind of crossroads at which we stand. Ten times in the last 3 years we have stood right here, as we do today, the lives and welfare of the disadvantaged hanging in the balance. At a time like this, America should shine. Instead, the Republican majority strains the needs of our most vulnerable citizens to the breaking point.

Ten temporary extensions over 3 years should send the House a clear and unmistakable message. We need to treat America's disadvantaged as first class citizens by charting a new course for the long-term reauthorization of the TANF program.

On this Republican watch, the House has taken up hopelessly divisive bills that have drawn the condemnation of mayors, governors, welfare directors, religious leaders and poverty experts.

Time and again, the Republicans have tried to terminate Federal responsibility by replacing State flexibility with unfunded mandates and changing the focus of welfare reform from real jobs to make-work. Nothing good comes from this approach.

Instead, this wrong path has led to legislative gridlock. Those who suffer most are those who most need our help. The disadvantaged need our compassionate ideas and commitment to promote reforms that will help them leave welfare and actually escape poverty. This goal is particularly important when you consider that an additional 4.3 million Americans have fallen into poverty over the last 3 years for which we have data. In 2003 alone, almost another 800,000 children fell into poverty. Now, that should be a rallying cry, driving us to act.

But, instead, the Republicans use the misfortune of some Americans to suggest that poverty is rising because welfare recipients are not working hard enough. That is just wrong. It is callous and cold- hearted. The problem is not the unwillingness of people on welfare to work. The problem is too many of those leaving welfare are not finding work, or they are finding jobs that do not lift them out of poverty. We could, of course, help by providing more child-care assistance, job training and a higher minimum wage, but the Republican leadership and the President have resisted such reforms. Instead, the Republicans try to sell the same worn-out threadbare suit of clothes again.

It happened again in March when the majority unveiled their new 3- year old idea from the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources. Nothing has happened since. Nothing, leaving many to believe the Republican leadership intends to include the welfare legislation as part of the upcoming budget reconciliation bill rather than considering it as a separate measure. Such a process will make it harder to provide the necessary investments in child care because Republicans know the budget reconciliation process is meant to cut programs, not improve them. And that is just fine by the Republican leadership because they do not believe working families deserve any more help for child care. Like so much from their leadership, the rhetoric does not match the reality.

According to data from their own HHS, Health and Human Services Department, only about a quarter of the children who are eligible for child-care subsidies under State eligibility criteria actually receive assistance. This fraction drops to roughly one out of seven, if you use the Federal eligibility standard for daycare assistance. The data does not lie. We are falling short in helping low-income families meet the challenges of raising a family and at the same time going to work.

President Bush's response to this problem is to make it even worse. His proposed 2006 budget shows the number of people receiving child assistance will decline, decline by 300,000 over the next 5 years. So the administration is proposing even greater work requirements for welfare recipients at the same time that the President proposes cutting child care. So much for a helping hand.

My friends on the other side of the aisle suggest their bill is modestly more generous on child care than the administration's budget. However, that Republican package, in reality, underfunds child care assistance by $10.6 billion over the next 5 years. That is their calculation.

Republicans want to outsource Federal responsibility to the States without a dime more to address a $10 billion deficit. That leads nowhere except forcing States to face deep cuts in child-care assistance for the working poor.

Mr. Speaker, there is a better way. We have proposed legislation that gives the States the flexibility and the funding needed to move welfare recipients into real jobs and out of poverty. It is the right thing to do, and this is the right time to do it. And with that hope, I support this temporary extension of the current law. I will not abandon disadvantaged Americans at the very time they need us most.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin).

I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey).

(Ms. WOOLSEY asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin).

(Mr. LEVIN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, it really speaks volumes that there is no one who wants to come out here and talk about what happens to ordinary people here in this country.

The last election was one in which people said the issue was whether people had values or not. The values that the Democrats have stood for for 70 years, really since the Depression, were a minimum income for everyone.

Now, let us start with the minimum wage. We have not raised the minimum wage in this House since 1997. We raised our own salary yesterday 2 percent or whatever it was. I do not know. But the people at the bottom have not had an increase since 1997.

We take a young woman who has got a kid and got out of high school and did not graduate, and we send her out and say, go get a job, go get a job; and she gets a job at minimum wage which amounts to about 50 percent of the poverty level. That is not a value that I support.

Housing is another value that we should be talking about. These people are struggling to find a place to live in the city close to their job. In Seattle you cannot find very many places inside the city. As we gentrify the centers of the city, the people have to move out farther and farther and farther to the point where the bus lines require a couple of hours to get into the city to work at a minimum- wage job.

Health care, another value. There should not have to be a colloquy over here about whether we are going to provide health care for these people. We know that we need a workforce that is healthy. We need people going to work who are healthy, and we need children who are healthy who can go to school and learn and become part of an educated workforce. To fail these children in their earliest years is to present ourselves with a problem. Maybe not us, because we will not be here when the kids who are on welfare today become a problem for the Congress, but 20 years from now people are going to say, why did we not have health care?

The reason we wound up with a school lunch program in this country was because when they went to drafting people in the Second World War, they had so many recruits that had nutrition-related diseases that they had

to reject them. And so, Mr. Truman, it was not some big-hearted thing, he started the school lunch program so that we would have healthy kids. And yet we are still questioning whether these youngsters, we are putting the pressure on the States to make cuts in welfare in every single jurisdiction.

The chorus of hollering is going to start when these bills start passing and State governments have to deal with what we have put out there as an insurmountable problem for them, a mandate from us that they have to find the money for.

Finally, education of kids. That is a value. You want kids to have an education. You want parents to have an education. Kids follow the model of their own parents. If we do not help these people on welfare get an education, if we make it an insurmountable task, the kids do not see their own mother or own father get an education.

My belief is we can do better than this, and I hope when we pass a permanent bill we will.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 3021) to reauthorize the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant program through September 30, 2005, and for other purposes, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 3021, the TANF Extension Act of 2005, as amended. This legislation will extend for 3 additional months certain welfare programs, including the Temporary Assistance For Needy Families and child care programs within the Committee on Ways and Mean's jurisdiction, so those programs would continue to operate at their current funding levels through September 30, 2005.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), the distinguished chairman of the Committee on the Budget and a member of the Committee on Ways and Means.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, this will be the 10th extension of these programs since the original authorization of the 1996 welfare reform law expired in 2002. That law produced remarkable results. Work among welfare recipients doubled. The poorest single-mother families reported a 67 percent increase in their real earnings between 1995 and 2002. Single mothers' real wages continued to increase during the 2000-2004 period, despite the 2001 recession and terrorist attacks.

Despite predictions of welfare reform opponents that the 1996 welfare bill would increase poverty, the number of children in poverty fell by more than 1 million. The black and Hispanic child-poverty rates hit record lows. Welfare caseloads fell 60 percent to their lowest levels since 1965. Welfare funds stayed constant, and child care funds grew, even as caseloads plummeted. Taxpayer resources per family on welfare more than doubled from $7,000 per year to $16,000 per year today.

In 2002 and 2003, the House passed comprehensive welfare reform legislation that would have extended these programs for a full 5 years. That legislation also included modest adjustments designed to encourage and support more work, higher incomes, stronger families, and less poverty. These House-passed bills offered up to $4 billion over 5 years and added child care funding to support more work.

Unfortunately, our friends in the Senate did not follow suit, and so we have been forced to come to the floor with repeated short-term extensions.

Mr. Speaker, it is important that we continue these programs, and I urge all Members to support this legislation. But while we mark time, we are missing out on many ways to help even more low-income parents and families leave welfare for work. We must do more to encourage States and local communities to support strong, healthy families.

The subcommittee I chair has, once again, approved legislation that tracks the comprehensive welfare reform bill of the House that the House passed before. I expect in the coming months the full committee on Ways and Means and this House will once again act on comprehensive welfare reform legislation as part of the budget reconciliation process. Regardless of the process, our goals remain the same: to encourage and support more work, less poverty, and stronger families.

Mr. Speaker, I believe this process of continued extensions of welfare programs is finally nearing an end. I look forward to working with our Members to get this done so more families can know the dignity of collecting paychecks instead of welfare checks.

In the meantime, I urge support of the legislation before us that continues these welfare programs in their current form.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I would like to remind the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) that, during the last several years, we have passed out of this House two bills, both of which have offered as much as $4 billion more for child care, both of which the gentleman from Washington opposed.

I might also mention that welfare case loads during this period of time of this legislation has fallen by 9 million, from 14 million recipients in 1994 to fewer than 5 million today. Again, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

I think it is very clear how incredibly successful this program has been, and we need to move forward to make it even more successful.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I would like to remind, again, those who speak detrimentally of this legislation that, since their opposition to this, no additional $4 billion for child care over the next 5 years has been able to have been offered. No assurance for full TANF funding through 2010 has been able to be available, that would be available in this legislation. No assurance of supplemental grants for low benefits in poor States. No assurance. And it goes on and on.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, in 2002 and 2003 this House passed long-term reauthorization legislation to encourage more work among welfare recipients and to provide more resources for States to assist low- income families. And I have heard several on the other side, my good friend from Washington, talk about values, talk about Democrat values, Republican values. He spoke about the amount of funding.

Let me just mention that under the Democrat values of the programs that we had twice as many who were on welfare than were on welfare today because caseloads were cut in half during our current legislation while Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, TANF, funds were fixed and child care funds grew, Federal funds per TANF families more than doubled. As a matter of fact, in 1996 the average family under the old Democrat plan had $6,934 average approximate per family. In 2004 these same families had $16,185 because the program was block granted, and it was an equal amount of funding coming in and it was not reduced.

This, Mr. Speaker, would be the 10th extension of these programs since 2002. However, I believe this process of continued extensions of welfare programs is finally nearing an end. I expect that the House will soon act on and pass comprehensive welfare reform legislation as part of the budget reconciliation process. But until that happens, it is important that we continue these programs and we do need to pass this bill today. Therefore, I urge all of my colleagues to support this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, as mentioned, this would be the 10th extension. And everyone has the right to ask, why another extension, instead of our buckling down and being able to pass a welfare reform bill.

There is an effort, I think, to blame the Senate. I do not think we forget who controls the Senate. But let us forget about that. Because I think the main problem is the approach of the House majority, and when it comes to this as has been true of so many other programs, it is their way or no way. And so far when it comes to further work on welfare reform, it has been no way.

Now, that may be better, and I think it is, than what they have proposed here; but still we should be able to, as I said, buckle down and tackle this issue. We have not done so.

There has been zero effort by the Republican majority in this House to sit down with Democrats and see where we go from here. Zero.

There has been success under welfare reform as we passed some years ago. There have been some successes. The rolls have been cut in half and the majority of those who are leaving welfare have worked since they left. And two-thirds now of the people receiving welfare or TANF are engaged in work. But the problem is that so many of them are not moving up the economic ladder.

These are the government figures: 60 to 70 percent of those who have moved from welfare to work, 60 to 70 percent are essentially earning at the poverty level or worse. In contrast, those who leave welfare and move into higher starting wages were 40 percent more likely to be working 2 years later, and those receiving child care assistance, the same way.

So some years ago we worked, President Clinton proposed it, there was passage by the House and Senate. He vetoed it twice because there was inadequate child care, inadequate health care. The Congress, with a number of us working on it, paid attention to those and it passed on a bipartisan basis. But there is no effort to move to another stage of welfare reform, and that is to make sure that it is structured so that people can move off welfare into jobs that do not lead them into poverty.

Instead, the Republican majority here has proposed not moving people off welfare into work that takes them out of poverty, but emphasizing or talking only really about those who are on welfare and moving into work regardless of the consequences. And we in the minority here have proposed bills that would continue State flexibility which would be taken away by the majority here and would reward States if they moved people off welfare into good-paying jobs. They would take care of the technical problems with health care, transitional Medicaid and also would restore full funding to the Social Services block grant.

So in a word, I say to the chairman of the subcommittee, instead of simply extending this bill because you are unwilling to sit down on a bipartisan basis and work on further important welfare reform, I urge you to instead of just kind of stonewalling, sit down with us and see if we cannot do still better.

Mr. Speaker, let me thank the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, I must tell you, I am extremely disappointed. In 2002, the TANF law expired. This is the tenth temporary extension. These are missed opportunities. The Democrats believe that we should extend the TANF bill. But we should stop trying to micromanage from Washington, one size fits all, and we should provide resources necessary for our States to be able to lift American families out of poverty.

Our objective in TANF reauthorization should be to lift families out of poverty, yet the bills that have passed this body that the chairman of the committee has referred to fails to incorporate lifting families out of poverty as a core requirement of TANF.

We should be providing education and training to the mothers leaving welfare so that they can move up the economic ladder, yet the bills that have passed this body have restricted our States in their ability to provide education and training to the people on welfare.

We should be providing safe and affordable child care so that families can, in fact, move up the economic ladder and accept employment opportunities. Yet the bills that have passed this body have provided inadequate funds for child care. We have provided more mandates, $11 billion more needed in child care alone, yet the bill that passed this body provides only $1 billion, an unfunded Federal mandate. We can do better.

If we really want to lift families out of poverty, let us sit down now. Stop stalling. Let us work together, Democrats and Republicans, so that we can have a TANF reauthorization bill that will help American families out of poverty rather than the bills that have passed this body that will step backward.

Mr. Speaker, let me just point out to the gentleman from California, we have worked together when he was chairman and I was ranking member. I would just urge the gentleman to sit down and try to work out a bill that represents the views of all people of this country and all 435 Members of this distinguished body.

I would point out very clearly that, the last time I checked, the Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate and the White House since 2002, and yet we have been unable to pass a TANF reauthorization bill.

Stop placing blame. Let us sit down and work together. Give us a chance to sit at the table, and you are going to have a much better bill that will help American families escape poverty and will give the resources necessary to the States so that they can get the job done and will provide safe and affordable daycare, child care for the families that need it.

In my own State of Maryland, the only way you can get child care is to go on welfare. That is the wrong message. Let us get it done right.

Mr. Speaker, here we go again. Instead of making the TANF law better, instead of giving welfare recipients the tools needed to move from welfare to self-sufficiency, we are once again extending a bill that has continuously moved people from welfare into permanent poverty.

Why are we not making education or training count as a work activity for welfare recipients so that individuals can receive the skills they need for jobs that actually pay a livable wage, jobs that pay above the poverty level?

Why are we not providing quality available child care that includes care for infants and for weekend and evening workers to help welfare parents keep their jobs and become self-sufficient, because if parents do not have a safe convenient place to leave their children, they cannot go to work? And if they do, they can really concentrate on their job. Believe me, I know because, over 35 years ago, I was a single mother with three small children. My children were 1, 3 and 5 years old, and their father financially abandoned us. Even though I was working full-time, I needed welfare to keep our lives together. But it was not until my mother moved to our town and I could have her take care of the children during the day that I could pay 100 percent attention to the work that I was doing. As soon as she moved into town, I was promoted to management in my company because I did not have one ear and eye home and one at the job. And then when I got home, I was 100 percent there for my children. But when I was at work, I was 100 percent at work.

So I was promoted to management, and later, I worked my way off welfare and off poverty. Eventually, I started my own business, and now I am a seven-term Member of the House of Representatives. Let me tell you, I am not sure any of that could have happened without the help and the leg up that I received from the welfare system. And believe me, I have paid back into the system many, many times over, and so have most of the women who have been given a chance for a higher education, who have been given the support of a good child care system to help them stay in the work force so that they can achieve.

So why are we wasting our time extending something that has moved welfare recipients, yes, out of welfare, but yes, into poverty with an idea they may never be able to move out of poverty because they have not gotten the assistance that they need? They will pay back to the system many times over, I promise you.