In the 1990s, I taught office skills in a welfare-to-work program. Most of my students were women, and most came in with a beaten-down mindset. Some carried visible scars — one came to class with bruises around her neck after her ex-husband broke into her home and tried to murder her. Others carried invisible scars, the result of generational poverty and lives spent hearing they would never amount to anything.
There was the mother and daughter — both gorgeous, smart, and desperate to get off welfare. There were women who had committed petty crimes, women who chain-smoked through every break, and women who had never once been told that they could do something with their lives.
At first, I didn’t know what to do. I could have stayed apart, just the instructor at the front of the room. Instead, I chose to immerse myself in their lives. Even though I was allergic to tobacco, I went outside with them during smoke breaks. I listened. I learned. And I became their friend as well as their teacher.
Inside the classroom, my co-instructor and I treated every mistake as a gift. When a student asked for help, Vicky would exclaim, “Yes! I’m so glad you have this problem. Everyone, come over here — let me show you how to solve it.”
At first, the women were terrified. For people at their economic level, mistakes could be catastrophic — miss a payment, lose a form, forget a rule, and the bottom fell out. They were completely risk-averse. But slowly, they began to realize that in our classroom, mistakes weren’t punishable — they were how you learned.
And once that shift happened, they began to flourish. By the end of the program, nearly every woman had found a job — except for one with poorly controlled epilepsy who simply couldn’t function in an office. The rest discovered that they were capable, valuable, and worthy of self-respect.
That program wasn’t just a personal triumph. It was part of a broader national surge under the 1996 welfare reform — a bipartisan agreement between President Bill Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich that sought to “end welfare as we know it.” AFDC was replaced with TANF, lifetime benefits were capped at five years, and work or training became requirements. The results were dramatic: welfare rolls dropped by over 50%, employment among single mothers rose by more than 15 percentage points, and poverty among black children reached its lowest historical level.
But that progress began to erode. Court decisions, state waivers, and policy shifts diluted TANF’s work requirements. Meanwhile, other assistance programs grew — often without work incentives. Medicaid enrollment climbed from around 40 million in 2002 to over 92 million by 2022, now touching one in four Americans. SNAP expanded from covering 7–11% of households in 1980–2008 to nearly 19% by 2013 — over 40 million people today. And states began extending welfare benefits to illegal aliens, even though they tried to deny and hide it.
For many families, welfare began to feel as safe as a paycheck (or safer). The incentive to make the hard transition to work weakened. The trampoline flattened. In many cases, a person could do just as well financially on welfare as in a service job, especially once you factored in health coverage, food stamps, housing subsidies, and other supports. And welfare won't fire you or lay you off. For those with limited education and few skills, the hard truth was that employment no longer offered a clear financial advantage. And when the paycheck is no better than the benefit check, the drive to work withers.
President Trump’s first term proved that a strong economy and a culture of work can make an extraordinary difference. By early 2020, the national unemployment rate had dropped to a 50-year low of 3.5%, and black unemployment fell to a historic low of about 6.8%. Household incomes rose, job openings outnumbered job seekers, and for the first time in decades, opportunity expanded across every demographic. These gains were cut short by the COVID crisis — but they showed what is possible when work and opportunity go hand in hand.
That’s why these renewed reform efforts — from Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner’s push for two-year housing limits to new work requirements across SNAP, Medicaid, and more — matter deeply. They aren’t acts of cruelty, despite what the media is trying to tell us. They are attempts to restore structure, aspiration, and, most importantly, the dignity that comes from work.
Work offers something a checking account cannot: self-respect, purpose, identity. It says, "You belong, you contribute, you matter." That is what I saw unfold in my classroom. That is what welfare reform proved once. And that is what America needs again today.
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