ABSTRACT
President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA, P.L. 104–193) on August 22. PRWORA fulfilled President Clinton’s campaign promise to end public assistance as it was known, but in a way that neither he nor his administration’s key welfare reform architects, including David Ellwood, Mary Jo Bane, Peter Edelman, and Wendell Primus, had intended. Rather, many of the provisions mirrored what U.S. Congressional House Republicans had promised two years earlier in their Contract with America, whose ten legislative goals included the contemporary mantra of cutting taxes, balancing the federal budget, and reducing the federal role in social welfare provision. In 1994 the Contracthelped shift the terms of public debate to the right side of the political spectrum in the United States, taking the Clinton administration along with it (Heclo, 2001, pp. 190–191). As such, PRWORA provided incentives to shape the behavior of recipients of cash assistance and other benefits to meet public ends, some of which related directly to labor force participation, and others to meet a variety of social concerns such as abortion and teenage pregnancy, and the standing of undocumented or illegal immigrants.
