At FGA, we don’t just talk about changing policy—we make it happen.
By partnering with FGA through a gift, you can create more policy change that returns America to a country where entrepreneurship thrives, personal responsibility is rewarded, and paychecks replace welfare checks.
What Washington Learned In The 30 Years Since Welfare Reform
On August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, making good on his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” Democrats and Republicans had spent years fighting over the details and arrived at the same conclusion: Welfare should help people get back to work, not pay them to stay home.
Bipartisan welfare reform was a momentous achievement. But 30 years later, we’ve learned that lasting reform can’t be one celebratory moment. It must be an ongoing process, complete with an ironclad resistance against loopholes and “interpretation.”
What they replaced was a system that for decades had all but guaranteed the opposite. Under the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children, an open-ended entitlement, the more a state grew its welfare rolls, the more federal money it collected. There were no work requirements, nor were there any limits on how long a family could stay on the program, trapping generations of Americans in the cycle of dependency.