Michael Burke

USA TODAY

April McCray thought she had finally caught a break in late 2005. That’s when the state of Louisiana granted cash assistance to the single mother through the Temporary Assistance of Needy Families (TANF) program. It was her first experience with America's welfare program.

McCray, who had been in and out of work, struggled to make ends meet. This, she hoped, would at least help soften the burden.

But a month later, the state stripped her of the benefits without a clear explanation, she said. Since then, she says Louisiana, which controls state and federally allocated TANF dollars, has denied her requests for assistance several times.

"It gets depressing," said McCray, who in 2016, is still struggling. With three kids and rarely more than a part-time job, she says she needs help she can’t seem to get from a welfare system that was overhauled 20 years ago.

Overhauling welfare was a hallmark of then-President Bill Clinton's time in office. When he signed welfare reform into law on Aug. 22, 1996, he declared at a ceremony in the White House’s Rose Garden that it would "end welfare as we know it."

Twenty years later, few would dispute the accuracy of that prediction. Welfare is, and has been, a vastly different system than it was prior to the law, which gave states wide control over their own welfare programs by allocating to them block grants.

So, two decades later, are those changes working? It depends whom you ask.

TANF’s legacy has divided policy experts, with supporters saying it put an emphasis on work and increased employment among single mothers in the process while also reducing poverty overall. The program's critics say it tore a hole in the safety net for people who remained in poverty and couldn’t find steady work, like McCray.

“(TANF) did shift the emphasis toward work. I think that is something where there has been a lot of agreement,” said Heather Hahn, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. “... As far as whether people are better off, I do think they are, in some cases, worse off.”

What America's welfare system used to be

Welfare didn't exist in America before the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. It officially came into being as a rule under the Social Security Act in 1935, offering aid to families with dependent children (AFDC).

In establishing the program, the federal government, for the first time, took responsibility for helping children with a parent who was dead, gone or otherwise incapacitated. Previously, those children most likely would have been institutionalized.

The program worked by the government giving funds to the states, which then distributed the money under federal guidelines.

Over several decades, AFDC went through several changes and revisions, perhaps most notably in 1961 when it expanded its definition of a "deprived child" to include one who had an unemployed parent. And, though the benefits were small, many families did end up dependent — and the criticism poured in.

The program was blamed for encouraging unwed mothers, and for discouraging work. It included phaseout rates, meaning that dollars earned meant less dollars in assistance.

Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan chipped away at changes, instituting job training and work requirements for AFDC participants. But by the 1990s, calls were clearly pouring in for change.

Enter Bill Clinton, who championed the most radical overhaul of America's welfare system to date. Clinton, amid a re-election campaign, made reforming the program part of his bid to win back the White House.

When TANF became a law, a lot changed

The newly minted Temporary Assistance for Needy Families put an emphasis on getting people out of poverty and to work.

Under TANF, recipients in most cases are required to participate in work activities for 30 hours a week. Combined with expansions to the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax credit for people with low- to-moderate-income jobs, TANF succeeded in getting people to work, especially during Clinton’s presidency.

From 1996 to 2000, employment rates among never-married mothers shot from 63% to 76%, according to the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). Additionally, both poverty rates among families with single mothers and overall poverty rates dropped.

"The welfare reform legislation moved us in the right direction by being much more aggressive about employment for the single mother population," said Robert Doar, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who was formerly the commissioner of welfare in New York City.

Employment and poverty rates have leveled off in the long term, which has resulted in disagreement among policy experts about just how effective TANF has been in increasing employment, though most agree that it at least helped move the needle.

Where the law has failed, experts say, is by leaving behind those at the very bottom — the group of people in deep poverty who typically haven’t been able to find work, like McCray.

Studies have found that since TANF was instituted, deep or extreme poverty has increased. A 2011 study by the University of Michigan's National Poverty Center found that families living on less than $2 per person a day more than doubled from 1996 to 2011.

Block grants: The good and the bad

Hahn of the Urban Institute and Liz Schott of the CBPP each attribute the rise in deep poverty largely to TANF. They pointed to three main flaws with the legislation: the block grants don’t adjust for inflation; states have often spent large portions of their TANF dollars on things other than basic assistance; and states sometimes have incentives to cut needy recipients loose from the program.

Since TANF became law, states have received fixed block grants from the federal government. When lawmakers were constructing TANF, Democrats in Congress wanted to include an inflation adjustment for the grants, said Ron Haskins, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who helped draft welfare reform as a staff member on the House Committee on Ways and Means.

An inflation adjustment would have enabled the amount of the block grants to increase along with inflation. But the law passed through a Republican-held Congress without one.

“Remember, in 1996 we were in midst of a huge budget fight, and Republicans were trying to balance the budget and savings were a huge deal,” said Haskins, who considers the reform mostly a success.

Not adjusting for inflation has caused the block grants to erode by about a third since 1996, according to the CBPP. That has essentially reduced the benefits states can give out, as well as the number of families that receive benefits, even as the number of needy families hasn’t been going down.

In addition, states have great flexibility in how they can spend their block grants. The money spent must fit into one of TANF’s four main purposes: assisting needy families; promoting work and marriage; reducing out-of-wedlock pregnancy; and increasing two-parent families.

States have wide discretion in determining what falls under those broad purposes, and that has led to significant spending on things other than core welfare services.

That’s a problem, Hahn said, because providing families with cash or helping parents find jobs are the two most effective ways to lift families out of poverty, since both provide them with incomes. In 2014, the most recent data available, 26% of national TANF spending went toward cash welfare, while only 8% went to work programs, according to the CBPP.

“It doesn’t always have to be about cash, but it should be about getting people to work,” Schott said.

The road ahead

Twenty years after Bill Clinton signed welfare reform, it’s his wife, Hillary Clinton, who could become the next president and have an opportunity to amend the law.

The Clinton campaign did not return an email requesting comment, but the Democratic presidential nominee has indicated on the campaign trail that she would re-examine welfare programs.

In an April interview with WNYC, she said “we have to take a hard look at it” and was critical of the five-year limit that recipients can get benefits.

She was also critical in a June interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein of the “leeway” given to the states and said there should be an expectation that states provide a safety net to those in poverty.

“I think we have to do much more to target federal programs to the poorest,” she said in the interview.

Her opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump, hasn’t often discussed welfare reform or TANF during his presidential campaign and his campaign didn't return a request for comment. But in his 2011 book, Time to Get Tough, Trump praised welfare reform for emphasizing work and said other welfare programs should follow the same approach.

While discussing welfare in a June interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity, though, Trump said people need even more of an incentive to work — which he would seek to create.

"Right now, they have a disincentive," he said in the interview. "They have an incentive not to work."

Follow Michael Burke on Twitter: @michaelburke47