The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. The TANF program implemented by PRWORA-and a series of state-level reforms instituted prior to 1996 known as state waivers-produced changes in the structure of welfare benefits, introduced time limits, strengthened requirements for mandatory participation in work-related activities, and changed various administrative procedures.

To inform public debate on issues relating to the reauthorization of the TANF program in 2002 and to help states in refining the designs of their TANF programs, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS) contracted with RAND to synthesize the current state of knowledge about the effects of the TANF legislation and the TANF programs of individual states. To this end, the RAND-ACF TANF Synthesis Project considered a range of outcomes, including the welfare caseload, employment and earnings, use of other government programs, fertility and marriage, household income and poverty, food security and housing, and child development. The primary focus of the synthesis is on the net effects of TANF, taking into account the effects of other factors such as the economy and other policy changes that may have affected the outcomes of interest. Like the literature on which it is based, the synthesis considers both the effects of specific policies including benefit structures, time limits, work requirements, and sanction policies, as well as the effect of the TANF reforms as a whole.

Publications

A Decade of Welfare Reform: What We've Learned About Child Well-Being, Research Brief RB-5068, Santa Monica: RAND, 2002.

A Decade of Welfare Reform: What We've Learned About Welfare Usage and Economic Outcomes, Research Brief RB-5067, Santa Monica: RAND, 2002.

Grogger, Jeffrey, Lynn A. Karoly, and Jacob Alex Klerman, Consequences of Welfare Reform: A Research Synthesis, report prepared for the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, DRU-2676, July 2002 (available in PDF and HTML). A summary article is also available in the Fall 2002 copy of RAND Review (vol. 26, No.3).

Karoly, Lynn A. , Estimating the Effect of Work Requirements on Welfare Recipients: A Synthesis of the National Literature, testimony for the hearing on “Welfare Reform: Success in Moving Toward Work,” before the Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness, Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives, CT-185 (also available in PDF), October 2001.