WASHINGTON - Responding to a hearing scheduled today before the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources, Subcommittee Ranking Member Lloyd Doggett declared, “Some Republicans are calling nursing care for seniors, Pell Grants for students and tax relief for working families ‘welfare.’ Using that label in an attempt to make it easier to cut these programs that provide economic security and opportunity for millions of Americans is misleading."
Rep. Doggett released a report he requested from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) showing a distribution of spending for the ten largest programs that some Congressional Republicans have recently classified as welfare. The CRS analysis found that nearly half of the spending was directed toward helping the elderly and disabled. Another 28 percent went to working families and individuals, and an additional 8 percent went toward education programs. The remainder went primarily to medical, food and housing aid. Only one percent of the funding went toward cash aid for non-working families under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
In 2011, the Republican Study Committee introduced the Welfare Reform Act, which would have imposed a spending cap on a variety of programs deemed to be “welfare" spending, including Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Refundable Child Credit, Pell Grants, job training programs, and Head Start. In 2012, the Ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, Jeff Sessions, released CRS data, which he claimed demonstrated that “welfare" was the single biggest item in the federal budget. Once again, however, this data included Medicaid, the EITC, Pell Grants, the School Breakfast program and many other programs. The announcement for Tuesday’s Human Resources Subcommittee hearing refers to this same data set when describing the nation’s “welfare system."
