Wyoming's two-edged welfare experiment

Susie Armajo, a Northern Arapaho who grew up on the Wind River Indian Reservation, was barely getting by. The young single mother was supporting her three children on $320 a month in welfare plus food-stamp aid. And then things seemingly got worse.

Under a new welfare-to-work program, the state of Wyoming put a cap on the number of months residents could receive benefits. So Ms. Armajo, her time just about up, went off the dole and found a job in child care.

The position paid a modest $6.50 an hour. Eventually, she enrolled full time in a community college to improve her job prospects. Today she does have a better-paying position and the hope of a meaningful career - but it didn't happen before going through a long night of hardship and many days away from her kids.

Armajo's story illustrates how one state - and in some ways, the nation - is doing eight years after one of the biggest welfare reforms in modern history.

Since the sweeping program was enacted during the Clinton administration in 1996, states have tried varying mandates to move people from the welfare rolls into the workplace. The idea was to reduce the amount of money paid out in public subsidies and empower people to be more self-sufficient.

By these standards, no state has been more successful - or punitive, depending on your point of view - than Wyoming. It has reduced the number of people on welfare by a full 90 percent. The national average is 52 percent. A mere 332 Wyoming households now receive Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) - down from 4,970 households in 1996.

Yet many of the people who have moved on haven't found utopia on the high plains. Some have landed jobs that don't pay enough. Others are having trouble getting child care. Still others are finding themselves in the worst of both worlds - unable to find work and ineligible for public assistance.

Indeed, critics say the welfare-to-work program has contributed to the number of poor in Wyoming, where nearly 10,000 families live below the poverty line in a state of just 500,000. More than 10,000 families receive foods stamps, and more than 35,000 individuals receive Medicaid.

"What we've created is more working poor, and people struggling even harder to make ends meet," says Deanna Frey, executive director of the Wyoming Children's Action Alliance, a child-advocacy group.

Single mothers - the population welfare reform was most geared toward - remain among the most disadvantaged in Wyoming: Thirty-eight percent are living at or below the poverty level, estimates a US Census Report.

Although more pronounced in Wyoming, the outcome here for families is consistent with what's seen elsewhere in the US, according to Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at University of California at Berkeley. For example, even as 3 million American households have been moved off the welfare rolls, "child poverty rates are still inching upwards," he notes.

Mr. Fuller, codirector of a study that has been tracking the lives of 700 single mothers during the past five years, believes that gauging the success of welfare reform turns on the question of what is trying to be achieved. "If the goal is to move people off welfare, the policy has been a stellar success," he says. "If the goal is to improve the lives of family and children, it's been a stunning failure."

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