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The New Retrenchment: Social Welfare Spending 1997-2006
[PDF]State and local spending for social welfare programs — including cash assistance, medical assistance, and social services — fell in 2006 after adjusting for inflation and need, for the first time since 1983. Although this decline was due in part to one-time changes in the Medicaid program, the 2006 decline also confirms broader, downward trends in social welfare expenditures since 2002, as well as major shifts in the relationship between state fiscal capacity and social welfare spending.
Thomas Gais and Lucy Dadayan, September 2008
Spending on Social Welfare Programs in Rich and Poor States
[PDF]Social welfare spending supports lower-income households. Programs include health initiatives such as Medicaid and state child health insurance programs; cash assistance programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families; general assistance, and state supplements to SSI, as well as other service programs including child care, foster care, low-income energy assistance, and services to the homeless.
The Lewin Group and The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, June 2004
How States and Counties Have Responded to the Family Policy Goals of Welfare Reform
[PDF]Describes how 18 states and 26 counties within those states responded to the family policy provisions of the 1996 welfare law. The report also offers explanations for why state and local efforts to move clients from welfare to work were greater than efforts to promote marriage and prevent nonmarital births; why abstinence-based efforts to achieve lower rates of teen pregnancy overshadowed state and local efforts to achieve the other family policy goals of PRWORA; and how states and localities responded to the family formation goals of the 1996 welfare reform law.
Deborah Orth and Malcolm Goggin, December 2003
The Fiscal Effects of Welfare Reform: State Social Spending Before and After Welfare Reform
[PDF]This study addresses how state spending on social services has changed since the advent of welfare reform, using detailed survey data from 16 states and the District of Columbia for state fiscal year 1995, and for fiscal years 1999 and 2000.
Donald J. Boyd, Patricia L. Billen, and Richard P. Nathan, May 2003