Wisconsin has all but ended cash aid. Mississippi and other traditionally conservative states are implementing advanced day care programs. And the public seems to approve. A study issued by the University of Michigan seems to confirm that assesment, stating that the number of Americans who trust government is beginning to rise once again, albeit slowly. Unfortunately, that trust may become tarnished once again if the federal government carries through with its bureaucratic approach to enforcing compliance with eligibility limits through interstate tracking.
Most states believe intrastate tracking is the real issue.
Nevertheless, the federal government is focusing attention on welfare participants who cross state lines. When Congress passed welfare reform, it asked the Department of Health and Human Services to prepare a report on the status of states' information systems for managing welfare programs. Not surprisingly, the report says that many of the existing state systems are old, and revamping their software programs to meet the demands of welfare reform will be complex and costly. As for interstate tracking, the report determined that no single computer architecture was the best solution, so it proposed five options. In these four cases, data about individuals would be transmitted by the states to the database so that other states could run queries and match files.