The Administration has and will continue to set forth in detail our goals for reform and our objections to this legislation. The Administration strongly supported the Senate Democratic and House Democratic welfare reform bills, which ensured that States would have the resources and incentives to move people from welfare to work and that children would be protected. I strongly support time limits, work requirements, the toughest possible child support enforcement, and requiring minor mothers to live at home as a condition of assistance, and I am pleased that these central elements of my approach have been addressed in H.R. 4. We remain ready at any moment to sit down in good faith with Republicans and Democrats in the Congress to work out an acceptable welfare reform plan that is motivated by the urgency of reform rather than by a budget plan that is contrary to America's values. There is a bipartisan consensus around the country on the fundamental elements of real welfare reform, and it would be a tragedy for this Congress to squander this historic opportunity to achieve it.
Welfare reform is first and foremost about work.
H.R. 4 weakens several important work provisions that are vital to welfare reform's success. In addition, the Congress should abandon efforts included in the budget reconciliation bill that would gut the Earned Income Tax Credit, a powerful work incentive that is enabling hundreds of thousands of families to choose work over welfare. H.R. 4 was designed to meet an arbitrary budget target rather than to achieve serious reform. The legislation makes damaging structural changes and deep budget cuts that would fall hardest on children and undermine States' ability to move people from welfare to work. The final welfare reform legislation should reduce the magnitude of these budget cuts and the sweep of structural changes that have little connection to the central goal of work-based reform.