Congress is again debating work requirements for programs providing need-tested assistance to low-income families and individuals. Need-tested programs provide benefits and services to individuals and families based on financial need (usually low income). This is in contrast to social insurance programs such as Social Security and Unemployment Insurance, which base their benefits on past work. Work requirements for cash assistance for parents in needy families with children receiving public benefits have been part of policy debates since the 1960s. Those debates culminated in the 1996 welfare reform law ( P.L. 104-193 ), which created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant to replace the pre-1996 cash assistance program of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Since the enactment of the 1996 law, extending work requirements to other need-tested programs has sometimes been raised in policy debates about need-tested programs. Legislation before the 115 th Congress—the House-passed version of H.R. 2 —would expand work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). H.R. 5861 , reported to the House from the Ways and Means Committee, would alter some of TANF's rules regarding work. In addition, the Trump Administration is currently granting demonstration waivers for states to implement work requirements for certain recipients of Medicaid, and has proposed expanded work requirements for housing assistance programs. Work requirements for recipients of government assistance seek to achieve a variety of policy goals. They can attempt to offset work disincentives in government assistance programs and promote a culture of work over dependency on government benefits. Work requirements can also reduce the assistance caseloads, leading to government savings. They can screen out those who decide that the benefit of receiving assistance is not worth the cost of complying with a work requirement. They can also be used to remove from the assistance programs those who do not comply with the societal norm of work. In general, the economic status of most individuals is tied to work—either current work, past work, or the work of another family member. Thus, requiring work can be seen as a means of improving the economic status of individuals and families, as it is the primary means of lifting them out of poverty. What does the research evidence indicate about the impact of work requirements in meeting these policy goals? Most of the research that addresses this issue comes from a set of experiments, conducted prior to the 1996 welfare reform, on alternative approaches to the work and education provisions in TANF's predecessor program, AFDC. This report summarizes the findings from the pre-1996 welfare-to-work experiments as well as the limits of applying those findings to the current policy debate around work requirements. Before the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA, P.L. 104-193 ), a large number of experiments were fielded to inform the welfare reform debates that spanned four decades, from the 1960s to the mid-1990s. The experiments were demonstrations of alternative policies and were evaluated using the randomized controlled trial (RCT) method, which is used to isolate the effect of differing policies from other factors that can influence outcomes. The era of experimentation on alternative welfare policies began with the negative income tax (NIT) experiments initiated in the 1960s and 1970s. They were conducted because the welfare reforms offered (but never enacted) by Presidents Nixon and Carter were based on the NIT model, which was an income guarantee and a gradual "taxing back" of benefits as incomes increased. In the 1980s, the focus of the experimental research shifted to examining programs that required work and/or provided employment services with the goal of moving recipients from nonwork on the AFDC assistance rolls to work and being off the rolls. This research culminated in evaluations fielded in the early 1990s in the federally sponsored National Evaluation of Welfare to Work Strategies (NEWWS) study; evaluations required of states that obtained "waivers" of AFDC requirements related to work; and the Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP), which required special legislative authorization. This report focuses on findings from mandatory welfare-to-work programs. These programs combined work requirements with a program that provided funded employment and educational services. Recipients were assigned to activities such as job search or required to enroll and make progress in educational activities, and they were sanctioned if they did not participate as required. Some of these programs included independent job search—requiring recipients to look for employment on their own—but also included other activities if that independent job search did not result in employment. The sanction for not participating in required activities in most of the evaluated programs was a reduction—not a termination—of a family's benefit. The evaluations of the pre-1996 welfare-to-work experiments, taken as a combined body of research, provided a fairly consistent set of findings. This report uses findings from NEWWS to illustrate the impact of mandatory welfare-to-work programs. The NEWWS findings were consistent with a large number of evaluations—fielded at different times in different sites—from the 1980s through the mid-1990s. In addition, this report examines a second set of evaluations of mandatory welfare-to-work programs that also provided "earnings supplements," which continued benefits for those who found work while on the rolls. The studies discussed here were initiated before 1996. However, many of the evaluations were not published until well after the enactment of the 1996 welfare reform law. The law permitted welfare-to-work experiments that were initiated prior to its enactment to continue after enactment, up to the date of the experiment's scheduled expiration. Mandatory welfare-to-work programs often increased rates of employment and average earnings above what was observed in the absence of such programs. The positive impact on employment and earnings was usually modest in size. Some evaluations found that the employment and earnings impacts faded with time, so that the main effect of such programs was to accelerate entry into the workforce. Mandatory welfare-to-work programs often resulted in lower rates of receipt of assistance (usually measured for both cash and food assistance) and lower assistance payments, on average. Additionally, while employment and earnings impacts sometimes faded over time, the reductions in assistance payments tended to persist as a long-term impact. Lower levels of assistance payments stemmed from both fewer recipients on the rolls and lower benefit payments as recipients worked and had earned income (though, under AFDC rules, the time period over which a recipient could have substantial earnings and remain on the rolls was limited). Additionally, some of the reduced assistance payments resulted from sanctions on families that did not comply with the participation requirement. The NEWWS evaluation was designed to provide evidence on whether a "work-first" approach or an "education-focused" approach yielded larger impacts. The work-first approach generally assigned recipients to job search as their first activity. At three NEWWS sites discussed here (Atlanta; Grand Rapids, MI; Riverside, CA), job search was conducted in the context of a "job club," which included classroom instruction as well as structured and supervised contacts with employers. The education-focused approach assigned those without a high school diploma to basic education activities first, and those with high school diplomas to vocational education or other skills-building activities. NEWWS tested both approaches head-to-head in the same location, at the same time, and with the same population. The basic finding from NEWWS is that both approaches increased employment and reduced assistance payments. The impacts from the work-first approach occurred quickly. For example, the Riverside work-first program (the findings shown here were restricted to those without a high school diploma) had the largest immediate impacts, with the employment rate for the treatment group exceeding that of the control group by almost 17 percentage points. The employment impacts for all programs declined over time, as members of the control group became more likely to be employed in later years. The cash assistance impacts also tended to fade—again because members of the control group also left assistance over time. However, many programs—work first or education focused—had lasting impacts on both rates of employment and receipt of cash assistance through year five after random assignment. All lasting impacts of the programs, except for both programs in Grand Rapids, can be considered positive for a welfare-to-work program (higher rates of employment, lower rates of benefit receipt). A NEWWS program in Portland, OR, operated a "mixed strategy." Case managers in that program had the discretion to offer preparation for a General Educational Development (GED, or high school equivalent) credential to those they believed had a good chance of obtaining it. The program also allowed participants to forgo low-paying jobs to look and wait for higher-paying jobs. Of all the NEWWS programs, Portland's produced some of the largest employment impacts. However, its mixed strategy was not tested head-to-head against a pure work-first or education-focused strategy, so it is not known whether the large impacts resulted from the program's strategy or from the particular economic context of Portland at that time. Figure 1 shows NEWWS findings on employment and cash assistance receipt impacts for years one through five following random assignment. The figure shows the impacts (the difference the program made) in the employment rate and cash receipt rate for both the work-first and education-focused programs in Atlanta, Grand Rapids, and Riverside, as well as the program in Portland. The welfare-to-work experiments of the late 1980s and early 1990s provided evidence that mandatory welfare-to-work programs by themselves did not increase total income (i.e., the sum of earnings and government assistance). On average, earnings tended to be low; thus, they offset, but did not exceed, the reduction in assistance. Typically, the impact on average incomes was not statistically different from $0. Even the Portland and Riverside NEWWS programs, which had relatively large employment impacts, did not increase incomes on average over the five years.