WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) and U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood (IL-16) appeared yesterday morning before a breakfast meeting of The Ripon Society, delivering remarks about a plan they have authored to make sure that able-bodied adults who receive federal welfare benefits work at a job as a condition of their receiving a government check.
The plan is called the JOBS For Success Act. Introduced in both the House and the Senate on May 1st, the legislation would reauthorize and reform the Temporary Aid for Needy Families Program (TANF) to ensure that families who receive benefits under this program also receive the assistance, training, and services needed to connect them with jobs to succeed in the workforce.
The legislation follows up on a 2024 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) which found that the Department of Health and Human Services must do more to monitor the use of welfare funding under the TANF program by states. GAO’s review found multiple areas in need of improvement and confirmed that TANF non-assistance, which constitutes 78 percent of total spending, lacks basic financial guardrails, creating an environment ripe for waste, fraud, and abuse. According to Daines, the bill also follows up on the recent effort by Congress to tighten the work requirements for able-bodied adults who receive Medicaid benefits, which was approved as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill earlier this year.
“It’s a noble mission to get people back to work, to have a job, to wake up in the morning and do something that has meaning and purpose and supplies the needs of their families,” Daines stated. “What we tried to do in the One Big Beautiful Bill were some very modest Medicaid reforms. We said, ‘If you're able-bodied without dependents, do you think maybe you could work 20 hours a week to receive Medicaid benefits?’ That's what we did as Republicans. You think about the welfare reforms back in the ‘90s that were successful – we have to continue to do this. We made an important first step with One Big Beautiful Bill.”
“Republicans have been accused sometimes of not having a heart. But we have a heart and a brain – I think that's the difference. And we realize we are on an unsustainable path from a fiscal viewpoint. But it's not only fiscal concerns that we have. There are also societal concerns of trying to get people back to work.”
LaHood agreed.
“We have 7.2 million unfilled jobs in this country right now,” he observed. “How do we fill these jobs? That's really where our Jobs for Success Act comes into play. We introduced it with the thought that TANF has to be reformed. It is less accountable today. It is less effective. It is not efficient like it was, and it has not been reauthorized since 2005.
“TANF was established in 1996 under the welfare reform plan that was approved when Bill Clinton was President and Newt Gingrich was Speaker. Bipartisanship created this program, and it worked fairly well transitioning people off welfare. In fact, it led to the biggest migration of people off welfare. But it needs to be reformed.”
“What we've done in this bill – again, feeding off what we've already done in the One Big Beautiful Bill – is ask how do we transition people to work? How do we make sure these dollars that are block-granted to the states go to work assistance programs? How do we transition people into the jobs they need and make sure it goes to the people who really need it?”
LaHood, who serves as Chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Work and Welfare, said he is optimistic about the bill’s passage in the coming year.
“We have broad support on the committee right now and in the broader conference,” he stated. “And so we look forward to pushing this forward and trying to get it across the finish line sometime in this Congress.”
To view the remarks of Senator Daines and Congressman LaHood before The Ripon Society yesterday morning, please click the link below:
