What came in like a lion:

...Unfortunately, this time more than most, the hype exceeds what the bill can deliver...

...Even Republicans within the Department of Health and Human Services were puzzled as to why anyone, including their colleagues at the White House or liberals on Capitol Hill, would want to spend over $3 billion for the bill that finally emerged...

...Governors and state welfare directors supported it chiefly for two reasons that are hardly new: it represents money to states for education and job training, and offers some additional tools for enforcing child support obligations, for example, wage withholding...

...Following the first debate, neither side wanted to be responsible for having sandbagged what Moynihan had skillfully hyped as the welfare reform of the century...

...It's going to put people through a ringer...

...By the end some of the worst provisions in the original Senate bill had been dropped by House-Senate conferees, but so had most of the improvements in the original House bill...

...The opposition to mandatory work requirements stems not from a desire to avoid work (jobs at good wages have always been a priority of welfare advocates), but from experience...

...Furthermore, setting up the programs is a waste of scarce resources, since states will also be required to operate at least two additional job-related "activities," spreading limited funds even more thinly...

...The only benefit improvement over current law would come when a woman leaves welfare to take a low-paying job-at that point she'll be entitled to "transitional" health- and child-care benefits for one year...

...To recipients and their advocates it meant making the system more rational, the benefits more realistic, and helping poor families out of poverty, not just off welfare...

...Early in the process New York Senator Daniel Moynihan, chief sponsor of the Senate bill, made it clear that he would agree to anything if it would produce a bill with his name on it...

...NANCY AMIDEI Nancy Amidei has written frequently on poverty, hunger, and human services issues in these pages.ssues in these pages...

...With such limited funds it's assumed states will choose those that are cheapest-and least able to move poor families out of poverty...

...and most poor people not already eligible for welfare will get nothing...

...Supporters talk about the health- and child-care benefits...

...The conference committee that met over the summer to work out a compromise and accommodate the White House, lurched from stalemate to stalemate, then, with impetus from the first presidential debate, produced a bill...

...Those were modest though helpful changes, but for poor kids and their families, it was pretty much downhill from then on...

...Two years after President Reagan called for a new look at welfare policy, we're reminded that it isn't easy to help needy children while punishing their parents...

...States offering job experience and training on a voluntary basis have always had more people signing up than jobs to offer, and every state has long waiting lists for subsidized child care-a necessity for poor families seeking work...

...WELFARE REFORM WHAT CAME IN LIKE A LION WENT OUT LIKE A WIMP What is now trumpeted by its sponsors as the most significant revision of welfare in fifty-three years, has been described by advocates for low-income families as "pretty disgusting," and by a welfare supervisor at the Texas Department of Human Resources as "WIMP"-for Welfare Improvement (Maybe) Plan...

...In 1987 the House of Representatives passed a version of welfare reform...

...The compromises came early and deep, creating many of the later difficulties...

...If jobs, training, and child care were plentiful, mandatory requirements might be viewed differently...

...States might decide, for example, that an eight-year-old can provide adequate after-school care, even if the child's mother disagrees...

...The biggest sticking point (and greatest misunderstanding) throughout the debate centered on the issue of mandatory work and training requirements...

...Mothers will not even be allowed to decide whether the available child care is adequate...

...Both sides quickly cut their losses and agreed on a final bill...

...opponents note that those benefits "sunset" in 1995 (though the work provisions do not), and in no year is it clear where the child-care services for roughly 1.6 million children will come from...

...But those were points the White House insisted on, and won...

...To the White House, welfare reform meant spending less (or very little more), helping fewer people, and requiring adults to work at unpaid jobs...

...The Republican governors of New Jersey and Oklahoma were among those objecting...

...Women who want to supplement welfare with work would still find their benefits reduced-along with any incentive to find part-time jobs...

...The most serious disagreements came over the requirement that unemployed fathers who are between jobs perform sixteen hours a week of undefined "community service...

...under the circumstances, requiring participation becomes a costly form of harassment...

...As he has in the past, Moynihan blamed welfare advocates, whom he characterized as "letting the good be the enemy of the best'' (and then took comments out of context from their letters of opposition to claim their support for his bill...

...opponents note that even when fully-funded those features will provide only $1,200 per participant-compared, for example, with costs under the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) which has average training costs of $3,100 for people who are regarded as "job ready...

...At the end, the compromise contained no national welfare benefit "floor," no help to poor states with pitifully low benefits (less than $60 a month per person in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama), only six months' aid for children in two-parent families in the twenty-three states still requiring fathers to leave home...

...The bill that emerged from the Senate this June was opposed by virtually every church, labor, low-income, and social-advocacy group interested in the issue...

...Supporters point to the new education and training provisions for the "severely disadvantaged...

...Throughout, serious differences divided the players...

...put so many new requirements on people who already are put through a lot, to get such small benefits, and with no assurance of real education or training," says Susan Reese of the Coalition on Block Grants and Human Needs...

...Those fathers not only don't need unpaid work"experience'' (having just come from paid work), but participating in it takes time that would be better put to finding paid work...

...To some in the Congress, it meant a way to get money to their states to help meet welfare costs...

...It included improvements in health- and child-care benefits, in program administration, and in incentives to states to raise welfare grants...

...Families currently on welfare won't be helped out of poverty by what remains...

...Ultimately, presidential politics may have had more to do with the outcome than any of the bill's particulars...