Bush official champions pro-marriage initiative
With President Bush's welfare reform reauthorization plan still languishing in Congress, an administration representative Tuesday again touted the administration's proposal to dedicate new funding to promoting healthy marriages.
Wade Horn, the assistant secretary for children and families at the Health and Human Services Department, spoke at a seminar hosted by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank.
Horn said research studies show clearly that married couples are far less likely to live in poverty. "The question is not 'Should government be involved in promoting healthy marriages?' but how?" Horn said.
The Bush administration has proposed spending $1 billion over five years on marriage promotion initiatives. Half of the money would be dedicated to funding state initiatives. The states would have to agree to match the federal grant in order to be considered for the program. The other half of the federal funds would go to community initiatives, and would also fund federal technical assistance to the states and communities, as well as research and evaluation. The money would be awarded to states and communities on a competitive basis.
The administration would fund the initiative by reducing by $100 million per year the "illegitimacy reduction bonus" which has been given to states as part of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, the welfare reform program enacted in 1996. Horn said the Bush administration wanted to revamp the illegitimacy bonus because states were winning the bonus as a result of demographic shifts rather than concerted initiatives.
The other half of the funding would come from scaling back TANF's "high performance bonus" program, which rewards states that are successful in moving welfare recipients into good jobs. Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio, has introduced legislation that mirrors the Bush administration's TANF reauthorization plan.
The plan raised some controversy when it was first proposed last year, with some women's organizations and antipoverty groups arguing that it was not the federal government's role to promote marriage, and that by doing so, women might find themselves trapped in abusive relationships. But Horn dismissed those claims, saying that grants would only be given to programs that work with unmarried couples who have expressed a strong interest in marriage. He said federal evaluators would examine whether the state and local programs led to any negative side effects, such as increased domestic violence.
Democrats in the Senate last year agreed to fund the Bush marriage initiative under a compromise deal that would have also provided funding for domestic violence and teen pregnancy prevention programs, but the reauthorization of the overall TANF program foundered over unrelated issues that continue to impede its passage.
Also at the briefing, Heritage research fellow Robert Rector said that data collected by the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study-a joint effort of Columbia and Princeton Universities-demonstrated that many poor parents could escape poverty simply by getting married. The university study followed 3,600 unmarried parents for five years and found that more than 70 percent were either cohabitating or were romantically involved, and were considering marriage on their own at the time of their child's birth. But only about 10 percent of them actually did marry. If they had, poverty rates in the group would have been reduced by about two-thirds.
In addition, Rector said that the study had also revealed that while teenage pregnancy rates have dropped in recent years, out-of-wedlock births to mothers in their 20s have risen, and now the median age of unmarried mothers is 22 at the birth of the child.