Aid to Dependent Children (ADC)
Mid- to late-twentieth-century government program that
provided financial assistance to poor families with children.
Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), later known as Aid to
Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), was a provision
of the Social Security Act of 1935. Although the impulse to
assist poor and orphaned children dates to after the Civil War,
no formal federal government program aimed at alleviating
poverty existed until President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New
Deal. The Social Security Act called on states to develop plans
to aid the poor, with the federal government matching up to
one-third of these expenditures. The states had discretion to
determine income eligibility and benefits levels, but they
could not place a time limit on benefits or require recipients
to work.
Originally intended to enable poor widows to care for
their children, the program by the 1960s came to support
mostly unmarried mothers. In fewer than 10 years, from 1961
to 1970, AFDC caseloads nearly tripled. Several Supreme
Court cases decided in the late 1960s and early 1970s weakened state restrictions that had blocked some from receiving
benefits, resulting in a further expansion in AFDC caseloads.
Lower courts built on these precedents to expand the concept
that citizens were entitled to receive welfare benefits, placing
the burden on government to justify eligibility restrictions.
AFDC became the primary method of providing cash
assistance to the poor for more than 60 years, and the term
became synonymous with welfare. Critics of AFDC claimed
that the absence of work requirements and time limits on
benefits established a precedent for relief that fostered a
culture of dependency. These concerns prompted several
attempts at reform in the 1960s and 1970s, including President Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan and President
Jimmy Carter’s Program for Better Jobs and Income, but neither proposal passed Congress.
Passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) eliminated the
open-ended federal entitlement of AFDC by establishing
time limits on benefits and by requiring recipients to work or
participate in job training. Under the PRWORA, the federal
government provided block grants to the states for the
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
Opponents of AFDC hailed the new measures and celebrated
the precipitous decline in welfare caseloads in the late 1990s,
while critics of the reforms of 1996 warned of rising poverty
in poor economic times.