The American ‘social welfare safety net

This chapter examines the context, contestations and experiments which have shaped the contemporary US federal welfare system. It examines the detail of contemporary safeguards, emphasising the role of federal/state relations, and the use of waivers from legislative mandates to enable both dismantling and expanding welfare protections under different presidential administrations. The analysis calls for future research that moves beyond oversimplified narratives, urging scholars to delve into the nuanced complexities and real-life experiences that characterize American welfare provision. It notes that means-tested low-income programmes have expanded to include working class and low-income populations well beyond the traditional urban and rural poor they were initially designed for. Policymakers have chosen to expand these programmes in lieu of automatically protecting universal insurance programmes such as pensions (Social Security), or Unemployment Insurance. Cash assistance to low-income families (TANF) has continued to shrink, illustrating the politics of malign neglect of indifference that has allowed cash assistance for the poor (welfare in its narrowest sense) to disappear in various states. It concludes that as intergovernmental relations have become extremely polarized, there is a world of difference between the lived experiences of low-income populations in blue versus red states.