Two decades after the legislative drive to ‘end welfare as we know it’, public assistance for low-income Americans remains politically contentious. When President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996, some argued that this would bring an end to the polarizing, racialized debates around welfare that had marked the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program for decades. Yet, the election of Barack Obama, the nation's first African-American president, sparked a mobilization of those fearing that Obama's policies would disproportionately benefit low-income minority groups. Tea Party activists resuscitated the language of ‘welfare cheats’ and Donald Trump's presidential campaign promised to cut public assistance programs. Clearly, means-tested social programs remain a potent issue in US politics. For this reason, it is important to understand the realities of anti-poverty policy during the previous administration. What did the Obama team seek to achieve, what did they actually do and how did the political climate affect what was possible?

This book answers these important questions. One recurring theme is about how politics prevented the administration from achieving its goals. Members of the Obama administration were well aware of the economic and social despair of too many in US society, and they wanted to use the tools of government to help. However, they also felt that an African-American president should tread cautiously in the racialized minefield of anti-poverty politics. Obama could hardly lead a new ‘War on Poverty’ – the first War on Poverty was launched in the 1960s when poverty was widely viewed as a rural white phenomenon – and said relatively little about the welfare program itself. However, as this book documents, the administration tried to help those in poverty more than it would admit, engaging in a massive expansion in spending on food stamps, an extension of health insurance in a way that especially aided people of moderate incomes, a permanent increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and other initiatives to help people gain the skills they need to survive in a globalizing, service-dominated economy.

Even if the administration's anti-poverty efforts were often stealth policies cloaked in broadly inclusive rhetoric, these policy proposals met a wall of Republican opposition that gained strength throughout Obama's time in office.