Social legislation (U.S.)

Social legislation in the United States consists of acts of Congress, state legislatures or local legislative bodies directed at resolving or in other ways dealing with social problems and issues. In most discussions, social legislation in the United States is said to be concerned with Health, Income maintenance, Housing, Education, Employment and Training and Personal Care of dependent populations including the unwell or infirm elderly, mentally ill, orphaned, neglected or abused children and other dependent populations,

Perhaps the most important single piece of social legislation in the U.S. political system is the Social Security Act of 1935, as amended. The current act includes legislation enacting Medicare, (Title XVIII) and Medicaid(Title XiX) as well as the basic social insurance program that provides monthly income support for millions of retired workers and others. The Act also contains numerous other provisions that define the basics of what some see as the American welfare state and opponents deride as "cradle to grave socialism."

The original 1935 Social Security Act included "temporary" programs that were known as categorical aid programs for children of unemployed fathers (Aid to Dependent Children - ADC}, the blind (Aid to the Blind, or AB), disabled workers (Aid to the Disabled, AD} and the elderly poor (Old Age Assistance or OAA). Although the umbrella term "Social Security" applied to all of the provisions of the full law, under the constitutional doctrines of fiscal federalism in effect in the 1930s, only the main social insurance program (Old Age and Survivors Insurance program) for insured retired workers and their surviving spouses involved direct federal payments to individuals. All of the categorial aid programs (known collectively as social assistance programs to distinguish them from the OASI social insurance program) involved federal payments to the states as matching funds for the states to create state-level programs of benefit to individuals. In the 1950s, ADC was renamed AFDC - Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and AD became APTD - Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled, to signal Congressional unwillingness to support "lazy and shiftless" workers and those who were only partially or temporarily disabled. Precluding benefits to the former - known for centuries as the "unworthy poor" - has always been an underlying dynamic of U.S. social legislation and social policy, and private, state and federal workers' compensation programs were (and are) directed at the latter group.

An upsurge of interest in poverty and anti-poverty legislation in the 1960s provoked both dramatic increases in federal social spending in nearly all categorical aid programs and other U.S. social legislation and also dramatic and sustained political reactions against the categorial aid programs, as well as the Johnson Administration era "war on poverty" established by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and what President Clinton described in the 1980s and 1990s as "welfare as we know it." Much of the criticism was racially tinged and focused in the AFDC program, "welfare mothers", and who supposedly drove "welfare Cadillacs" and unfairly and illegally benefitted from the AFDC program - or so it was claimed, even though benefit levels in most states were extremely low. These and other issues of "welfare reform" were only resolved or politically neutralized with the replacement of AFDC with the much more stringent and limited TANF program.

Almost unnoticed in all of the hue and cry over the need to reform "welfare as we know it" was the adoption in 1974 of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) title to the Social Security Act, which replaced the need for federal-state Old Age Assistance program and, in fact, went well beyond it with a program of direct federal benefits to the most poor elderly populations.

Other selected Congressional Acts important in U.S. social policy are listed on the Related Articles page.