Welfare Reform

Transportation and welfare studies show that without adequate transportation, welfare recipients face significant barriers in trying to move from welfare to work. These challenges are particularly acute for urban mothers receiving welfare who do not own cars and must make multiple trips each day to accommodate child care and other domestic responsibilities and for the rural poor who generally drive long distances in poorly maintained cars. Most entry-level jobs that today's welfare recipients would likely fill are in suburbs that are often inaccessible via public transportation. Moreover, many entry-level jobs require shift work in the evenings or on weekends, when public transportation is either unavailable or limited. An Access to Jobs program would authorize $900 million to support the transportation element of welfare reform. The program's success, however, will depend on how the Federal Transit Administration defines the program's objectives, performance criteria, and measurable goals and the extent to which the program balances the need to provide a supportive framework for helping welfare recipients and the need to oversee federal dollars so that the program does not duplicate other federal and state welfare programs. In addition, a successful Access to Jobs program should build on lessons learned from existing welfare-to-work programs. These lessons learned focus on the need to coordinate transportation strategies with other local job placement and social services, the importance of assessing the local labor and employer markets, and the inclusion of many transportation strategies--not just existing mass transit--in carrying out welfare reform.

GAO noted that: (1) transportation and welfare studies show that without adequate transportation, welfare recipients face significant barriers in trying to move from welfare to work; (2) existing public transportation systems cannot always bridge the gap between where the poor live and where jobs are located; (3) the majority of entry-level jobs that the welfare recipients and the poor would be likely to fill are located in suburbs that have limited or no accessibility through existing public transportation systems; (4) FTA has funded welfare-to-work demonstration projects, planning grants, and regional seminars, while HUD's Bridges to Work research program is in the early stages of placing inner-city participants in suburban jobs; (5) although these programs began recently and have limited funding, they have identified programmatic and demographic factors that state and local officials should consider when they select the best transportation strategies for their welfare-to-work programs; (6) these factors include: (a) collaboration among transportation providers and employment and human services organizations; (b) analyses of local labor markets to help design transportation strategies that link employees to specific jobs; and (c) flexible transportation strategies that may not always rely on existing mass transit systems; (7) if authorized, an Access to Jobs program would bring additional resources and attention to the transportation element of welfare reform; (8) however, limited information about the program's objectives or expected outcomes makes it difficult to evaluate how the program would improve mobility for low-income workers or support national welfare-to-work goals; (9) the new program may require FTA and local transit agencies to undergo a cultural change whereby they are willing to accept nontraditional approaches for addressing welfare-to-work barriers; (10) the agency must ensure that the millions of dollars it contributes to welfare reform support rather than duplicate the transportation funds provided through other federal and state agencies; and (11) while FTA has begun to consider some of these important issues, addressing all of them before the program is established would help ensure that the transportation funds provided for an Access to Jobs program would be used efficiently and effectively in support of national welfare goals.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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