Voices on child support
Ron Haskins
Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution; former Majority Staff Director, House Ways and Means Human Resources Subcommittee (1995-2000)
The exact words were found in the primary source linked below (testimony, book page, report or article), at the page given.
"When we started the child support program way back in the 1970's, the main idea was cost recovery. We were trying to reimburse taxpayers for paying for welfare. That is still a worthy idea, but since then, our welfare system has changed dramatically, and now we emphasize to a great extent people becoming independent of welfare."
Source
Child Support and Fatherhood Proposals: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, 107th Congress, 1st Session (Serial No. 107-38), U.S. Government Printing Office (via govinfo.gov), 2001-06-28, p. 35 (PDF p. 39) (testimony). Checked 2026-10-13.
Context
Oral testimony at a House Ways and Means Human Resources Subcommittee hearing on child support and fatherhood proposals during welfare-reform reauthorization. Haskins was listing three child support issues for the subcommittee; the first, 'who gets the money,' concerned distributing more collections (including arrearages) to families who had left welfare rather than retaining them to reimburse government.
The passage it comes from
The first is who gets the money, and Mrs. Johnson and others have already spoken eloquently about this. When we started the child support program way back in the 1970's, the main idea was cost recovery. We were trying to reimburse taxpayers for paying for welfare. That is still a worthy idea, but since then, our welfare system has changed dramatically, and now we emphasize to a great extent people becoming independent of welfare. As that goal has shifted of our welfare program, more and more members have come to see that the child support system should also shift. So the arrearages that we used to retain to repay taxpayers and the money that we retain (all the money when the family is on welfare) a lot of people think should be given back to the families.
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