This chapter focuses on traditional cash welfare. It provides background on federal cash assistance to poor families, explains current TANF policy, and proposes that antipoverty scholars turn their attention to a fundamental precondition of democratic experimentalism: the presence of meaningful and well-functioning democracy that includes the poor. A democratic structure that operates nondemocratically by weakening the political voices of poor people is an insufficient environment for a just approach to welfare. Instead of laboratories of democracy, states in this domain often function as laboratories of suffering –political entities that experiment upon poor people without robust informed consent. While some democratic deficits are likely inevitable in any system, in welfare, we see a governance structure in which the sole direct beneficiaries of the regime are largely shut out of the democratic processes that structure that regime.

Holes in the Safety Net: Federalism and Poverty explores the relationship between antipoverty programs and federalism. The introduction provides a foundation for the rest of the book through an overview of the extent and nature of poverty in the United States as well as a brief history of how welfare programs have changed over time. We are at a moment in which the basic structure of the safety net is uncertain and up for grabs. Proposals to replace existing programs with block grants or to allow states to impose tougher restrictions on welfare recipients abound, often justified using the language of federalism. This chapter introduces these challenges and then provides a roadmap of the rest of the book.