While Congress Stays out in the district. Yorks a tweet from new congresswoman louise slaughter. I had a wonderful time meeting with medical students at the university of rochester to talk about Health Issues facing congress. Michigan senator gary peters jumping into lake here on to view some of the wrecked ships. We will play the video. There he goes. Aving into lake huron in wetsuit. A couple had led from politico. State departments order to review 15,000 Clinton Emails for potential release. The article says the federal judge today ordered the state department to review for potential release of nearly 15,000 previously undisclosed documents related to Hillary Clintons use of a personal email server. Preaching another headache for the democratic nominee. Creating another headache for the democratic nominee. Another headline, donald trump flipflopping on immigration. His surrogates pushed back against the idea that the republican president ial nominee is softening his hardline positions on immigration with trump himself insisting there has been no. And on his part. You can read more no flipflopping on his part. You can read more at politico. And the former governors talk about the 1996 welfare law. Mr. Thompson also served as the secretary of health and Human Services. Hosted by at an event the American Enterprise institute. We are just about ready to get started. What i think is a historic event. Im going to tell a short anecdote. Story,om, according to a was built with republicans posted gingrich. Postgingrich. They were going to vote on the way talent merged welfare reform bill. Representative mike castle had come in with a centrist bill. At the last minute. It was quite upsetting. Thatules committee decided castle could present his version first. It would be voted on and if it lost, he would support the ways and means bill. Wns is veryive to agitated. He is in the back corner over there in the closet pacing back and forth with the door open. He sees castle conferring with two or three other people. He says, that is out of protocol. You cant be dealing like that. You have to be on the up and up. He goes over to check it out. He comes back to the representative in the closet and says, dont worry about it, they are talking about something else. The representative says, i am such a suspicious person. I am a flawed individual. He concludes by saying god is not finished with me yet. I would love to work with a guy that has that kind of humility and it doesnt happen often. [laughter] we are cosponsored by the Secretaries Innovation Group which is an organization about which i am the executive director that has members that are Human Services secretary secretaries from 19 states making up 46 of the country. And we deal with policy issues and programmatic issues and management issues. I have three colleagues here that i would like to have come up. The first is from the university of maryland. He will welcome you here as well. Decided, but we dont need to do it. [laughter] all right. Glad youre here. You were a lot nicer when you used to work for me. [laughter] ok. Im going to go through in three minutes what happened between 1984 and 2001. In 1981, president reagan made modest changes to the eligibility in the first budget bill. And three years later, 1984, Charles Murray published losing ground which created a lively debate and no introduction to this group is necessary. Professor larry mead who is with us today from new york university, just two years later, wrote beyond entitlement. Arguingre doing for for a basis for welfare reform. As a group of important thinkers convened by aei, they published the new consensus on family and welfare in which a bipartisan group, one of our cosponsors, was a primary author. And suggested both sides of the left and right could coalesce around the idea of mutual obligation. Again, in 1986, governor mario cuomo of new york brought together five future members of the clinton administration, he concluded that society should require work in exchange for public support. 1986, one of our panelists here today at wrote a wrote a long and influential article that became a book. He said a public job at a wage slightly below minimum is the only way to promote work as a condition. In 1988, harvard professor in future clinton official david a proposed a two year time limit after which work is required for some sort of job guarantee. Then in 1987, president reagan created the interagency low income Advisory Board that was intended to be a onestop shop for those states that wanted to pursue welfare reform waivers. In 1988, led by Senate Finance member Patrick Moynihan the , Family Support act was passed based on an education and training model. Unfortunately, the caseload went up by about one third in the four years it was implemented. Then, 1981, the results came in that seemed to confirm, from california, a workforce Deployment Force yields better results from education and then education and training. In 1992, arkansas governor bill clinton ran on the promise to end welfare as we know it. The phrase the invention of bruce reed, one of our panelists today with thought leadership emanating from the aggressive policy institute. Two years later, the task force on welfare had three cochairs and published work and responsibility act in the month of june, 1994. After the first two clinton years in 1994, Newt Gingrich decided to nationalize the election with 10 promises made, one of which featured welfare reform, and in the 1994 election, republicans took the house and senate and increased their statehouses from 19 to 30. And the contract bill was introduced in january of 1995. After that, there were several republican iterations of the bill. Er having beta two bills, vetoed two bills, on the third try, president clinton signed a modified bill. Including former Deputy Assistant who is with us today. Immediately after the implementation of the bill, the big three indicators which are employment, dependency, and poverty all simultaneously moved strongly in the right direction. The fourth, out of wedlock birth increased. No social legislation has been as studied and as debated as the welfare reform legislation, which is one reason why 20 years later, were still debating it. In this room, we cap the people who helped and designed and implement it and the original coalition. Represented by larry mead and a the Maryland School of public policy. We have the two for most governors at the forefront of that push and we have secretaries represented here. And with that, i will jump right in. Governor thompson, i have a question for you. You were elected to start serving in january of 1987. You were a long serving governor through 2001. In your election, you featured welfare reform as a major policy platform that may have played a large role in defeating an incumbent. My question for you, where did you get the idea that welfare reform is a major issue that would be worthy of featuring in your campaign . First off, thank you, jason, for inviting the governor and myself. It is good to see my good friend, john. He and i competed against each other in michigan, wisconsin. I would come up with a gate an idea and he would steal it. He would refine it and make it better and i would steal it back. We had a tremendous contest going on who could do the best job possible and welfare reform. It was like Michigan State versus wisconsin put all season. Football season. It was a labor of love between both of us. Understand the situation i remembered. A conservative republican that nobody thought had a chance to win. A popular democrat governor running for reelection, and i was the only governor that year to defeat an incumbent governor in the united states. One of the big reasons was that we had a terrible problem in wisconsin. Money to increase welfare payments without any kind of causal relationship or response whatsoever. People from all over the midwest were coming to wisconsin to get on welfare reform. The New York Times was following several of those individuals and wrote stories about them. It got so bad that the Greyhound Bus people in chicago, there were signs put up that says, if you want more money, all you have to do is pay 25 and get a roundtrip ticket to madison and get on welfare, cash your check and come back and live in chicago. It was a huge story. Everybody in wisconsin was upset. I had a debate with tony ural. Elected thompson is governor, everybody from wisconsin will go to mississippi. The truth of the matter is that everybody from mississippi is already here in wisconsin because of the welfare payments. He thought he was going to put me down. It was a line that got me a great deal of publicity throughout the state of wisconsin and we started welfare reform after i got elected. People were misusing and taking advantage of the system that became a huge issue in wisconsin. There were several reasons i won that year, mostly economic. But the welfare reform ideas were starting to take hold in wisconsin before any place else because other people were abusing the system. The people in wisconsin were fed up of paying higher taxes to attract more people from other states that come and get on the welfare rolls. You jumped in with five demonstrations. It became wellknown throughout the country. Where did it come from . Most of the audience knows that it exempted teenagers and families including parents must attend school regularly in order to receive the full check. Where did that come from . I was sick and tired of building prisons in milwaukee. I wanted young individuals to go to school and get an education. What i did is i invited welfare mothers to come to the executive residence and have lunch with me. Just welfare mothers. I got my best ideas from welfare mothers. Welfare mothers came and had lunch with me. Surprised that a republican government governor would invite them to the residents and talk about welfare reform. A lot of them said weve got to , do something about keeping our children in school. Learnfare. Ed that was one of many ideas that came out of my lunches. Governor, i have a question for you. You were the governor of michigan from 1991 to 2003. When you took office, you inherited a budget deficit. Endy on you decided to general assistance, which was highly controversial at the time. What was your thinking . Thank you to you and the innovation chiefs for having us all here today. Happy anniversary everyone. 20 years ago, it was signed by 20 bill clinton. Quite a historic day. Going back like tommy, he was the only one in 86 to be the incumbent and i was the only one to beat an incumbent in 1990. He was from a larger town than me. There were no traffic lights. When i came into office we were 2 billion in the hole and we were worried that one of the problems, michigan had been losing a lot of jobs. We didnt have much capacity to be raising revenue. Our problem is that we are spending too little and we are not spending it very well. Looking at all the problems, it was a program for a single 35 other adults states did not have the program. It would not have been in most of the country controversial. It was embedded in the Michigan Program for some time. When we eliminated it, it was controversial. We kept pointing out that we did maintain safety nets there in terms of food stamps and help health benefits. There was also the safety net called work. And it was about 20 hours a week at minimum wage that would more than replace the general assistance. The philosophy we started with that supports be temporary as we move people from needing assistance to more independence and you can start that by going to work. The first money you earn gets you that much closer to the day. When you become independent. That was the decision, that was just the beginning. One of the interesting things. This also became something i , know that members of the switched in 94 and focused on the ability to create different kinds of partnerships. We were being criticized that it would lead to a dramatic rise. And homelessness. In homelessness. It was clearly in an acceptable on acceptable risk. Unacceptable risk. One fellow that couldnt be here today is dr. Jerry miller. He was very much involved, the counterpart to jessen jason. Jerry had been the budget director for michigan. He had been down here with the state budget. Back, theme department was bigger than the state budget when he left. This is actually a bigger department. Jerry figured out with the leadership of the Salvation Army, we could enter into a contract to work with us on homelessness. They only had 100 plus years of experience there. That contract was stunningly successful because what we would do, we had these tollfree numbers. Homeless,saw anyone call the army. We saw the tv camera going out and taking a shot of someone in the street and saying what is going to happen to this person. They would ask the press secretary and the governor. Look, you saw this. Call the Salvation Army. Did you lend a hand . Michigan has tough winters. We did not have an issue because of the fine work the Salvation Army did. It was a massive publicprivate partnership. The army had to do with that a little bit internally. They hadnt been in that level of interconnectedness with the governor. Rather the state build shelters, why not go to these people and do it. And what is interesting, the biggest pushback we got from some of the people who needed help, i dont want to go to the Salvation Army because you have to get up to the morning, there are chores to do. There are no alcohol drugs and alcohol. There are restrictions on my freedom here. The public support quickly evaporated. That got us started. Like tommy said, there was a tremendous competition in the early 90s. Backandforth. Let me ask governor thompson about something that led to that competition. Governor thompson, the Reagan White House had an official, chuck hobbs, whose job it was to help states think of and submit waivers to the federal government for welfare. He told me when he started, he didnt know if any governors were going to meet with him or Pay Attention to him. He said i got off the prop plane in harrisburg, pennsylvania, and the governor met with me. No one had a better relationship with the symbiotic relationship with the white house then you beginning in the late 80s. Can you tell us what youre thinking was at the time . At the end, theres 45 states. He started in the late 1980s. Did you know it would be a tsunami . Or were you just doing one thing at a time . I was doing one thing at a time but i was hoping for a tsunami. Chuck hobbs is a great american. Andame and talked to me also president reagan came and campaigned for me. When i first ran for governor. I had a chance to talk to president reagan. He said, i tried welfare reform in california. I was unsuccessful. Im counting on you and other governors to come forward with good ideas. He said, i am going to set it up to make it easy for you. I remember the conversation on a thursday afternoon in waukesha. He said, im counting on you to come up with new and innovative ideas. I will help you. Hobbs, every time i called him, he was there. I was very successful getting waivers. I think im the only governor that ever got waivers from three president s on welfare reform. Everybody really wanted to help and do something because they saw the problem like john and me and other governors that wanted to do something to change it. You set the dynamic because you had proposed one or two every year. If you were opposed to welfare reform, you didnt get any rest in the state legislature. I think that was another factor. What do you think about that . There is no question. Tommy is right. When i walked in, i bumped into susan and she gave me memoirs as part of the reagan revolution. It is interesting, because we got started with president bush 41 was in office. Bruce will get into this, im sure. It was pretty stunning in 1992 to have a democratic candidate for president. And he was talking about ending welfare as we know it. But that was a pretty decisive moment. Because of that, there was no slacking off on waivers once president clinton took office. It does continue. Just continued. In one sense, it validated what we had been doing. Here is president clinton talking about it. If you look from wisconsin and the Northern Industrial states, lets say the generosity of the Welfare Programs were somewhat less than what we had been dealing with in the northern states. If they are talking about welfare reform, we sure as heck got to be talking about welfare reform because the disparity is pretty significant. You were in 1995 and 1996, the critical year before the passage, you were chair of the republican governors association. What a team that was, one heck of a powerhouse. We call it the glory years. [laughter] it really was. You were looking for the maximum amount of flexibility. You said conservative micromanagement is no better than liberal micromanagement. That is not exactly what happened. What is your current thinking about the relative balance between having strong work requirements while you also have a block grant as opposed to an unfettered block grant entirely. What is your thinking . I believe the nations governors were in no way interested in some race to the bottom. I dont think that was ever a fair criticism. We heard that from one part of the debate. On the other hand, we had people that were supposed to be allies who wanted to give us a lot more help and direction. They had forgotten this concept that we were pretty keen on. The idea of federalism. Let the states work on this and let us try to solve some of these problems. That Competition Among the states will give you some pretty good results. We didnt need conservative micromanagement as a replacement for liberal micromanagement. Micromanagement was the problem. Give us the flexibility and let us try to solve the problems. That is what you saw. Even what emerged the fight, obviously, in 1995, you have a Republican House for the first time in 40 years. Speaker gingrich who