WASHINGTON -- President Bush’s welfare reform plan to revise income support, job training, education, and child care programs would deprive working parents of important educational opportunities and would do nothing to help families with the increasingly difficult task of finding quality child care and accessing pre-school services for their young children, said Congressman George Miller (D-CA) on Thursday.

Bush’s plan for reauthorizing the omnibus “Temporary Aid to Needy Families” (TANF), the federal welfare program, act was announced in Washington on Wednesday.

“The President’s plan blatantly ignores the impact of the current recession on parents and their children,” said Miller, senior Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee, which has key jurisdictional responsibilities for child care, education, and job training programs.

Miller noted that many aspects of the 1996 welfare reform law are not likely to be changed this time around; the emphasis on moving off welfare towards self-sufficiency through education, training and work is broadly accepted. The main issue is whether Congress and the Administration will enable people to do that successfully or throw them -- unskilled and unprepared -- into a weak economy where they will be ill-suited to many work opportunities and more likely to fall back on assistance of one form or another.

Bush’s plan, as announced, would force parents to work without the benefit of receiving the vocational training they need to secure well-paying jobs.

“The Bush plan contradicts everything we know about what it takes for workers to succeed in the current economic climate,” Miller said. “It might have been adequate for the turn of the last century, but it will do nothing to help workers in this economy. It contradicts widespread expert views on the direction in which we should head.

“The Bush plan would provide no increase for child care subsidies, despite the fact the current federal funding only meets about one-fifth of the demand,” Miller said.

Miller added that despite strong evidence that quality child care is an important factor in child development and later success in school, the Bush proposal does nothing to improve the quality of child care and nothing to expand opportunities for pre-school education.

The Bush plan creates the same problem for job training as it does for child care, Miller noted. “Only one percent of current TANF funds are used for job training and most of that goes for basic English classes,” Miller said. “We can’t expect states to put more people to work in a recession with no real funding for job training.

“I hope the President’s announcement on welfare reform is the beginning of a dialogue, rather than a bottom-line,” said Miller. “We have an opportunity to do something vitally important for our nation’s families at a very difficult time for low- and middle-income workers. It would be a shame if we squandered it.”

In December, 2001, Miller introduced an innovative bill to expand the availability of quality, affordable child care for low-income families. For more information on the Child Development and Family Employment Act of 2002 please go to: http://edworkforce.house.gov/democrats/rel121901.html