This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 29th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown. A welfare reform effort is under discussion in Congress, a small reform to be sure, but it has

the distinction of perhaps being the largest welfare reform in nearly two decades.

Charles Hughes, co-author of the Cato paper The Work Work versus Welfare Trade Offers his thoughts.

There is a welfare reform effort currently sitting in Congress.

It's been called the biggest bipartisan welfare reform effort in 20 years, presumably, since the

1996 welfare reform plan, but what is it actually?

Well, right now it's a discussion draft to properly reauthorize TANF, temporary assistance for needy families,

which is what people generally think of when they think of welfare programs.

It would make a number of changes.

One of the more promising shifts would be to try to make the policies more evidence-based

and to introduce some kind of outcome measures that would look at how people who are on the program

and leave are fairing after they do so and that would be in terms of the

percentage of people who are working and how their earnings change

over a period of time.

Another change is it would give states more discretion in how they kind of allocate their resources and how they try to meet

the work requirements in the program.

So it would be a small step towards giving the states more authority

which is a good thing because the federal government shouldn't really be

wielding the kind of power it does in this kind of policy sphere.

And Republicans are, in some sense, willing to walk away from this change over how states are given that leeway to determine where this money goes and how it's used.

Right, well both sides I think have some objections which is always going to be the case

...