The war on poverty we never finished
The vision was always about opportunity. Our safety net still hasn’t caught up.
There is one phrase that has shaped American anti-poverty policy more than almost any other in the last half century. In January 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty” — outlining an aspirational vision for how the United States would address the material needs of struggling families, while equipping them with the tools to work, earn, and strive toward their own version of the American Dream.
But essential to President Johnson’s message was that this was a war for opportunity as much as a war against poverty. The core aspiration was work and independence. Temporary assistance addressing immediate material needs was a step on that path, not a destination.
That distinctly American aspiration, fusing compassion and self-reliance, has never been fully realized by the system built in response. And the constraint holding it back is not intent. It is design.
The shortcomings of the social safety net are a well-documented fixture of domestic policy debate. The system spans well over 80 programs administered through the states, overseen by multiple federal agencies reporting to different congressional committees. From the 1960s onward, many of the major programs comprising what we now call the social safety net, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, child care assistance, and housing assistance, were created at different times with distinct objectives and oversight mechanisms.
The result is a fragmented system that is burdensome to navigate, and often inadvertently punishes the very behaviors the war on poverty’s vision was meant to encourage. Nationally, 22% of low-wage workers on public assistance have intentionally limited their earnings — refusing raises, declining promotions, reducing hours — specifically to avoid triggering a benefit cliff.
Even in Utah, the best state in the nation for upward mobility, 19% of safety net participants worked fewer hours, and 13% turned down job offers, for the same reason. Twenty-nine percent simply decided not to look for or pursue a new job, raise, or promotion.
Analyses from the American Enterprise Institute, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to name a few, confirm what struggling families experience: benefit cliffs and system fragmentation can make it difficult to progress and economically rational to stay stuck. What was designed to be temporary help on the path to independence too often functions as an inadvertent barrier to it.
The American people already recognize these shortcomings, and there is some vital consensus on what to do about them across party lines.
New nationwide polling data from Sutherland Institute and Y2 Analytics shows broad bipartisan support on both the problem and the solution. Eighty-eight percent of Democrats, 79% of independents, and 75% of Republicans agree that benefit cliffs are a legitimate problem in the social safety net. Eighty-three percent of Democrats and 72% of Republicans say the same about forcing families on temporary assistance to navigate multiple government entities, often referred to as administrative burden.
On reform, the consensus is equally striking.
Seventy-five percent of U.S. voters believe the federal government should give states more flexibility over social safety net programs. And 65% of Democrats and 59% of Republicans support federal reform that would allow states to combine funding from multiple programs to test new approaches to helping families escape poverty.
That kind of cross-party agreement on a policy direction is as uncommon as it is clarifying. It exists because the underlying aspiration – not to make poverty more comfortable, but to help people build the capacity to leave it — transcends party lines.
These principles of work, independence, and compassion are embedded in American culture. The question is how to further embed them in American policy.
Answering that question requires a different frame. Most safety net reform efforts ask how to make a particular program slightly better to solve a specific problem. A more aspirational question is this: if we were designing a system with the goal of helping families toward work-based independence, what would it look like?
A new Sutherland Institute report I authored proposes one answer worth testing: empowerment accounts. The concept would replace multiple temporary assistance programs with a single, consolidated monthly benefit — explicitly tied to work or training, and calibrated to phase out gradually as earnings rise.
The promise of America includes the promise of opportunity for all those willing to work for it.
Empowerment accounts are not unconditional cash transfers. Instead, they would be temporary, targeted, and pro-work — with spending guardrails to ensure assistance supports both short-term stability and long-term independence.
Rather than tinkering with each program separately over years or decades, a well-designed pilot could simultaneously address benefit cliffs and system fragmentation — the two structural flaws that most consistently trap families in the very dependence the safety net was intended to avoid.
The polling data cited above suggests Americans are ready for this conversation: 74% of Democrats, 71% of Republicans, and 56% of independents support the empowerment account concept.
State leaders could test this concept through new pilot programs — and they are already asking Washington for the flexibility that would make it possible.
Utah – which has operated an integrated safety net and workforce model for decades, and in 2025 created a pilot program to test benefit cliff interventions with existing state authority — wants to build on its successful approach to innovate further. In 2026, the legislature passed, and Gov. Spencer Cox signed, a resolution calling on the federal government for additional state innovation authority. Kentucky and Delaware have also passed measures to address flaws like benefit cliffs in the social safety net.
State leaders recognize the design failures of the current system and need the flexibility to test alternatives — but the fragmented structure of the safety net and federal law constrain comprehensive state-level experimentation.
The Upward Mobility Act, introduced this year by Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio and Rep. Blake Moore of Utah, would change that. The bill would allow five states to voluntarily blend funding from up to 10 federal assistance programs to test new ideas, like empowerment accounts, with budget guardrails, federal oversight, and independent third-party evaluation. This is not an open-ended block grant or a blank check. It is a structured, accountable experiment, designed to generate the kind of real-world proof-of-concept that informed the successful 1996 welfare reforms.
The aspirational purpose of the war on poverty, the evidence of the safety net’s current shortcomings, and the emerging bipartisan consensus on a reform framework, all point to the need to embrace federalism and state innovation, allow for comprehensive cross-program reform pilots, and streamline the safety net to better realize its purpose.
More than 60 years ago, President Johnson described the war on poverty as a struggle, but “not a struggle simply to support people, to make them dependent on the generosity of others.” It was, he said, “a struggle to give people a chance.”
The nationwide consensus now apparent — among families who rely on these programs, voters across the political spectrum, and an increasing cohort of state leaders — confirms that too many Americans have not yet received that chance. Not because the country lacks compassion or intent, but rather because it built a system that too often works against the goal it was intended to serve.
This is a fitting moment to have the conversation: 30 years after the transformative pro-work reforms of 1996, and while we celebrate 250 years of the American experiment. Because at its core, the promise of America includes the promise of opportunity for all those willing to work for it. It is as timely as it is necessary for state and federal leaders to advance a new social welfare reform movement that can finally realize the vision of America’s war on poverty as a war for opportunity.
Nic Dunn is Vice President of Strategy and Senior Fellow, and host of Defending Ideas, for Sutherland Institute.
