After nearly two years of debate and delay, Congress finally appears ready to move to the next phase of welfare reform. The House has passed an update of the 1996 law that changed welfare from an entitlement to a program of time-limited support requiring participants to enter the work force. The Senate is expected to act early next year. The delay may turn out to be all to the good, however, provided lawmakers realize, before it’s too late, that they’ve been fighting yesterday’s battle about the value of work over welfare. That battle has already been won.

Since President Bush sent his welfare reauthorization proposal to Congress in 2001, the principal debate has been over its requirements that welfare clients work more hours and that states move higher percentages of welfare clients into jobs.

If we continue to frame the next stage of welfare reform in these terms, we risk committing the sort of error military planners often make. We’ll be preparing for the last war instead of the next one.

In the war waged to end what many called a culture of dependency, the battle cry was, in effect: "Get a job, any job." I propose we wage a new war against what welfare reform has unmasked as the true enemy-poverty. And I propose a new battle cry: "Get a job, get a better job, get a career."

Until 1996, low-income families with children had for decades received government support as an entitlement. The new message that welfare is temporary and that work should be a condition of it was timely, stark and necessary.

And families in Kentucky and around the nation have gotten the message. The number of families receiving welfare has dwindled-in Kentucky, by more than half. Reliance on welfare as a generation-to-generation way of life has all but disappeared.

By and large, adults use the Kentucky Transitional Assistance Program (K-TAP) in precisely the manner intended-as a short-term source of the cash, child care assistance, training and other forms of support they need to bridge rough spots in their lives. Most of those who do not meet K-TAP’s work expectations are struggling with such formidable barriers (among them substance abuse, domestic violence and mental illness) that employment is beyond their reach.

Given this makeup of the welfare population, there’s little point in insisting, ever more stridently, that work is important, or that children fare better in working families. Everyone, welfare families and their advocates included, already recognizes that. Let’s take that issue off the table.

The issue that belongs on the table, front and center, is poverty. We haven’t begun to solve that one. We need to start figuring out how to do more than simply move families from welfare into the ranks of the working poor.

Because that’s basically what welfare reform has done so far. That’s not to diminish its achievement, but we should be clear that what we have achieved is just a necessary first step.

By some measures, children and adults in Kentucky families who have left welfare are doing at least as well as those still enrolled in K-TAP. But by no stretch could we call these families upwardly mobile or self-sufficient. They are still heavily dependent on government aid-in the form of Medicaid, food stamps, and child care assistance.

Congress seems inclined to simply do more of what it did in phase one of welfare reform. The House-approved reauthorization plan calls for a higher percentage of welfare clients to fulfill work expectations, and for those who do to work more hours. If Congress clings to that approach, states will have to invest more heavily in minimum-wage, make-work jobs. That will leave fewer dollars for the education, training and child care that can pave the way out of such dead-end employment. It will also siphon funding from the counseling and treatment that the drug-dependent, abused and mentally ill need to even reach the starting line on the road to self-sufficiency.

I propose that Congress instead throw down a radical new challenge to the states. Instead of prescribing minimum hours of work and work-program participation rates, let our lawmakers tell us we must improve the well-being of families and reduce their reliance on all forms of government aid.

Let them continue to allow states wide latitude in how they spend their welfare block grants, but let them hold us closely accountable for those things that really make a difference, such as reducing child poverty and food insecurity.

Let them require us to prove that, in moving families off the welfare rolls, we are not simply forcing them to trade one inadequate source of income for another equally inadequate source. Let them reward or penalize states based on the number of former welfare clients who get a job at more than the minimum wage, the number who pursue an education while working, and the number of children in welfare families whose school attendance and school performance improve.

If Congress can’t bring itself to make this bold departure, I’d urge its members to heed the advice a wise physician gave a junior colleague who was considering what to do next in treating a patient’s complex condition. "Don’t just do something," the older doctor said. "Stand there." The current welfare law has worked well for Kentucky families. Supplement it with more resources, especially added funding for child care, and I see no reason it can’t continue to serve our families well for years to come.

Standing pat on welfare would be far preferable to telling families that our hopes and expectations for them extend no further than a minimum-wage job. Welfare reform isn’t supposed to be about upping the ante in some numbers game. It should be about strengthening families and improving children’s lives. Before Congress proceeds further, may its members pause and ponder that.