Government Welfare Programs Pros And Cons

Government welfare programs have been around for over 80 years. Thousands of impoverished Americans have relied on various types of aid when they were most in need over the years. However, some Americans began to feel as though the system was being taken advantage of by a number of welfare recipients who suffered from issues with substance abuse, and were using the government aid to fund their habits. Because of this belief, several states have developed programs to drug test recipients believing that the cost of the tests would be less than the money saved from weeding out the drug abusers. When the results did not support this belief states began looking into alternatives such as hiring more better trained welfare case workers and increasing

When the United States of America was just a few disjointed colonies, aid was given to those who were unable to work and those who simply could not find work. It was not until the Great Depression during the 1930s, when millions of Americans were without work and were in need of aid, that the government established the first official welfare programs. The first programs included social security pay outs for the older generation, unemployment, compensation, and aid to families with dependent children (Welfare Info, 2017). Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, the different welfare programs have grown and changed, developing over the years to become what the nation needed at that time. Welfare programs are run on a state by state basis, therefore the type and amount of aid varies across the United States. According to Welfare Info (2017), most states offer basic aid: healthcare, food stamps, child care assistance, unemployment, cash aid, and housing assistance. The requirements for each different type of aid varies

Those two programs are the only two welfare programs that the state of Idaho is legally allowed to drug test. In March of 2010, Republican lawmakers called for a study over what the legality and possible outcomes of drug testing those 10,500 people would be. The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare found that the costs of potential litigation, on top of the cost of the tests, would be greater than the savings of eliminating drug users from government programs (Russel, 2011). Seven states already have drug testing programs in place: Arizona, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Utah (Covert, 2015). As a country, the United States has a national drug use rate of 9.4 percent. According to Covert (2015), .002 to 8.3 percent of welfare applicants tested positive for drugs in the seven states. The range of results is below the national percentage, and the states have collectively spent almost $1 million to discover this (Covert, 2015). For the seven states, drug testing did not turn out to be the money saver many thought it would