Drug testing of welfare recipients in Florida was halted by a federal judge.
There have also been proposals in Congress for nationwide testing of welfare recipients.
If the courts rule drug testing of welfare recipients to be constitutional, a broad new exception to the fourth amendment will have been carved out.
There has been a lot of criticism lately of entitlement programs, and public assistance programs, and drug testing of welfare recipients.
In 2011, at the urging of Governor Rick Scott, who rode to office on a wave of Tea Party support, Florida now requires drug testing of welfare applicants.
In case you haven't heard, the Michigan House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday, December 3rd, that would allow for the suspicion-based drug testing of welfare recipients.
It contained a provision allowing states to conduct some drug testing of "welfare recipients," though the provision has long been understood to apply to people on TANF, not to people on SNAP. .
The drug testing of welfare recipients, reduction of the length and maximum amount of unemployment benefit provisions, refusal to expand Medicaid coverage and repeal of the earned income tax credit, among other mandates, have likewise exacerbated the increasing difference between the average incomes of the top 1percentt and the bottom 99percentt.
But these days, the details of such a family's life are charged with political meaning, as the city faces the first test of its welfare overhaul in a recession.
Nationally, the situation is shaping up as a test of the welfare program that Congress created in 1996, when it ended the decades-old federal guarantee of coverage for the poor and no longer tied the amount of money spent on welfare to the number of people on the rolls.
