Twenty years ago this month, seated in the White House’s Rose Garden and flanked by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, government administrators, and citizens, Bill Clinton signed the historic welfare reform bill.

The legislation swept away the main cash assistance program for low-income families, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and replaced it with the more restrictive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).

With the stroke of a pen, Clinton ended the welfare entitlement, time-limited federal-funded cash assistance to five years over the course of one’s lifetime, instituted work requirements, converted the funding stream to a block grant (enabling each state to impose even greater restrictions), and, in what became the cardinal practice under the new more punitive welfare regime, set in motion sanction schedules across the states that penalized recipients for failing to comply with welfare-to-work rules.