As president, Reagan attempted to translate his Californian project in welfare reform onto the federal stage, without success. Instead Reagan's project was brought to final fruition by President Clinton, whose monumental welfare reform of 1996 effectively federalized the poor law tradition, turning America's welfare bureaucracy into an immense national apparatus for policing and enforcing child support obligations amongst the welfare poor.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 245