WASHINGTON – Welfare is causing a ruckus in the presidential campaign. But the program is a shadow of its old self from the 1970s, when Ronald Reagan used the image of "welfare queens" to assail government poverty programs promoted by liberals.

Nowadays government cash assistance to the poor is mainly conditioned on work. And the Obama administration waivers excoriated by Mitt Romney as gutting welfare reform are unlikely to reverse that basic policy, as even some architects of work requirements acknowledge.

"If Washington were different and ... people could sit down and reason together, it's not impossible to think that Republicans and Democrats would come to an agreement on waivers similar to what the administration is proposing," said Ron Haskins, co-director of the Brookings Center on Children and Families. As a senior House GOP aide in the 1990s, Haskins helped write the original welfare-to-work legislation.