Determined to destroy Bill Clinton’s signature achievement, President Obama’s administration has opened a loophole in the 1996 welfare reform legislation big enough to make the law ineffective

On Thursday of last week, HHS issued regulations that modified — gutted — the work requirement. Its new regulations allow the states to substitute education programs for work to get welfare benefits. The regs say that “vocational educational training or job search/readiness programs” “count as well” in meeting the basic condition that recipients work in order to receive welfare benefits.

The loosened requirements on what constitutes work are of a piece with Obama’s strategy of expanding his political base by widening the dependency on government handouts.