On June 2, 2025, former NASA board member Heleen Blommers successfully defended her dissertation ‘Deconstructing the War on Poverty: Why a failure narrative became entrenched in American political discourse, 1964–1974’ at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Supervisors were Professor Karel Davids (VU), Dr. Dienke Hondius (VU), and Professor Damian Pargas (LU).

Heleen’s dissertation focuses on the War on Poverty, a large-scale domestic anti-poverty program in the United States in the 1960s. Soon after the program was launched in 1964, it was criticized from both left and right and by the mid-1980s, the general narrative had become that the War on Poverty failed. Today, historians and economists argue that the anti-poverty program was actually quite effective in various ways. Yet, the idea that the War on Poverty failed is still entrenched.

The dissertation answers the question why and how the failure narrative of the War on Poverty came into being in the United States. It looks at the implementation of the program on the ground in Georgia, eastern Kentucky and Baltimore and analyzes how local controversies developed into a general belief of failure.

It shows that that not only conservative resentments about the program, but also the discontent of the poor themselves and of a diverse group of people helping to fight the War on Poverty existed. Their frustrations were rooted in conflicting interests and existing ideas about the deservingness of the poor and culminated into a failure narrative. In this way, the dissertation provides a more nuanced understanding of the shift in welfare politics and policies at the end of an exceptional period in the United States.