As it was originally envisioned, Welfare was, and this is how Johnson described it, a "temporary hand up in a time of need."
It quickly became more than that when many of its original requirements were stripped away by successive administrations and Congress, Democrat AND Republican.
Republicans didn't start really going after the new plantation state it created until the 1980s.
Workfare, or Welfare to Work, which was instituted by some Republican states in the 1990s. That made Democrats howl like mad and they were fairly successful in blocking it at the wider Federal level.