This work is meant to analyse the social welfare programs that gave financial aid to the poorest, implemented by the State of Rio de Janeiro focused on fighting against poverty during the XXI century, from 1999 to 2021. The discussion is supposed to occur over the studies about the cooperative federalism. The State of Rio de Janeiro has peculiar structural characteristics that draw the obdurate poverty in the state of Rio and that this work tried to recover, such as: having housed the federal capital that was emptied by the government s headquaters relocation to Brasília without due counterparts, then again forced to a fusion in 1974 with the extinct State of Guanabara without a planning regarding the appropriate management afterwards, and, last but not least, having concentrated a strong heritage regarding slavery and a big landholding concentration, structural aspects that favor the poverty phenomena. The State inaugurated a period of implememtating a robust agenda of public policy for social assistance in 1999, under Governor Anthony Garotinho s mandate, and the main program was the Cheque-Cidadão one. This was the first ever social program on a State level to give financial aid to the poor and it lasted until 2007. When the Garotinhos left government, in the end of 2006, the new administration led by Governor Sérgio Cabral interrupted the Cheque-Cidadão and all the subprograms it embraced. Only in 2011 the State resumed this kind of program with the Renda Melhor and the Renda Melhor Jovem, that began with the call and incentive from the Federal Government, when this last one implemented the program Brasil Sem Miséria. Again, in 2016, these two programs were eliminated, having the Renda Melhor Jovem been resumed in 2021. The political circumstances that set the tone to the relation between the Federal Government and the State influenced on the implementation, expansion and elimination of these programs. Also, the discontinuation of the policies jeopardised the fight against poverty in the State of Rio de Janeiro, despite some progress that was made until the financial crisis that hit the State in 2016. It is crucial to understand that it is necessary the introduction of a multisectorial social assistance agenda, containing effective public policies able to go beyond providing short term welfare to the population, and actually get to break the poverty intergenerational cycle by concomitantly investing in health, education and job creation. And it is depended on integrated actions over an intergovernmental aspect, that can unite Federal Government, State and Cities on the same data platform, the CAD-Único, in order to strengthen the active search as well as to gather the maximum number of needy people to the network of assistential programs.