Strengthening TANF for States and Needy Families
This brief offers specific recommendations to address four problems with TANF. First, too few needy families receive TANF help, with significant variation across states. Second, TANF did not respond during the recession. Third, TANF has been unresponsive to caseload changes, particularly that half the cases only include children. Fourth, TANF?s limitations heighten families? need for a whole package of supports. The recommendations include increasing federal funding for states to better accommodate increases in need; aligning TANF incentives with the goals of work, economic stability, and child well-being; and streamlining access to the full range of supports for low-income working families.
State Approaches to the TANF Block Grant: Welfare Is Not What You Think It Is
The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant is a broad funding stream that allows states to make greatly divergent policy decisions, with vastly different implications for each state?s low-income families. This paper examines how state goals, policies, and expenditure decisions contribute to unique pictures of TANF in California, Florida, Michigan, Texas, and Washington. The paper examines not only cash assistance, but also states? overall approaches to the block grant. Further, the paper studies how state TANF programs responded to new federal requirements (the Deficit Reduction Act) and funding (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), and to the recession.
Getting On, Staying On, and Getting Off Welfare: The Complexity of State-by-State Policy Choices
Congress reauthorized TANF in February 2006 as part of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. The changes included under reauthorization will require most states to greatly increase work participation among their caseloads in order to avoid financial penalties and could cause many states to rethink their current welfare policies overall. This marks a good time to review states' current rules, which provides a benchmark against which future changes can be assessed. This brief reviews the multiple ways a family can get on welfare, stay on, and leave (or lose) assistance. It uses the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database (WRD) to examine the variation in key policies as of 2003.