The Time Has Come to Overhaul the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program

While over 1 million households receive benefits from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, the ins and outs of the United States’ last remaining major cash welfare program could rarely be expected to star in celebrity news headlines—that is, until recently. As part of what Mississippi State Auditor Shad White described as one of the largest public corruption cases in Mississippi’s history, former Green Bay Packers and Minnesota Vikings quarterback, Brett Favre, is alleged to have coordinated with state officials, including Governor Phil Bryant, to direct $5 million in state TANF funds for the construction of a volleyball facility at Favre’s alma mater and over $1 million to Favre himself to star in a public ad campaign, which never aired. While Favre’s alleged involvement has led to increased media attention of this scandal, he has not been criminally charged and his name is only one of thirty-seven other defendants in a $77 million civil lawsuit seeking justice for public benefits fraud.

The backdrop of this scandal is a state where nearly one in five Mississippians live below the federal poverty line, including 28 percent of children. Yet, a family of three looking for help to make ends meet will receive a maximum of just $260 a month from TANF, amounting to less than 20 percent of the income needed to overcome the federal poverty line, which currently sits at nearly $22,000 for a three member household. Mississippi, like many other states, struggles to overcome a particularly dangerous combination: scant public benefits, steep barriers to accessing them, and some of the nation’s most alarming poverty statistics. These numbers paint a picture of a threadbare safety net plainly outmatched by the stark levels of economic insecurity facing so many Mississippi families. Families look to public benefits like TANF for a step towards economic stability, the difference between being able to pay for a monthly prescription, emergency car repairs, or school supplies and going without. At the same time, TANF also fails to reach the vast majority of families who need it, with only four families receiving benefits for every hundred living in poverty.

On its face, the program’s shortcomings in fighting poverty can be attributed in part to decades of disinvestment, a dearth of state capacity, and other difficulties common in administering large public benefits programs today. But digging deeper into the policy choices and history behind the TANF program reveals its inability to meet the challenge of widespread poverty is a natural consequence of the aims and policies core to the TANF program as we know it. Since its conception, TANF was imbued with paternalistic ideas about the families who need this assistance most, based on racist and misogynistic stereotypes, often with particular animus towards Black mothers and single mothers. Accordingly, many of TANF’s policies prioritize scrutinizing and controlling families over reducing poverty, allowing states to fund initiatives which do not address families’ material needs over putting cash in parents’ pockets. The program’s decentralized funding and implementation model gives states the flexibility to direct these funds as they see fit (including towards seemingly off-the-wall projects as is alleged in the recent Mississippi scandal) as well as broad discretion in erecting steep barriers to access by engineering eligibility requirements and increasing administrative burdens.

If policymakers are serious about fighting poverty with a revamped TANF program, progress must focus on confronting the regressive ideas which have historically driven its policies, reaching more families and expanding access to benefits, and ultimately, shifting its administration and oversight back to the federal government.

The Troubling History of TANF

The historical perspective can also illuminate where TANF has gone wrong and what must be done to overhaul this program to meet the needs of families and individuals experiencing hardship. To understand how TANF has failed to fight widespread poverty (including child poverty), it’s important to take a look back at the origins of the U.S. welfare system and the values and prejudices elevated by its policies throughout the nation’s history. What we typically think of today as welfare began with the signing of the Social Security Act of 1935, enacted during the Great Depression as the “Aid to Dependent Children” (ADC) program. This program expanded on the “Mothers’ Pensions” programs which had begun spreading across a number of states in recent decades. These cash aid programs were offered almost exclusively to white mothers, and also discriminated against unmarried or divorced women. ADC provided funding for states to establish their own aid programs for mothers and, like Mothers’ Pensions, was also designed to exclude Black mothers and keep women out of the workforce.

In 1962, ADC was renamed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). By then, the majority of mothers receiving benefits were either divorced or unmarried, and 40 percent were Black women. Increasing federal oversight and important legal victories won by the Welfare Rights movement had pushed back against racial discrimination and ultimately established AFDC benefits as an entitlement program. This meant families had a right to receive benefits if their income and circumstances (such as young motherhood) qualified them, significantly increasing the numbers of families receiving benefits. Fueled by racist and sexist stereotypes about undeserving Black single mothers, backlash to these changing demographics and growing enrollment numbers spread as politicians on both sides of the aisle questioned whether these mothers were “deserving” enough. By the 1980s, this resentment had only snowballed, culminating in Ronald Reagan’s famous “welfare queen” moment, evoking the central obsession of the “welfare reform” movement: the ugly lie of the amoral Black mother living large on welfare checks with her “too many” children.

After the Reagan administration significantly cut AFDC benefits in the 1980s, President Bill Clinton ushered in further widespread reform to the existing welfare system in 1996 with the signing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). During his presidential campaign, Clinton had famously promised to “end welfare as we know it” and this bill seemed to deliver, replacing AFDC with the TANF program we now know today. PRWORA restructured welfare benefits from an entitlement program with significant federal oversight to a federal block grant, administered by states with broad discretion to set their own eligibility criteria. These changes were intended to assuage concerns about benefits recipients growing “dependent” on welfare and single or divorced women choosing benefits over income from work or dependence on a male partner. The bill’s text made these fears abundantly clear.

The legislation laid out four main purposes for the TANF program, putting these concerns into stark language:

• “Provide assistance to needy families so that children can be cared for in their own homes or in the homes of relatives.”
• “End the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage.”
• “Prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies.”
• “Encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.”

This statement of purpose provides key context about how and why TANF has failed those who need it both in what it does and does not say. The law’s emphasis on the importance of patriarchal (and hetero-normative) family structures and recurring references to welfare “dependence” reveal some of the regressive ideas central to the program’s creation. What is even more alarming is that the law does not even mention poverty reduction as a goal, making it clear that since its inception, TANF has faced an uphill battle to become an effective, accountable anti-poverty program. By drawing a throughline from the ideas about race, sex, and class popularized during welfare reform, policy choices in the 1996 welfare reform bill, and TANF’s continued failings today, we can identify the major obstacles still holding this program back almost 30 years later and see a path forward to undoing them.

The law does not even mention poverty reduction as a goal, making it clear that since its inception, TANF has faced an uphill battle to become an effective, accountable anti-poverty program.

How TANF Fails Families

Block Grant Funding Structure and State “Flexibility”

In entrusting state TANF agencies with welfare administration, the 1996 PRWORA also emphasized the “flexibility” they should explore in meeting the program’s four main goals. This flexibility gave states broad discretion to use TANF funds for purposes besides direct cash assistance, allowing states to divert cash benefits from single mothers to providing so-called “resources and services,” like nutrition classes or faith-based courses on the importance of marriage. Though the specter of welfare dependency remains an effective bogeyman even in today’s politics, these fears were and have always been based in false and often misogynistic and anti-Black ideas about the personal moral failings of people living below the poverty line.

Just as these ideas shaped the pivotal 1996 welfare reform bill, they continue to hobble TANF and harm benefits recipients to this day. In fact, while the block grant structure and generous flexibility provided to states was designed to help assuage suspicions about undeserving single moms on welfare, it also laid the groundwork for brazen misuse of funds like the grift seen in the recent Mississippi lawsuit. Meanwhile, TANF benefit amounts continue to fall far short of meeting families’ needs as states prioritize TANF spending on expenses other than providing cash assistance and refuse to increase benefit amounts to meet today’s cost of living. TANF benefits still leave a family of three below the poverty line in every state, and fifteen states do not provide TANF benefits sufficient to keep a family of three above 20 percent of the poverty line ($386 for a family of this size).

Engineering Eligibility and Reducing Access

Along with broad discretion over how to spend TANF funds, the 1996 PRWORA also gave states wide latitude to decide the definition of “needy” for themselves and in doing so, reduce the pool of needy families they’ve been tasked to serve. Fueled by ideas like the welfare dependency panic, most states have used this flexibility to set income thresholds far below the federal poverty threshold and nearly all states limit the amount of assets families can retain without losing benefits. More than ten states have used this autonomy to set “family cap policies,” which restrict mothers’ TANF benefits even if they welcome a new child into their family and rooted rules in racist and misogynistic ideas which dehumanize women in low-income households and women of color.

While many of the proponents of the 1996 TANF bill point to reduced TANF caseloads as proof that welfare reform has been a success, both saving families from much maligned welfare dependency and providing a path to economic security, subsequent evidence has now shown a much different picture of welfare reform’s effects. It’s now clear that the families who vanished from these welfare rolls were pushed off by ever-tightening definitions of “needy” and other barriers to access erected in suspicion of welfare recipients rather than lifted out of insecurity into self-sufficiency. Indeed, according to the Congressional Research Service, “Most of the post-1994 decline in the cash assistance caseload resulted from a reduction in the share of eligible families receiving benefits, rather than a reduction in the number of families meeting states’ definitions of being a needy family.”

The continuing legacy of this policy design can be seen in the pitiful statistics on TANF accessibility and uptake across the country. When TANF was enacted in 1996, sixty-eight out of every 100 families in poverty received assistance. In 2020, this number had been reduced to just twenty-one of every 100 families.

Unnecessary Work Requirements

In addition to the web of eligibility requirements including income reporting and other often duplicative paperwork, TANF recipients must also grapple with work requirements. The 1996 PRWORA established that states must show their TANF programs meet a work participation rate, a threshold for the share of TANF recipients engaging in work for a minimum amount of hours, and gave states broad autonomy in determining what work activities can be counted and how to punish or “sanction” families who don’t meet these requirements. These policies require workers receiving benefits to regularly report their hours worked or risk losing critical income, leaving many vulnerable to having their benefits cut off due to even minor errors in filing paperwork.

These requirements are said to encourage benefits recipients to work more and exit TANF as soon as possible, but this idea holds more closely to a myth based solely on stereotypes about people experiencing poverty rather than evidence. Proponents of welfare reform and the 1996 PRWORA insisted a commitment to tying work to cash assistance was the only way to prevent debilitating, long-term welfare dependency, mostly among Black benefits recipients. However, decades of research on work requirements in welfare programs have shown these requirements succeed only in excluding families in genuine need who are unable to successfully jump through yet another hoop. They do not significantly increase families participation in the labor market and over the long term, families affected by work requirements were no more economically secure.

About This Interactive Map

This dashboard shows key info on how TANF benefits and access to benefits as well as the demographics of poverty differ across the fifty states. Learn more about each state’s TANF program and the people who need it by searching for a state in the text box or selecting a state on the map.

Glossary

Child poverty rate

• Percentage of children under 18 in households living below 100 percent the federal poverty line.

Deep child poverty

• Percentage of children under 18 in households living below 50 percent of the federal poverty line.

Maximum monthly benefit

• The maximum monthly cash benefit offered to a family of three.

Spending on basic assistance

• The percentage of a state’s TANF block grant directed towards providing cash benefits to eligible low-income households.

Maximum eligible income

• The maximum income allowed for a family of three to qualify for TANF eligibility.

TANF to poverty ratio

• The ratio of households receiving TANF benefits to households below the poverty line.

Share of applications denied

• The percentage of applications for TANF benefits which were denied.

Family cap policies

• Policies which deny parents increased benefits when a new child is born if the household is already receiving benefits.

Some Key Trends and Takeaways

• Many states in the south and states with high rates of child poverty also offer some of the lowest minimum benefits.
• The majority of states spend less than 20 percent of their TANF funding on basic assistance.
• States with larger Black populations, particularly Southern states, often offer some of the least generous benefits with the highest barriers to access.
• With high application denial rates and low maximum benefit amounts, many states require low-income families to navigate complicated paperwork and repeated rejections for meager cash benefits.
• The low TANF to poverty ratio in many states also reflects this difficulty in accessing benefits.
• Even in states with the lowest maximum benefit amounts, crushing limits on maximum family income keep families from building security.
• Punitive and dehumanizing policies like family cap policies are particularly common in states with less generous TANF benefits.

About the Data

This data interactive draws on the most recent data available from federal government and policy peer organizations. It includes 2021 child poverty data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), racial demographic data drawn from the 2018–2021 American Community Survey (ACS) estimates, and data on 2020 TANF to poverty ratios and 2021 state TANF spending compiled by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). This interactive also includes 2020 data on state TANF policies and benefits drawn from the Welfare Rules Database (WRD), maintained by the Urban Institute. Data on application denials was drawn from caseload data made available by the U.S HHS Office of Family Assistance (OFA).

These data findings demonstrate deep issues with TANF and the legislative model, funding structure, and regulations which have shaped it. Viewed through a historical lens, we can also see how policy choices—and the systems and incentives they’ve created—have led to both a safety net that makes it increasingly difficult for people to access paltry benefits and the enabling conditions for the Mississippi scandal.

Recommendations for Policy Change

If TANF is to rise to meet the challenge of poverty, especially child poverty, in the United States, the program’s goals must be reoriented around maximizing the aid dollars flowing to benefits’ recipients pockets, providing maximal direct material assistance to those struggling to meet their basic needs. Executive action and increased oversight from TANF’s administering agency, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), and ambitious legislative reforms to the program’s policies should be explored to achieve these aims. Ultimately, if this program is to provide the security every family deserves, federal legislation will be necessary to end state administrative power and broad discretion over TANF spending through the block grant funding structure and move towards federalization of the TANF program.

To fund this expansion of TANF’s enrollment rolls, federal priorities must shift to account for the United States’ pitiful standing in social spending rankings among OECD nations. Regulations like requiring TANF dollars to be spent on direct aid rather than sitting unspent in state coffers and requirements that states spend more cash on direct aid over less critical expenses can also help meet this need.

Bold action will be required to truly advance cash welfare from TANF’s current tangle of policy problems towards a more equitable cash aid program designed to meet the challenge of our nation’s persistent widespread poverty, almost definitely in the form of major federal legislation. While it’s understandable that this prospect may seem far-fetched when considered in the context of today’s often discouraging political discourse on welfare, only a complete rethinking of TANF’s model will do. New federal legislation must do the following:

1. Federalize Cash Benefits

Restore the federal governments role in the administration of TANF benefits. The status quo of state administration with little federal oversight and block grant funding structure has failed to deliver cash welfare and critical aid to those who need it most. Moving away from state power over how welfare funds are spent and who is seen as deserving them would not only ensure welfare dollars actually make it into families’ pockets, but ensure that families across the country will have access to the material support they need, regardless of what state they call home and the biases they might encounter.

2. Establish Minimum Benefit Amounts

To address paltry benefit amounts and disparities in TANF funds spent on cash assistance between states, a minimum benefit amount must be established for each state. This would guarantee families qualifying for TANF assistance receive at minimum the cash aid they need to keep from falling below the poverty line. It would also help to keep TANF funds flowing to the pockets of those who need them most and shrink state TANF slush funds which may otherwise be misused on expenses other than direct cash aid. Like most changes to TANF’s rules on who receives benefits and the cash they may or may not receive and why, this action would require federal legislation.

3. End Paternalistic Requirements and Establish Reasonable Income Thresholds

Barring states from implementing punitive rules like family cap policies which pass on the racist, misogynistic ideological legacy of welfare reform would be a strong first step to right the injustices of welfare throughout the country’s history and set TANF on the path to providing equitable paths to security for all families. It would also curb the effect of states’ efforts to engineer their eligibility pool by limiting prejudiced or bogus reasoning for TANF ineligibility. Similarly, requiring states to extend TANF eligibility to all households below a standard level of income adjusted across states would help expand TANF’s reach and enroll more low-income households in the program.

4. End Work Requirements

Ending federal enforcement of the work participation rate requirements and barring states from denying or sanctioning benefits based on failure to meet work participation requirements would further increase accessibility of TANF benefits. It would also remove a significant source of administrative burdens which might stand between an otherwise eligible family and the cash aid they need based on paperwork details or small discrepancies. Shifting TANF’s priorities away from proselytizing on workforce engagement and towards ensuring children and families’ essential needs are met is also a necessary rethinking of the program’s core values.

During recent negotiations over a congressional plan to lift the debt ceiling and avert a government shutdown, the House GOP majority insisted on increasing work requirements on social welfare programs like SNAP and TANF. While these politicians claimed work requirements are beneficial for those receiving public benefits, research shows quite the opposite, linking work requirements with arbitrary loss of benefits and overall worse economic outcomes for those affected. These GOP talking points show the enduring political relevance of work requirements, despite this evidence. It’s up to advocates and policymakers who care about ending the widespread economic insecurity working class and poor families experience to hold this line and promote a vision for the future of TANF free from work requirements and focused on helping benefits’ recipients build economic security.