TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families)

In April 2006, the District of Columbia implemented a child support pass-through and disregard policy for families in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) caseload, passing through the first $150 per month of child support paid to these families and disregarding this amount when determining their TANF benefits. This study provides a process evaluation of the policy implementation and uses a difference-in-difference framework to assess policy impacts. Our results suggest that noncustodial parents with a current support order for children on TANF paid 5.6 percent more child support as a result of the pass-through policy.

This issue brief examines unemployment from a child's perspective, reporting that 6.2 million children lived in families with unemployed parents in 2012. Many of these children live with parents who have been out of work six month or longer. Unemployment insurance covers only 36 percent of children with unemployed parents; unemployed parents are more likely to receive SNAP benefits than UI benefits. The brief provides estimates of children affected by unemployment by state and metropolitan area, considers the effects of parental job loss on child development, and reviews policies affecting the safety net for children of the unemployed.

The Affordable Care Act established the Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG) Program to provide training programs in high-demand health care professions to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients and other low-income individuals. In 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services provided five-year grants to 32 grantees in 23 states. In its first year of funding, HPOG grantees launched their programs and enrolled and trained substantial numbers of participants. This brief describes the program and the progress made by grantees in the first year of funding. It also describes efforts to evaluate the success of HPOG.

High marginal tax rates can make moving above poverty very difficult for low-income families. These high tax rates result from increasing direct taxes and decreasing transfer payments. A single parent with two children who increases her wages from poverty-level to 150 percent of poverty-level can face a tax rate between 26.6 percent and over 100 percent, depending on which state she lives in. In addition, her marginal tax rate can vary radically, depending on her earning pattern. This paper shows how sensitive marginal tax rates are to assumptions about state of residence, earning patterns, and program participation.

This report investigates potential sources of sources of multi-state quarterly wage data that have been or might potentially be used for research purposes, focusing on the National Directory of New Hires, the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program, the Wage Record Interchange System, and the Administrative Data Research and Evaluation project. For each source, the report provides a summary of the project's purpose and design, discusses the rules surrounding accessing information from the source, and gives an overview of research using the source, where available. The report concludes with a brief discussion of the benefits, barriers, and policy implications associated with using these sources for research.

The Department of Health and Human Services' waiver policy allows states to rigorously test new welfare-to-work pathways. That's good news for the bipartisan goal of work. Learning from state innovation is just what the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program needs, Institute fellow Olivia Golden explains in a commentary for The Hill.

The Welfare Rules Databook, provides tables containing key Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) policies for each state as of July 2011, as well as longitudinal tables describing selected state policies from 1996 through 2011. The tables are based on the information in the Welfare Rules Database (WRD), a publicly available, online database tracking state cash assistance policies over time and across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The Databook summarizes a subset of the information in the WRD. Users interested in a greater level of detail are encouraged to use the full database, available at http://anfdata.urban.org/wrd.

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.