There is also a five-year limit for cash assistance to families that include an adult recipient, although states may exceed the time limit for up to 20 percent of their caseloads based on hardship. TANF provides funding to states to help families reduce welfare dependency and allows states to design and implement the program according to their needs. Counties that operate TANF have a direct stake in the program because they share administrative costs and may also fund part of the state MOE requirements.
When states are directed to sanction TANF participants for failing to meet program requirements, the reduced benefit can lead to county residents facing increased economic hardship, new barriers to employment, and increased reliance on other county support programs.
A long-term TANF reauthorization will provide program continuity and represents an opportunity to make substantive improvements to the program. Short-term extensions create uncertainty and make it difficult to plan and implement long-term program changes. Many TANF families struggle with multiple barriers to self-sufficiency, such as disabilities, mental health issues, domestic violence and substance use disorders, making it difficult for them to meet the full participation requirements.
TANF should provide states and counties with flexibility to provide partial credit to families with special needs. If there is interest on Capitol Hill in a full reauthorization it is not clear whether such support would extend to increases in the block grant but there could be other areas of improvement that could happen.
The Administration endorsed several proposals that had garnered some bipartisan support in the House last summer. These proposals include adding the reduction of poverty to the purposes of the TANF Act and restricting how states calculate third-party contributions as part of their maintenance-of-effort state spending requirements.
Last July the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources held a hearing on a reauthorization with both sides expressing a willingness to work together on extending the cash assistance block grant. Before the hearing the subcommittee issued a draft reauthorization bill for comment and testimony. It included several changes in terms of work requirements on adults, it tightens state spending requirements and realigned work requirements on how states calculate whether they are meeting work participation by adults.
It also gives states more flexibility in some instances in how they craft their work and training programs for adults on assistance. Two issues that emerged with a consensus during the July hearing was the issue of the marriage penalty and state spending.
The marriage penalty refers to the fact that when a family on assistance includes two parents they and the state must meet tougher work requirements, so tough that states have not been able to meet the targets and as a result are discouraged from providing such assistance.
The irony is the fact that the Act was intended to encourage marriage in some ways but it was a conservative requirement that if two parents were going to be on assistance they would have to meet a much tougher work requirement.
Those standards were made even tougher in the next reauthorization in and have had the impact of penalizing states that allow families on assistance. In at least some instances these two parent families may live in areas where work is limited or they may be families facing disabilities issues within the family that restrict the ability to have both parents meeting the work hours required.
The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
It does not store any personal data. Functional Functional. Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features. Performance Performance. Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors. Analytics Analytics. Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website.
These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Advertisement Advertisement. Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
0コメント