One Hand Clapping for DC TANF Families

September 30 is a drop-dead date for some two million poor families nationwide, including about 17,600 in the District of Columbia. It’s also, for different reasons, a drop-dead date for more than a third of these D.C. families.

At the end of the month, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program will expire, unless Congress extends it. Looks as if it will, though for only six months.

Here in the District, September 30 is the end of the fiscal year. The budget that kicks in on October 1 includes a benefits cut for the more than 6,100 families who’ve participated in TANF for more than a lifetime total of five years.

For some of them, it would be a second cut — 45% less than they’d originally received. A mother with two children would have to somehow get along on about $235 a month.

The budget the DC Council passed put a one-year hold on the cuts — as well it should have, since the Department of Human Services hasn’t finished the individual assessments that are supposed to link TANF parents to an appropriate mix of services.

But the hold was contingent on a future forecast that indicated considerably more revenues than the budget assumed.

Ditto for both the additional funds the Council allocated to TANF job training and a reprieve from the five-year time limit for TANF parents who face unusually serious barriers to work.

Well, the last revenue forecast was basically the same as the one before. And there are reasons to believe the next one will be also — if not worse.

Thanks to some smart, persistent advocacy, however, Mayor Gray has found some additional money for TANF in the current year’s budget — $11 million unspent for other programs.

The DC Fiscal Policy Institute tells us that the found money will avert further benefits cuts for half the year, beef up the casework staff to get those assessments done and make it possible for 900 more TANF parents to get employment services.

All this assumes the Council will swiftly approve the Mayor’s proposal. Seems likely, given what it’s already passed.

That will surely be good news for TANF families facing imminent benefits cuts — and for many others, since the extra casework and job preparation funds will take DHS closer to delivering on the program improvements its redesign promises.

But we’ll face another crisis at the end of March because the benefits cuts will go forward again — unless more money is found to postpone them.

If all goes according to plan, DHS will just have finished all the individual assessments. Some parents will have, at most, a couple of months of relevant training before they’re punished for earlier program failures.

And what about the parents who are by no means ready to plunge into an education and/or job training plan that might, in the best of circumstances, move them from welfare to work?

The budget the Council passed included indefinite time-limit exemptions for them — not in TANF itself, but by transferring them to POWER (Program on Work Employment and Responsibility).

This too hinged on a higher revenue forecast. And the Mayor’s found money won’t plug the gap.

So the clock will keep ticking for parents who can’t prepare for work because they’re seriously ill, suffering from the trauma of domestic violence or caring for a sick or disabled family member.

All because the District, unlike a number of states, doesn’t exercise its right, under TANF rules, to exempt them from the five-year time limit till they’re ready to put in the required 30 hours a week on permissible work-related activities.

DCFPI says that the Mayor and Council would have to find an additional $5.8 million to keep benefits flowing to these parents and their children — and give another six-month reprieve to the other at-risk TANF families.

Hard to believe they couldn’t if they cared to. For this, they’ve got some time to look.

But I’m told the Council has to approve the proposal for the found money on September 19 because DHS will otherwise begin reprogramming its computers to effect the benefits cuts.

This then is, in one sense, the drop-dead date for some of the District’s poorest families.

DC Council Improves Mayor’s Budget, But Not for TANF Families

Much celebrating in the local advocacy community. Much back-patting in the DC Council. Face-saving endorsement by Mayor Gray.

All this occasioned by the Council’s unanimous approval of a Fiscal Year 2013 budget for the District. And there are good reasons for the high-fives.

Among them, as the DC Fiscal Policy Institute reports:

• Projected savings and revenues that will preserve hospital-based health services for approximately 19,000 low-income residents insured by the DC HealthCare Alliance.
• An infusion of $18 million into the Housing Production Trust Fund — basically, a replacement of funds that were shifted out this fiscal year.
• An additional $4 million for the Local Rent Supplement Program, earmarked to provide stable housing for 200-300 currently homeless families. This will free up space to shelter some of those the Department of Human Services has been turning away.

These are large achievements. And as Councilmember Michael Brown observed, they reflect “great work by the advocacy community in this city,” which focused much of its energy — grassroots especially — on the affordable housing initiatives.

But it’s surely not the case, as the Mayor says, that the budget “protect[s] our most vulnerable residents.”

Nor, as Councilmember Marion Barry asserted during the pre-vote discussion, that it shows “sensitivity to TANF recipients.” Because they, in fact, got left under the bus.

As I earlier wrote, Mayor Gray’s budget assumed more than $5.6 million in savings from further benefits cuts to the 6,100 or so families that have participated in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program for a lifetime total of 60 months.

Only Councilmember Jim Graham tried to avert the cuts, though all but one member of the Human Services Committee had voted for the TANF Time Limit Amendment Act.

This bill would, among other things, protect long-term participants from further cuts until they’ve been properly assessed and had a chance to benefit from an appropriate mix of programs and services, as the TANF redesign plan envisions.

When Graham tried to fold it into the Budget Support Act — the package of legislation that’s paired to the budget proper — Council Chairman Brown said he couldn’t because the proposal wasn’t paid for.

In other words, no additional savings or revenues had been identified to keep the budget balanced if the amendment became law. And indeed, they hadn’t.

This speaks volumes about priorities and Brown’s cat-herding skills as well.

We are, after all, going to spend $3 million for a bang-up DC Emancipation Day celebration, which Councilmember Vince Orange asked for. Also some unidentified sum for a dog park in Ward 4.

Graham and Brown will supposedly look for the money to fund the time limit amendment before the Council takes the required second vote on the BSA next month.

Let’s not hold our breath. Nor take comfort in the fact that $14.7 million for TANF is second on the Council’s contingency revenue list, i.e., its priorities for spending any Fiscal Year 2013 revenues higher than those projected.

The additional money for TANF — the source of Councilmember Barry’s enthusiasm — is needed to make the TANF redesign a reality, though DCFPI says it wouldn’t be enough to cover employment services for all parents who should receive them.

Not a penny would go to preserving benefits.

So, with or without the wish-list revenues, TANF program improvements won’t go forward as planned.

And participants will still get punished because the program didn’t do what it should have to help them achieve greater self-sufficiency — or exempt those who weren’t ready, as federal rules allow.

Well, politics is the art of the possible. And the Council deserves credit for producing a budget balanced much less on the backs of the poor than the one the Mayor sent over.

But is it a budget that, as Chairman Brown claimed, shows that the Council is “putting people first?” Depends, I guess, on who people are.

Simpson Gaffe Shows Where He’s Coming From

Former Senator Alan Simpson, co-chair of the President’s fiscal commission, has taken a lot of heat for comparing Social Security (or maybe all government programs) to “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”

But Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank says he’s right on target. The outrage merely confirms that the simile is “spot on.” It’s proof positive that “special interest groups …, the real sucklings at the public teat,” don’t want the commission to “do its job right,” i.e., recommend spending cuts across the board.

The Post editorial board wants to give Simpson a pass. He should have watched his language. Indeed, he’s apologized. But his fundamental point about Social Security is correct.

Up to a point, the Post editors are right, though I don’t think Milbank is. The e-mail that provoked the controversy says that we’ve got to make Social Security “sustainable and assure long-term solvency.”

I don’t think anyone would quarrel with that. As I earlier wrote, the latest report from the system’s trustees projects a long-term shortfall in the Trust Fund, which holds bonds in which surplus payroll taxes are invested. If nothing changes, there won’t be enough funds to pay full benefits in 2037 or thereafter. Better to do something soon than wait till that happens.

But words matter. And Simpson’s are very telling. They’re not just some momentary lapse in tact. They’re a clue to what someone who may have a lot of influence on the future of Social Security and other social programs is coming from.

Consider first the simile. A cow with 310 million “tits” (one for every American) is a monster — obviously something we must do away with. All those people sucking at them are draining the system of resources. They’re getting something for nothing — sustenance they don’t deserve.

This is certain a novel way to look at an income insurance program — one that beneficiaries have, in essence, paid premiums for to protect themselves and their dependents from destitution if they become disabled and/or when retire, voluntarily or otherwise, at a fairly advanced age.

As Simpson himself acknowledges, this isn’t the first time he’s made “cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree.” (Note that figure of speech again.)

Back in April, he ridiculed the concerns he was hearing as coming from “old cats 70 and 80 years old who are not affected one whiff [sic]. People who live in gated communities and drive their Lexus to the Perkins restaurant to get the AARP discount.” (Former President Reagan’s Cadillac queens of welfare recycled.)

Which brings us to the other telling part of the e-mail — its blatantly insulting and dismissive treatment of individuals and organizations that have raised concerns about cutting Social Security benefits.

The recipient, who’s Executive Director of OWL (the Older Women’s League), is told she’s one of those people who “babbles into vapors.” Simpson refers her to a chart, if she’s “any good at reading … anything that might challenge [her] biases and prejudices.” She should call him when she gets “honest work.”

Asked about the commission’s prospective work on Social Security, he told a CNBC interviewer, “You’ve got to scrub out of the equation the AARP, the Committee for the Preservation of Social Security and Medicare, the Gray Panthers, the Pink Panthers, the whatever. Those people are lying …. They don’t care a whit about their grandchildren.”

So far as he’s concerned then, everything isn’t on the table, notwithstanding what President Obama said at the commission’s first meeting. He’d staked out his position long before then. “To think you’re entitled to something regardless of your net worth or income is just BS.”

So obviously are, from his perspective, any recommendations that would preserve Social Security for the long term without breaking the contract it’s based on.

And we know what will happen if that contract gets broken. Those “greedy geezers” whose benefits will be drastically cut — or eliminated — because they’re not in dire straits will get on board with a scheme to privatize the system.

I’m betting that would be just fine with the eccentric but nonetheless staunchly conservative former Senator from Wisconsin.