One Safety Net Time Limit Down, More Sweeping Limits in View

Here in the District of Columbia, the Council has just made history by eliminating the time limit it had imposed on all Temporary Assistance for Needy Families participants. No state has done this, DC Fiscal Policy Institute’s Executive Director notes in an emailed budget wrap-up.

And proudly because DCFPI played a major role in developing and then advocating for a policy that will ensure very poor families some cash assistance, activities that may get them jobs so they no longer need it and child care so they can meet those activity requirement

The Council’s unanimous vote for a policy more protective than what the Mayor originally proposed is maybe the biggest high point of this budget season.

Meanwhile, we see proposed nationwide safety net program limits of a whole other sort — some retreads, but others new inventions, though champions of so-called entitlement reform have been laying the groundwork for a long time.

SNAP Benefits Limits

The law that created TANF also set a time limit on eligibility for SNAP, but only for able-bodied adults without dependents They usually can receive benefits for only three months in any given three years unless they’re working or participating in a work preparation program at least half time.

Generally speaking, however, SNAP benefits have no time limit. People with incomes low enough to qualify can receive them until their incomes break the threshold.

The Trump administration, as you may have read, would shift 25% of SNAP costs to states — $116 billion during the first 10 years. States could reduce the value of the benefits they provide, notwithstanding ample evidence that current benefits don’t cover the costs of a healthful diet.

But they would also have to adopt new restrictions. These collectively seem to save the federal government an additional $77 billion or so. They would, among other things, revise the way the Agriculture Department sets benefit levels.

As things stand now, they’re based on household size. The more members, the larger the benefits, though they’re smaller on a per person basis due to assumed economies of scale.

So, for example, a two-member household can receive as much as $357 a month, while the maximum for a four-person household is $63 less than double that.

On the flip side, a household with only one or two members will receive no less than $16 a month. Most beneficiaries in this group are elderly and/or disabled.

The Trump administration would deny them any minimum benefit. More than 1.9 million people, most of them living alone would have to spend more on food — and perhaps more importantly, lose the incentive to remain enrolled and thus readily eligible for more assistance if needed.

Returning to the household benefits scale, we find an unadjusted per person increase for each member beyond the eighth. The administration would cap benefits at the six-member rate. Larger households would have to feed about 170,000 people who’d now be factored into their benefit.

This flies in the face of several trends. One is a significant increase in multigenerational households, i.e., those with at least two adult generations. The younger of them or even both may have children in the home too.

We also have unrelated families living together — in some cases, one allowing another to double up rather than rely on their community’s homeless services, in others, more permanent arrangements based on shared rent and other household costs.

Why any policymaker should seek to discourage them when they’re obviously beneficial and cost-saving in various ways, e.g., as an alternative to nursing home care, as a source of child care so that a parent can afford to work.

The answer, one infers, is to cut SNAP costs by about $180 million a year — food insecurity and out-and-out hunger increases notwithstanding.

Disability Benefits Limits

The Trump administration also seeks to cut both Social Security programs for people with disabilities.

For Social Security Disability Insurance, its budget would have Congress establish an expert panel to identify ways to keep workers with disabilities out of the program initially and/or get them out later.

It would also test its own strategies. This, one could guess, is because the expert panel might not recommend changes as radical as those the budget counts on to save about $58.7 million during the first 10 years.

It’s nevertheless the case, as I’ve said before, that experts have proposed various return-to-work proposals that could work for SSDI beneficiaries, as well.

What’s altogether other is the benefits limit the administration proposes for Supplemental Security Income — modest monthly benefit for elderly, blind and otherwise disabled people with little, if any other cash income.

Families can receive a benefit for each of their children severely disabled enough to qualify. As with adults, the amount reflects a complex income calculation, but benefits for each child are the same.

The Trump administration would retain the full benefit for one eligible family member, but ratchet benefits down for the rest. This effectively reduces the income that supports all family members — and $9 million in federal safety net spending.

It’s not the first effort to cut SSI funding. The House Republican Study Group tried to get the program block granted in 2012. The House Budget Committee decided to instead adopt the same cost-cutting approach we find in Trump’s budget.

Both have justified it by alleged economies of scale, e.g. the fact that housing for three people doesn’t cost a third more than housing for two.

But we’ve reliable research  showing that even the maximum benefit didn’t cover the extra costs of raising a severely disabled child. Sixty-two percent of families with just one with SSI benefits suffered at least one material hardship.

To borrow from Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell, the folks who’ve shaped Trumponomics and translated it into specifics seem to think “that it doesn’t suck enough to be poor.”

 

Inclusive Prosperity Programs Shortchanged in Mayor Bowser’s Budget

My last post merely mentioned shortfalls in the Mayor’s proposed budget, due at least partly to the $100 million or so she chose to forfeit by doing nothing to halt the automatically triggered tax cuts.

I’ll turn now to my picks for programs she shortchanges, based on how she styles her budget — a roadmap to inclusive prosperity.” Still only summaries. And not all programs some advocates have flagged.

Nevertheless, more than I can cover in a single post with enough substance to convey what’s under-funded — or unfunded — and why that violates the budget’s promise. So I’ll deal here with what seem the most obvious and followup with a couple of others that matter too.

Education and Training

We also all know that education and relevant job training generally move people along the road to some modicum of prosperity. For many adults in the District, the first step must be remedial education — basic literacy in reading and math, help in preparing for the GED exams.

For others, appropriate programs include those leading to a regular high school diploma and /or vocational education courses in other publicly-funded institutions, e.g., charter schools and alternative education in regular public schools like the Ballou High School’s STAY program.

Several surveys have found that adult learners miss classes because they can’t come up with the transit fare. Eighty-six percent of the youngest who had subsidized transportation said it would hard or altogether impossible to attend without it.

No reason to believe that’s not true for at least as many older adults, who’ve often got to spend more of such income as they have on basic needs for both themselves and their children. And, of course, we’ve got to assume that some of all ages drop out.

The Deputy Mayor for Education recommended an adult learner parallel to the Kids Ride program, which covers the public transit costs of getting to and from school.

Not a big ticket item—a mere $1.5–2 million. But no money in the Mayor’s budget for it.

Double-Duty Work Support

The full, unsubsidized cost of child care in the District is higher, on average, than in any state. Though low-income parents are officially eligible for subsidies that help pay for it, as a practical matter it’s difficult, if not impossible to find a center that will accept them.

This is a long-standing problem rooted in the insufficient rates the District uses to reimburse providers. For this, among other reasons, it was shy roughly 14,000 slots for infants and toddlers in 2015.

They’re the most costly to care for properly, what with diaper changing, feeding and all — hence local center charges averaging $22,658 a year.

The kids are too young for pre-K, of course. But the quality of care, e.g., nurturing relationships, talking to, has more impact on brain development than at any later stage. The very young children who get it will do better in school — and thus have a better chance of sharing in prosperity.

Now, if you can’t find trustworthy care for your child, you’re unlikely to work. Nor enroll in an education or training program that would prepare you to do so. And you won’t do either if you can’t pay for it.

Charges for licensed childcare are likely to increase, since the District recently set new licensing standards that require not only teachers, but their assistants to have at least a two-year college degree, unless they’ve got an independently-awarded Child Development Associate credential.

Those who manage to get either surely — and reasonably — will expect increases in their pay. It’s already, on average, extremely low — $26,470, on average, according to the latest figures.

If they don’t get them they can find employers that will. And that’s likely to further reduce open slots, since replacing them would be as difficult as keeping those who left.

Yet the Mayor’s budget doesn’t nothing about this. It would instead put $15.3 million into a new initiative to increase center capacity. But the new slots would be market rate — helpful for better-off parents, but no help at all for the most in need of affordable care to move down her road.

Paid Family Leave

The Mayor proposes no funding to translate the paid family leave law the Council passed into an operating program.

That requires both the creation of a new agency to administer the law, e.g., to ensure employers pay what they owe, pay out to eligible workers for the time off they take, and a new computer system to make all this possible.

We know the Mayor doesn’t like the law. But the essence of being an executive is executing laws.

Forcing more than half a million workers to wait for who knows how much longer to either keep working when they need time off for compelling  for compelling family reasons — or at least as likely forgo needed income — hardly comports with including them in prosperity.

Her refusal to propose the $20 million needed to get the program started doesn’t, I think, reflect only spending constraints imposed by her deciding not to even hit the pause button on the tax cuts. But they do perhaps provide some cover.

What We Know (and Don’t) About How DC Spends Its TANF Funds

Mayor Bowser and the DC Council will soon have to make a critical decision: What to do about the families that have reached the rigid time limit local law sets on participation in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

As I said before, a working group convened by the Mayor has recommended significant revisions to the law. They include both indefinite-term extensions for parents who are complying with requirements set for them and ongoing benefits for their children, no matter what.

This would be probably the single most important thing the District could do now to alleviate poverty. It arguably would save money too — in healthcare costs, for example, homeless services and special education for children who’d suffer brain damages due the high levels of stress that acute poverty can cause.

But sustaining TANF benefits beyond the point that federal block grant funds can be used for them won’t be cheap. So where will the money come from? No one, to my knowledge, has figured that out yet. And it’s certainly beyond my ken.

But it’s worthwhile, I think, to look at where the District’s TANF funds are going now. We have a partial answer from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which publishes annual state-by-state analyses of TANF spending, based on reports states must submit to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The Center proceeds from the view that TANF has three core purposes—cash assistance, work activities and child care. These reflect a widely-shared view that the program should serve as a safety net and help parents get (and keep) jobs that will pay enough to make them more self-sufficient.

The District spent only 63.% of its TANF funds, i.e., its share of the block grant, plus local funds, on the core purposes in 2015.

This is relatively more than states as a whole spent. But it still leaves a lot of money to account for — about $99 million, assuming the reported total spending is right.*

Drilling down, we see that the District spent 26% of its TANF funds — roughly $70 million—on cash assistance.

An additional 14% — somewhat over $37 million — went for work activities, most if not all of this presumably to the organizations the District contracts with to provide services that help parents prepare for and find work.

Another 22% — a generously rounded $60 million — funded vouchers that subsidize child care for low-income families. These need not necessarily all be families in TANF. But TANF families are a top spending priority so long as parents fully participate in their required work activities.

The District used 7% of its TANF funds — nearly $18.7 million — for refunds from its Earned Income Tax Credit, i.e., money paid to workers whose allowable income tax claims exceeded their liabilities.

Needless to say (I hope), few of the recipients were TANF parents. As the name suggests, only people with income from work can claim it. They need not be poor or even nearly so. For example, a parent with two children remains eligible until she earns $45,000.

The EITC is nevertheless generally viewed as a powerful anti-poverty measure — in part because it puts money into people’s pockets and in part because it provides an added incentive to work. To this extent, it’s consistent with the over-arching purpose of TANF.

Those keeping track will note that we’ve got about $80 million left to account for — a larger percent than any core purpose received. It’s also a considerably larger percent left over than states as a whole reported.

The Center puts it all but administrative costs into an “other services” bucket. HHS allows states to report some spending as “other” too, but not spending on as many different things as could be left after what I’ve thus far itemized.

So where did the millions go? I asked the Department of Human Services and have thus far not received an answer. I’m hopeful, however, because looking at those “other” items in light of TANF families’ needs seems a useful exercise.

We — and the DC Council — could then better decide if each and every one of those unspecified programs and/or services should continue to receive a share of TANF funds if that means that core purposes don’t get enough.

And should they continue to receive them if the administration and Council then can’t find enough to extend a lifeline to all the at-risk TANF families?

* The Center reports that the District spent about $267 million in TANF funds. This is nearly $100 million more than its share of the block grant, plus the local funds it must spend. The Center accounts for $2 million as block grant funds left over from a prior year, but that obviously leaves more unaccounted for.

State TANF Spending Raises Red Flags As Republicans (Again) Ponder New Block Grants

The latest reports on Temporary Assistance for Needy Family’s spending are a timely reminder of what happens when states receive insufficient federal funds and a lot of flexibility in what they can do with them.

Basically, we expect TANF to do two things — serve as a safety net for poor families with children and enable the parents to get jobs that pay enough to make them more self-sufficient. Not necessarily enough to cover all their family’s basic needs, but at least enough to make cash benefits unnecessary.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which analyzes the annual spending reports, translates these expectations into three core purposes — cash assistance, work activities and child care.

The last of these supports the second in that it frees parents to participate in a job training program and/or other activities that will prepare them for work, look for a job and, in the best of cases, actually work for pay.

The latest analysis, for 2015, gives us new numbers that tell the same old story. States, as a whole, spent barely more than half their share of the federal block grant, plus the funds they must spend to get it on these core purposes.

The remainder went for all sorts of things — some closely linked to a core purpose, e.g., Head Start and Pre-K, some to programs and services that don’t benefit only poor families, e.g., child welfare.

States may have used TANF funds to expand such programs, the Center says. In other cases, they merely used them cover rising costs — or even to replace what they’d been spending out of their own funds.

What they invested in core purposes varied enormously. For example, seven states spent less than 10% of their TANF funds on cash assistance, while eleven spent more than 30%.

Twenty-eight states spent less than 10% on work activities and related supports, e.g., transportation. Only five topped 20%. And twenty states spent less than 10% on child care. while nine spent more than 30%.

One might think that states spent less on one core purpose so they could spend more on another. Not altogether so. Two states — Arizona and Texas — spent less than 10% on each of the core activities.

We know how Arizona managed to free up so much of its TANF funds for other purposes. By 2015 it had cut its TANF time limit three times, kicking families out of its program after they’d participated for 24 months. That’s 36 months less than the time limit on their using federal funds for all participating families.

Arizona has since cut its time limit to a mere 12 months, gaining even more funds to cover budget shortfalls — a predictable need because the state has been cutting taxes for years.

The state realized further savings by reducing cash benefits below the low level paid when TANF replaced welfare as we knew it. The maximum a parent with two children can get now is $202 a month — about 12% of the federal poverty line.

An extreme case perhaps, but not altogether unique. The Center reports that Louisiana spent only 11% of its TANF funds on core purposes. Its very low cash benefits — $230 a month for a three-person family — went to only four of every one hundred poor families in the state.

Tempting as it is to trash on these states (and some others), the fault lies with the federal law, which permits states to economize at the expense of their very poor residents.

In a way, it virtually forces them to do this by holding the block grant at the same funding level as when TANF was created in 1996. It’s lost more than a third of its real-dollar value since. So states that want to do the right thing would have to spend far more of their own funds than the partial match the law requires.

We don’t see that in the spending figures. We instead see that states have used TANF as a slush fund — the term that a prolific conservative critic of the program recently used to rebut claims that welfare reform succeeded.

That claim is hardly new. It’s survived a barrage of evidence to the contrary. That’s because proponents in our Congress don’t actually seek to strengthen the safety net and put very poor people on a pathway to steady, decent-paying work.

Nor, for that matter, do they aim to give states flexibility so that they can develop more effective ways to do this. One need only recall the outcries from the right when the Department of Health and Human Services invited states to request waivers in order to test alternatives to the regular TANF work activity rules.

The House Republicans’ block-granting plans are all about cutting federal spending on non-defense programs, especially those that make up our safety net.

This is why we’re bracing for legislation to block grant SNAP and/or Medicaid. Republicans need to find significant savings as offsets for the tax cuts they’ve promised, plus those they’ll achieve by eliminating the Affordable Care Act.

TANF is a harbinger of things to come — unless supporters can galvanize grassroots opposition. This seems to me doable, though difficult.