The Trump administration’s focus on waste and fraud in the federal government is shifting to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) welfare program, according to an issue brief obtained exclusively by the Washington Reporter.
In the brief, the Administration for Children and Families — which falls within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — lays out how states across America are exploiting loopholes in TANF and provides solutions to minimize the waste.
The report, authored by David Swegle, the director of the Office of Family Assistance, explains how policies, like a caseload reduction credit, have evolved from its “original, well-intended purpose of rewarding states for successfully reducing welfare dependency into a mechanism that effectively eliminates work requirements for most states.”
One of the core problems is measuring TANF’s effectiveness, which Swegle notes can be muddled by external economic factors. “The challenge is that caseload decline alone does not show why families left or did not enter assistance,” he wrote. “A strong economy might drive down caseloads even if the state TANF agency does little to engage families in work, while an economic downturn may cause caseloads to rise despite state efforts to promote employment and self-sufficiency. As a result, the credit can reduce work participation targets based on caseload changes that are consistent with TANF’s goals but are not necessarily attributable to state work engagement efforts.”
“Any meaningful reform will need to address not only the design flaws that allow the caseload reduction credit to eliminate work participation targets but also the workarounds states have developed to minimize their work participation obligations,” Swegle wrote.
Despite the problems Swegle outlined with the caseload reduction credit, its elimination likely would not solve the problems he laid out. “If the caseload reduction credit did not exist, most states would likely take advantage of other approaches to avoid work participation penalties, most notably through ‘token payments’ (even at a cost of $35 per case as required by the FRA and discussed further below) or by moving families who do not meet work requirements to solely state-funded programs,” he wrote.
In the decades since TANF was launched, Swegle explained that parts of it have become ineffective if not counterproductive. The main target of his criticism is the caseload reduction credit; he wrote that “while [it was] conceptually intended to provide flexibility and recognize state success, the credit has become administratively burdensome, imprecise, and easily manipulated through strategies like generating excess [maintenence-of-effort] by reporting additional existing state spending that meets a TANF purpose. The FRA’s recalibration of the base year has done little to strengthen work requirements, and most states continue to face minimal or no federal work participation targets.”
