One of the key goals of US welfare reforms enacted a generation ago was to reduce families’ long-term dependence on benefits. It’s easy to understand why. Immediately before 1996 reforms, receipt of welfare checks under the former Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program reached a record high, with over five million families collecting those payments each month in fiscal year 1994:

Figure 1: AFDC/TANF Families, Fiscal Years 1980–2022

Many families on AFDC experienced extended periods on benefits, as a summary of the 1996 reform law described:

Although roughly half the families that enter AFDC leave the rolls within 1 year, most of them return. In fact, as indicated in chart 1, of the 4.4 million families now on welfare, about 65 percent or 2.9 million will eventually be on welfare for 8 years or more (Ellwood, 1986). Research also shows that despite the short welfare spells of some families, the average length of stay on welfare, counting repeat spells, for families enrolled at any given moment is 13 years (Pavetti, 1995).

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program that replaced AFDC in 1996 included several policies designed to reduce dependence. One key provision set a five-year lifetime limit on most adults’ collection of federal cash welfare; states could set their own, shorter time limits, and many did.

How is that working out? As Figure 1 showed, overall receipt has come way down in the wake of those changes. Compared with the AFDC peak in 1994, the number of families collecting TANF assistance in 2022 is down by 4.2 million or an astonishing 84 percent.

Yet despite that enormous decline, the share of cash welfare recipients experiencing “long spells” on benefits (i.e. lasting more than 20 months, according to HHS welfare dependence reports) doubled from 12.7 percent for individuals entering AFDC/TANF in 1996 through 1998 to 28.5 percent in 2017 and 2018 (the most recent period reviewed).       

How can that be? One key reason involves the changing nature of the TANF caseload.

Recall that the five-year limit applies to adults collecting federal TANF assistance. However, HHS data show that 55 percent of families on TANF in FY 2021 were exempt from the five-year limit—in almost all cases because the adult head (usually a nonparent relative like a grandparent, a parent collecting SSI, or a noncitizen parent) received TANF benefits only for the children in the household. That’s up from 21 percent of AFDC families that were such “child-only” cases in 1996. That reflects how, even as the TANF caseload declined sharply, a growing share of remaining cases is exempt from policies designed to limit dependence—including the five-year limit as well as work requirements.    

Other data reinforce that dynamic. In 2017–2018, among children ages 11–15 on TANF, 45.2 percent received benefits for more than 20 months, or four times the share of adults ages 25–64 (11.4 percent).

Some might argue that shouldn’t be a concern, especially given the large decline in the TANF caseload. If so, they would have trouble explaining away growing dependence on food stamp benefits, currently paid to more than 20 times as many households as collect TANF assistance. As Figure 2 shows, even as AFDC/TANF cases plummeted, households collecting food stamps soared and remain high today despite unemployment at historic lows. 

AFDC/TANF Families and Food Stamp Households, Fiscal Years 1980-2022

The latest HHS welfare dependence report shows that, during 2017 and 2018, nearly half (47.6 percent) of food stamp recipients spent more than 20 months collecting benefits. That exceeded the 28.5 percent of TANF households who has such long spells on benefits. It was also greater than the share of food stamp recipients with durations that long who entered the program during the Great Recession years (35.3 percent).

The nature of the TANF and food stamp caseloads is not the same. But as Congress reauthorizes both programs this year, rising durations should challenge a new generation of policymakers to identify ways to limit extended dependence on taxpayer support. Otherwise, as Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) rightly put it during a recent hearing on TANF, “we run the risk of trapping people in a generational cycle of poverty that makes a government check more valuable than a job and robs them of the dignity of work.”

Update: Figure 2 was mislabeled in the original version of this post

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