One little-noticed provision in the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill that marked the final act of the last Congress was another straight extension of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. That’s the block grant that included many of the historic welfare reforms crafted by congressional Republicans and signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996.
TANF’s authors set a time limit on the program’s operation, designed to force Congress to regularly review its effectiveness in assisting low-income families. But the latest extension—buried on page 3,899 of December’s 4,155-page spending behemoth—continues a pattern dating back to 2010, when the first and only long-term reauthorization of the TANF program expired. In the dozen years since then, Congress has repeatedly extended the program with no substantive changes for up to a few months at a time, and always as part of a broader bill in which TANF was simply an “extender” riding along as an afterthought. In recent years, House Republicans at least tried to make improvements, approving a comprehensive TANF reform bill in committee in 2018; during their past four years in the majority, House Democrats didn’t even hold a hearing on TANF.
The latest extension through September 2023 reinforces how TANF has become increasingly forgotten in American social policy discussions. I recently reviewed TANF’s history in a chapter I wrote for a new edited volume published by Oxford University Press titled Work and the Social Safety Net: Labor Activation in Europe and the United States.
My chapter focuses on “work activation” (the continental term for what Americans dub work requirements) in TANF and its predecessor programs dating to FDR’s New Deal. The 1996 work-based reforms reflected a significant departure from prior efforts to engage welfare recipients in work and productive activities, and quickly resulted in historic increases in work and earnings and declines in welfare dependence and poverty.
Additional changes enacted a decade later in the 2006 Deficit Reduction Act amplified the caseload declines, even as states have increasingly exploited loopholes to avoid engaging adult recipients in work and productive activities. Indeed, TANF caseloads remained low even during the Great Recession and continued their downward trend in the years since, in contrast with other means-tested benefit programs. By 2019 TANF counted three million adult and child recipients versus 35 million on food stamps.
Despite the onset of the pandemic, TANF was largely ignored as its caseload continued to drift downward in 2020 and none of the five pandemic laws enacted in 2020 altered the program. Meanwhile other government benefits—food stamps, enlarged unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and more—flowed to tens of millions of households, many for the first time. While the March 2021 American Rescue Plan (ARP) included $1 billion in TANF emergency assistance, that was just a fraction of the $5 billion TANF emergency contingency fund Democrats created during the Great Recession. That same law also included a massive, and now expired, expansion in the child tax credit (CTC), which temporarily recreated the pre-TANF welfare system’s defining feature of paying government checks each month to millions of parents regardless of whether they worked or not.
It’s hard to argue against smaller welfare caseloads, and some of TANF’s long-term trajectory is the natural result of a program whose funding has eroded over time. Since 1996, federal TANF funding for states has remained fixed at around $17 billion per year—without even an inflation adjustment and thus resulting in a real 45 percent reduction in its original value. Given recent 40-year-high inflation, the latest straight extension in December’s omnibus bill provides the largest real cut in the TANF block grant’s value to date—yet was supported by all but two House Democrats.
The current status quo has kept Republicans from updating TANF’s work requirements, which have similarly weakened over time, as my chapter details. As a result of straight TANF extensions for now the past dozen years, those debates (with the right seeking more work activity, and the left more program funding) have been fought to a draw. Meanwhile, the antipoverty debate has moved on to the size and terms of the far larger CTC and food stamps programs, among other issues. Both sides have offered TANF reform proposals in recent years, but with the present divided government it’s hard to see such bills advancing far, during the next two years at least. That would be a lost opportunity, since as I previously described with Ron Haskins, TANF is in need of modest but important reforms—some of which ought to garner bipartisan support—to improve the help it provides to low-income families with children.
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