In 1997, the nation embarked on a new experiment in welfare. People would have to work or be looking for work in order to get benefits, and they could only receive 60 months (five years) of assistance before being cut off for life. The name for this latest incarnation of cash welfare was “Temporary Assistance for Needy Families,” with an emphasis on the “temporary.”
This is the story of TANF in a chart. At first, enrollment fell sharply. The booming economy helped. Many families tried to get off welfare in order to preserve their eligibility for tougher times, and there was an uptick in the number of working mothers. In the 2000s, TANF enrollment continued to fall, though at a slower rate.
The housing crisis was a test that TANF struggled with. Any safety net program should be expected to cushion the cruelest blows of a recession. Yet TANF enrollment increased only 13 percent between 2007 and 2010. A recent report by the Brookings Institution remarked, “the percentage of poor people receiving TANF reached historic lows during the recession, precisely the time a safety net program would be expected to cover more of the poor.
Unlike food stamp or Medicaid funding, TANF money does not automatically grow with the size of the need. It comes in fixed amounts to each state, so during the recession, many states found it difficult to expand their programs. It had also become common for states to divert TANF money toward other services for the poor, so when extra emergency money became available in 2009, it didn’t necessarily go toward cash assistance at all.
Some states responded better than others during the downturn. In that time period, Oregon increased its enrollment by 72 percent, Hawaii by 85 percent, and Delaware by 70 percent. Other states saw decreases: Enrollment fell in Vermont by 41 percent, in Arizona by 23 percent, and in Indiana by 22 percent.
The recession highlighted another criticism of TANF, which is that compelling people to work does not necessarily mean they will find work or escape poverty. A 2009 paper in the American Journal of Public Health noted that families often cycle on and off benefits. Those who do leave TANF voluntarily are hardly well off, living below the poverty line on average, and one early analysis estimated that 20 percent of leavers went back on TANF within a year. A 2006 study of 1,075 families in Milwaukee concluded at the end of four years that, “most of these TANF applicants were no better off, and, in many cases, they were worse off than when they sought assistance.”
So there is growing population of families that have stumbled through all 60 months of federal eligibility. Many states have extension programs, but these are vulnerable in an era of tight budgets. Maine for instance, used to automatically extend TANF benefits for most families who used up their 60 months.
In 2012, Maine legislators discontinued that program, cutting loose thousands of households: Enrollment declined 26 percent in the first six months. Almost all of these families faced significant barriers to work. A survey by Sandra Butler, a professor of social work at the University of Maine, found that 40 percent of the adults had less than a high school education, and 39 percent said they had a disability that made it hard to work. Fewer than 25 percent of households had someone working at the time their benefits were eliminated, and most of that employment was part-time. After their benefits were cut, families had the neither the means or the opportunity make up for the loss in income.
TANF was envisioned as a runway for the poor to launch themselves out of poverty, but a troubling fraction still skid along the rock bottom of the economy. As the authors of the AJPH paper fret, “we may be relegating them and their children to a hazardous future that can only undermine personal and public health.” Ironically, for a program designed to “break the cycle of dependency,” its legacy may be that the cycle of poverty persists.