The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 introduced changes that require states to report on specific employment and education outcomes for people after they stop receiving TANF cash assistance.  Mirroring the Department of Labor's Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act programs, these measures cover employment, employment retention, employment earnings, and attainment of a high school degree. This Urban Institute fact sheet is a resource for states, federal staff, and agency leaders implementing the new law.  Drawing insights from the 2018 report called Measuring Employment Outcomes in TANF, the fact sheet helps explain the challenges and opportunities of measuring and interpreting employment outcomes.

Many child support policies disproportionately harm families with low incomes in which nonresident parents have limited ability to pay support. This blogpost outlines six recommendations on how child support systems can equitably serve families with low incomes to emphasize healthy child development, encourage parental support in all forms, foster parent-child and co-parenting relationships, and assist parents who struggle to pay support. These recommendations include the need to emphasize support for the entire family; establish and modify child support orders according to parents’ ability to pay support; identify and address the causes of noncompliance and limit punitive enforcement; transfer all child support collected by the state to TANF families; collect a wider range of demographic and outcome data and evaluate policy impacts on diverse family types; and provide government support to children in poverty whose parents cannot provide meaningful financial support.

The Child Support Enforcement (CSE) program was enacted in 1975 as a federal-state program and served to reduce public expenditures for recipients of cash assistance by obtaining ongoing support from noncustodial parents that could be used to reimburse the state and federal governments for part of that assistance. Over the years, CSE has evolved into a multifaceted program. While public assistance cost recovery remains an important function of the program, its other aspects include service delivery and promotion of self-sufficiency and parental responsibility. This Congressional Research Service summary explores how the CSE program has different rules for assistance families (e.g., those receiving cash benefits under TANF) and non-assistance families. Additionally, the summary highlights each of the CSE program’s seven major services -- (1) parent location, (2) paternity establishment, (3) establishment of child support orders, (4) review and modification of child support orders, (5) collection of child support payments, (6) distribution of child support payments, and (7) establishment and enforcement of medical support – and discusses how they impact TANF families.

The COVID-19 pandemic created sudden, substantial hardships for many families with low incomes and unprecedented challenges for the operation of benefit programs. Families combining work and TANF when the pandemic began could have lost earnings, while non-working TANF recipients may have become unable to meet other activity requirements, and families who were previously economically stable and ineligible for TANF may have become newly eligible for cash assistance. Agencies administering benefit programs had to determine how to adjust program rules during state program office closures while continuing to meet families’ evolving needs. This Urban Institute brief provides a graphical overview of selected TANF policy changes states made, including information about changes to work and activity requirements, sanctions, time limits, benefit computation policies, and treatment of unemployment insurance benefits.

On June 3, 2023, the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 was signed into law, a legislative package previously agreed upon by the White House and House Speaker to suspend the national debt ceiling limit through January 1, 2025 in exchange for a package of spending cuts and policy changes, including changes to work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and TANF. The American Public Human Services Association has developed a summary of relevant human services provisions and the corresponding effective dates.

Families experiencing poverty and economic pressure have increased risk for child maltreatment, intimate partner violence, and acts of violence by youth. This article highlights several programs that reduce rates of family and child poverty, including TANF, but it notes how TANF policies in particular have the greatest economic security policy discrepancies across states despite research that shows policies that increase access to money protect against family and youth violence. The article discusses research that indicates work requirements in TANF and other evidence-based interventions may protect against violence by increasing individual and family resources. However, one-size-fits-all work requirements may have unanticipated negative effects, such as an increase in sanctions that contribute to unemployment or under-employment when an individual cannot meet set requirements or leaving single mothers with less time to care for their children, which may increase the risk of child maltreatment.

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation has issued a Call for Papers for the Research and Evaluation Conference on Self-Sufficiency (RECS) 2022, to be held in-person from June 1-3, 2022 in Washington, DC. The Call invites proposals for full conference sessions, individual presentations, and roundtables on the following topics: TANF programs, policies, and populations; employment and mobility in the labor market; youth well-being and the transition to adulthood; strengthening families, fatherhood, marriages, and relationships; evaluating social programs, building evidence, and using data; and approaches to alleviate poverty and expand opportunity. A virtual information session on preparing and submitting a proposal will be held on July 22, 2021 from 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. ET. Proposal submissions are due by August 27, 2021.

This brief summarizes a May 2020 survey of State TANF administrators conducted by the American Public Human Services Association to determine how state agencies changed their TANF programs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Key changes included using or expanding short-term benefit programs for families impacted by COVID-19, utilizing waivers from TANF regulations, increasing opportunities for virtual learning activities and remote working opportunities, and changing income thresholds for eligibility or TANF benefit amount calculations.