This spring, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) temporarily halted a pilot project to test new approaches to measure the effectiveness of the federal welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF.
Now the administration is restarting it, and states have until August 15 to apply, according to the request for proposals issued this month. The focus of the pilot, per that document, is to promote work, reduce dependence on government help and encourage personal responsibility.
The pilot was mandated as part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. The central goal of it is to assess whether there might be better ways to gauge the impact and outcome of TANF spending than the Work Participation Rate, which is the only current measure of accountability for the program and as the name suggests, simply reflects the percentage of TANF recipients who are participating in countable work activities.
The initiation of the pilot was surely born of advocacy for a more progressive approach to evaluating TANF that does not look at workforce as the only possible successful outcome of the support. Here is the Center for Law and Social Policy’s view of Work Participation Rate, or WPR:
CLASP has deep concerns about the WPR, including that it is a) grounded in racist stereotypes about the need to force public
benefit recipients to work; b) does not measure the effectiveness of work activities; c) does not give states credit for engaging
recipients in activities such as full-time education and training beyond a year, or for addressing issues such as mental health
needs or substance abuse treatment; and d) forces caseworkers to focus on compliance and spend undue amounts of time tracking.
The Biden administration’s request for proposals aimed the pilot at those concerns. In their September 2024 request for proposals, examples of alternative measures applying states might use included “effective use of cash assistance and concrete supports; education and training; or work supports, job placement, and retention supports linked to career pathways.”
California, Maine, Kentucky, Minnesota and Ohio were selected by the Biden administration to serve as the pilot states. But those choices, which were made in between the election and inauguration, were nixed by the Administration for Children and Families.
“We believe the prior administration should not have proceeded with the pilots in the period between the election and the inauguration and should have left that decision for this administration,” said Acting Assistant Secretary Andrew Gradison, in a letter sent to the five states in March. Last week, in a statement announcing the newly constituted pilot, Gradison called the Biden metrics suggested to states “unverifiable and subjective.”
So what’s in the Trump plan for rethinking TANF measurement?
There are three measures that states will have to use and were required by the law that related to employment and median earnings after exiting TANF. Trump will add as a core requirement for all five states the “level of independence” from other government benefits like SNAP a year after participation in TANF.
The request for proposals then provides a 17-item list of examples for metrics that applying states can use. And those boil down to three general areas: “employment and reduced dependency,” “education and skill building,” and “health and family relationships.”
The examples are much more specific than what Biden put out in 2024, which were big-picture suggestions on what to include. The new request includes specific measures that the administration would like to see. A few examples:
Level of Independence from Government Benefits — 4th Quarter After Exit: The proportion of total family income from earnings in the 4th quarter after program exit.
Decreased Child School Truancy: Percentage of work-eligible individuals with at least one school-age child whose school truancy rate decreased between the period while the parent was receiving TANF to a defined period after program exit.
Two-parent Families: The number of two-parent families receiving TANF assistance.
Participation in Mental or Behavioral Health Services: Number of TANF participants
engaging in mental or behavioral health services to promote work while receiving
TANF assistance and working in unsubsidized employment the 4th quarter after exit.
As with the Biden plan, states will apply with two of these metrics they want to use in this pilot, and winners will assess TANF based on those plus the four core metrics until 2031.
This pilot proceeds after a year in which the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over TANF policy, has spent a lot of time on TANF. The committee held a series of hearings on the program’s impact, as well as the potential for waste, fraud and abuse within it. The hearings were geared somewhat around a series of Government Accountability Office reports on the subject.
While the recent reconciliation bill left TANF alone, Youth Services Insider would not be surprised to see a TANF reform bill of some kind come up in the next fiscal year. But the results of this pilot, which is slated to run for six years, won’t likely inform TANF policy for awhile.
