One interesting factoid from yesterday’s Human Services Committee hearing on Bill 18-1061, the DC Public Assistance Amendment Act of 2010: DC’s current TANF Employment Program can accommodate only 65 percent of active TANF cases. This means that 35 percent of eligible TANF families are not able to access the program’s integral services’including job readiness, education, and others.
And yet, the subject of the hearing was a bill that would impose a strict, 60-month time limit on recipients of TANF, ignoring completely the program’s shortcomings and insufficiencies. Yesterday, DCFPI — and a host of other organizations — came out to testify in strong opposition to this harmful piece of legislation.
The bill’s author, Councilmember Marion Barry, has stated that his intent is not to actually pass the bill as written, but simply to begin a conversation about welfare reform. Indeed, a desire to improve the effectiveness of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program is a worthy goal that most DC residents would support. But as written, the bill instead puts DC’s most vulnerable and needy families at risk while bypassing the challenge of program improvement.
Research strongly suggests that the key element of the proposed bill — a 60-month lifetime time limit for TANF assistance — would disproportionately affect precisely those who need the most support: individuals with complex barriers to work. A 2006 Mathematica study of Minnesota welfare recipients approaching the state’s time limit found that these individuals were much more likely to experience domestic violence, low cognitive ability, low literacy, or physical or mental health issues.
And while DC’s TANF program theoretically offers services to address many of these barriers, those services are difficult to access. In fact, according to a 2008 DCFPI / SOME study, many TANF recipients are unaware of the diverse services theoretically available to them.
This begs the question: isn’t DC putting the cart before the horse by considering time limits when the system’s core services are difficult to navigate and only available to two-thirds of recipients?
DC is at the cusp of a large-scale TANF restructuring that will introduce mandatory, comprehensive assessments of participants, expanded support for education opportunities, and rigorous evaluations of vendors to improve accountability. This new system holds great promise. In our opinion, the best way that DC can improve TANF services and effectiveness is not to set arbitrary time limits that penalize the most vulnerable, but to ensure the full and enthusiastic implementation of the TANF reforms that are already underway.
