Under Mayor Gray’s proposed budget, more than 6,100 families in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program will lose a fifth of their meager cash benefits come October — this on top of the same sized-cut imposed last April.

The figure I led off with is what a family of three would be left with. Additional benefits cuts would follow until the family got nothing at all.

More than 11,000 children under thirteen would be plunged into even deeper poverty. Some of them, as the Children’s Law Center warns, would be put into foster care simply because their parents couldn’t afford adequate housing.

The families who’ll suffer are those who’ve spent 60 months or more in the program — not necessarily consecutive.

In many cases, the affected parents haven’t gotten the services they need to overcome severe work barriers, e.g., mental and physical health problems, domestic violence trauma, minimal or no marketable job skills.

Some were expected to engage in what passed for work preparation activities — sessions on workplace behavior, writing a resume, interviewing, etc.

Then, as one participant said, “[t]hey have you on the computer all day,” searching the online listings and pressured to take the first job offered.

Many have cycled back into the program because they didn’t have the skills for the jobs they’d found — or hadn’t gotten the help they needed to overcome other barriers. Others, I suppose, returned when they lost their jobs due to the recession.

Not all the parents whose benefits will be cut were required to engage in work activities for their whole term in the program. Some were excused for awhile because their barriers made work activities wholly unrealistic. But the time off is being counted toward their 60-month maximum anyway.

What’s happening here is that part of the Department of Human Services’ TANF redesign is barreling ahead — the part that gives parents a stronger incentive to engage in required work preparation and work search activities.

Nothing like facing a penniless future to get one moving — unless, of course, one’s too ill, disabled or occupied with other responsibilities,e.g., caring for a severely disabled child, to move on the work front, even knowing the hardships awaiting.

The administration could exempt up to 20% of such “hardship cases” from the 60-month limit and still use federal funds for a share of their cash benefits. But it’s chosen not to.

The other part of the TANF reform — in-depth individual assessments to identify their individual strengths and needs — is lagging behind. Thus also appropriate agreements on what they should do to fulfill their responsibilities for striving toward self-sufficiency.

As of late February, DHS had completed only 12% of the assessments needed for families at immediate risk of cash benefit loss.

At the reported rate of 150 assessments a week, it won’t get through them all until months after the next 20% cut kicks in.

It might if the rate applied only to parents subject to the phase-out rather than to all parents who show up when they’re told to. Some at immediate risk haven’t heard, don’t understand or perhaps figure it’s futile because they’re going to lose their benefit anyway.

Councilmembers Jim Graham and Michael Brown have introduced a billthat would temporarily stave off the benefits cuts and mandate reasonable time-limit exemptions, such as many states provide.

Advocates have suggested ways the bill could be strengthened, including a longer reprieve period. But it’s a whole lot better than what’s coming down the pike.

Why didn’t Mayor Gray fold a version into his proposed budget? Surely he knows that TANF families will lose benefits because the program failed them.

For the same reason he put the benefits phase-out into last year’s proposed budget. Savings to help close the budget gap. This year he expects to save more than $5.6 million.

Well, the DC Council could do what the Mayor wouldn’t. The Human Services Committee took a step in this direction last week with a vote (4-1) in favor of the Graham-Brown bill

Now comes the need to find funds to substitute for the Mayor’s proposed savings — and to get at least three more Councilmembers on board.

Maybe we should launch a TANF Challenge along the lines of the popular Food Stamp Challenges.

Who knows what might happen if our elected representatives had to try living on $275 for a month?

Photo credit: US Department of Agriculture

“No longer will our homeless neighbors languish on the streets,” I explained to him. “Or for that matter, will even have to hunker down in a homeless shelter.”

“Where will they go?” he asked, intrigued.

“We put them in their own apartments,” I said, “ and then have case workers care for them.”

“Isn’t that expensive?” the executive asked.

“Studies show that it is actually cheaper to provide permanent housing and services, rather than keeping people homeless on the streets,” I said. “The cost of homelessness is high – from emergency room visits and paramedic runs to psychiatric support and temporary food and shelter.”

“So you mean that it is cheaper to pay a person’s rent and hire a case worker?”

“Exactly.” I said, thinking I had convinced a skeptical community leader.

But I had not closed the deal. He responded, “If the government is paying a homeless person’s rent for the rest of his life, then that is basically welfare housing. I don’t support welfare.”

Welfare Housing. I’m sure the image conjured up in his head was what former President Ronald Reagan described as “welfare queen”, the fictional mother on welfare driving a brand new Cadillac paid for by taxpayers.

Certainly, paid rent for life should not be the norm for every impoverished person entangled in poverty.   If an average one bedroom apartment is $700 per month, the government could be paying $8,400 per year. In a span of 20 years that could be $168,000.

If you compare this cost of rent to hospital and paramedic runs alone, the price tag for “housing first” appears to be cheaper. But for those taxpaying Americans who demand “less government”, a free ride can never be justified.

This is not the view of a small extremist group. I’ve encountered many people in  presentations with local neighborhood groups who have difficulty embracing the idea of free or subsidized rent.

“I’ve worked hard all my life, and have paid my rent most of my adult life,” they say. “Why should other people get a free ride?”

If “other people” meant “all impoverished people”, and if a “free ride” meant “free rent for life”, I would agree with them. Not everyone person on the streets needs “free rent for life” and not everyone needs intensive support services.

Sometimes “housing first” means simply helping a homeless family with initial rent payments in order to get them back on their feet. Other times, it is providing permanent housing while a person overcomes an addiction.

What is clear to me is that emphasizing permanent housing that is stable and supportive enough to help people overcome their personal barriers is the solution to ending homelessness.

For the most chronic homeless person who is usually struggling with a long-term disability, “housing first” is typically their only solution. They will never be able to work enough to pay rent, and will never be able to get off the streets without intensive help.

For them, providing “housing first” is a matter of life and death.

Photo credit: Images of Money

An incredulous gasp is my only response when a presidential candidate, worth a quarter of a billion dollars, publicly states on national television that this country has a “very ample safety net” for poor Americans.

Sure, our country provides Medicaid, food stamps, and housing vouchers to help Americans fight poverty. But these resources are not enough.

Just walk in our waiting room every weekday and the numbers of people you see clamoring for help will dispel the myth of an ample safety net.

Or, talk with America’s physicians regarding what they see. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently commissioned a national survey of primary care providers and pediatricians that resulted in an unusual conclusion by America’s doctors.

If they could, they would write a prescription to help Americans’ social needs – food, housing, fitness, and transportation assistance.

In fact, four out of five physicians felt that meeting the social needs of a person is just as important as meeting their medical conditions. Of those care providers in low-income communities, nine out of ten felt the same.

The link between meeting social needs and good health is so strong that three of four doctors believe that the health care system in this country should pay to help patients meet their social needs.

Imagine the HMO’s of this country paying to support homeless agencies, food banks, and affordable housing developers. Ironically, in these medical care organizations, their physicians whose primary goals are to help patients get healthy promote such an endeavor.

It just makes sense. Antibiotics and drug treatment are not the only avenues on the road back to health. Sometimes our doctors simply tell us to stay home and rest in the comfort of our beds, and to drink plenty of fluids and a healthy bowl of chicken soup.

But for more and more Americans the access to a secure home and nutritious food is just a fleeting hope.

Last week, I received a telephone call from a friend who I’ve known for years as a hardworking single mother of three children. She told me that she lost her job and was recently evicted from an apartment building that had been foreclosed. She and her children were now living in a motel, and her savings was dwindling rapidly.

Her predicament is contrary to a presidential candidate’s wrongfully perceived assessment of a sufficient social safety net. Her fear now is how to keep her children fed and housed. And she desperately hopes they will stay healthy.

In these difficult economic times, the chicken soup for this country’s soul is a safety net that meets social needs and healthcare conditions.

Photo credit: Terry Pritchard

Sounds pretty serious. So how big of a problem is this?

Apparently, it’s not a big problem at all. In California, former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger enforced an executive order prohibiting casinos from accepting welfare benefits as payment. His order was in response to this LA Times expose on the unintended use of benefits.

According to the Politico piece, in California “The amount accessed at casinos was about four-tenths of 1 percent of all welfare funds, while funds accessed at adult-entertainment venues were one one-thousandth of 1 percent, according to the state.”

The low utilization of this apparent legal loophole underscores the rationality of the poor. Left on their own, the poor spend far less than the general public on these illicit types of purchases.

I don’t have a problem with this law per se, clearly welfare benefits were not meant for casino and strip club purchases. But not surprisingly, welfare recipients themselves by and large agree.

The big take away here is that we should not assume that the poor are irrational. While maybe casinos and strip clubs should not be able to cash out welfare payments, assuming that welfare recipients are people who choose to spend their limited funds on frivolous purchases is not supported by the data.

This is a lesson that is not only important for policy makers, but anyone who designs interventions in aid of the poor. Too often the organizations I work with base their interventions on a presumption of irrationality amongst the poor. People by and large tend to be rational people who try as best they can to maximize their utility.

Given a choice between eating or gambling, rational people choose eating. This is true, by and large, across the income spectrum. Policies or social interventions that presume the poor are somehow less rational than the non-poor start from a dishonest place that is not supported by the documented, aggregate actions of the poor themselves.

Photo credit: Roadsidepictures

Huffington Post

This is an important, timely post because it reminds us of how poor people lived — and died — before the creation of today’s safety net.

Here in the District of Columbia, Morgan found “people living in basement apartments with dirt floors. Many were hungry, cold and short of coal for stoves. Some children were staying home because they had no shoes.”

Found a penniless woman with no coat to brave the cold weather for a trip to the social service agency. A blind man who made the trip, but was living with his nine children in an unheated place because the agency wouldn’t — or couldn’t — help him buy fuel.

In California, Morgan met a family that had lost three babies to dehydration while picking cotton there in 1936.

Still dreadful conditions 20 years later, he writes, when Michael Harrington chronicled farm worker poverty in that agriculture-rich state.

Morgan cites some evidence that safety net programs have lifted Americans out of poverty.

For example, the official poverty rate for seniors dropped from 28.5% in 1966 to 9% in 2010, at least partly because the federal government started indexing Social Security retirement benefits to cost-of-living increases.

Two other examples based on the Census Bureau’s supplemental poverty measure. You can see them in this nice infographic from the Half in Ten campaign.

But Morgan’s main point is that safety net programs have changed thequality of poverty.

In other words, poor people, by and large, don’t suffer the same acute, life-threatening deprivations as they did before we began building the network of programs that make up today’s safety net.

Morgan focuses on what may be our biggest success — federal nutrition assistance programs.

“Clinical malnutrition,” he writes, “has given way to what government and private agencies call ‘food insecurity.’”

“Poor nutrition, not malnutrition is the biggest problem” now, says anti-hunger expert and advocate Joel Berg.

And indeed, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2010 figures, children in only 1% of American households sometimes didn’t get enough to eat because their parents couldn’t afford to feed them.

WIC alone, Berg estimates, has prevented 200,000 babies from dying at birth.

“Progressives,” Morgan concludes, “should not be timid about extolling this achievement. And conservatives, above all, should welcome it” because safety net programs “enable millions more people to participate in the great American market,” e.g., by using food stamps to buy groceries, vouchers to pay rent to private landlords.

Many conservatives do appreciate the safety net, Morgan says. But, even by his own showing, many don’t.

For example, he quotes Newt Gingrich, whose latest tome notes that the 2009 poverty rate was about the same as when the War on Poverty began. “What did we get in return?” Newt asks — a rhetorical question if ever there was one.

We hear the same thing from the Republican Study Committee, which counts a large majority of House Republicans as members.

“Americans have spent around $16 trillion on means-tested welfare,”* it says. “Even with all these resources devoted to assistance for the poor, poverty is higher today than it was in the 1970s.”

This is the send-up for its broad-gauge attack on virtually the whole range of federal programs that constitute the safety net.

And RSC member Paul Ryan, who chairs the influential House Budget Committee, has personally championed radical safety net cuts.

As we head into the Fiscal Year 2013 budget season, both the administration and Congress will be looking for ways to reduce non-defense spending by $54.7 billion.

“The safety net will be a fat target,” Morgan warns.

Some major programs won’t get hit by the automatic cuts the failure of the Super Committee will trigger. But that doesn’t mean they’re safe, since Congress is perfectly free to change them — or the law that partly protects them.

Other programs are wide open, as the Congressional committees and subcommittees parcel out the mandated reductions.

We often focus on defects in the safety net — people who aren’t served, people who are but not sufficiently. This is still important.

But, taking a leaf out of Morgan’s book, I feel we urgently need to show how much good safety net programs do — and to revive the history of what poverty in America was like before them.

* This figure comes from the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation — a not always reliable source. The RSC is also indebted to the Foundation for its uniquely expansive definition of “welfare”.

Photo credit: Florida Keys–Public Libraries

We’d thus expect safety net programs to catch more people when the economy tanks, as it did in late 2007. We’d expect them to provide enough aid to serve their basic purpose, i.e., ensuring that needy people have enough to eat, a roof over their heads, essential medical care, etc.

By this modest measure, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program has egregiously failed — no surprise, given past performance.

A new brief from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities confirms this with two updated perspectives on the TANF safety net — what portion of poor families with children is it catching and how much is it helping those caught to meet their basic needs.

TANF Enrollment

TANF was created in 1996 to replace AID to Families with Dependent Children –  a program under which the federal government provided states with matching funds based on what benefits were costing and need.

“Welfare reform” converted this scheme to a fixed-sum block grant, plus a Contingency Fund states could draw on during hard economic times — until the Fund ran dry.

At the time, AFDC was providing cash assistance to 68% of poor families with children. Participation rates have been steadily falling — and not because fewer families were poor enough to need aid.

TANF did expand slightly — by 13% — after the recession set in. But in 2009, only 27% of families in poverty received any cash assistance from the program.

Cash Benefits

TANF cash benefits started out low — an average of about $395.50 a month for a family of three.

As of 2008, 28 states and the District of Columbia had increased the nominal value of the benefits they provided, but fewer than half enacted increases big enough to even keep pace with inflation.

Since then, inflation has continued to make dollars worth less. But most states have frozen benefit levels. Six states and the District have actually cut them.

A perfect storm of reasons for this — mostly attributable to federal policies. Most important perhaps are the year-after-year failure to increase funding for the block grant and rules that allow states to use TANF funds for more politically-popular programs.

Add to these two recent decision by our penny-pinching Congress.

The first was to let the TANF Emergency Contingency Fund die, thus denying states more of the extra funding the Recovery Act had provided to help them cope with recession-related pressures.

The second, more recent denied 17 mostly poor states supplemental funds they’d been receiving since TANF was created and, at the same time, cut back what had already been approved for the regular Contingency Fund.

I don’t want to let states — or the District — off the hook here. They’ve been choosing to economize on TANF cash benefits for a long time. Even in tough economic years like these, budgets are choices.

Nevertheless, the federal partner has been shirking its share of responsibility for maintaining the TANF safety net — and allowing states to shirk theirs as well.

End result is that:

• TANF cash benefits are worth less now than in 1996 in all but two states.
• They’ve declined by at least 20% in 34 states and the District.
• No state provides benefits that lift a family of three out of extreme poverty, i.e., above 50% of the federal poverty line.
• In 29 states and the District, benefits for the family are below 30% of the FPL.
• They’re below 20% in 14 states, nine of which have lost their supplemental grants.

This unfortunately may not be the worst of the bad news.

As CBPP earlier reported, a number of states have already projected budget shortfalls for Fiscal Year 2013.

They could face gaps they hadn’t expected due to the automatic spending cuts the debt ceiling/deficit reduction deal will trigger — or cuts Congress may pass to avert them.

Photo credit: jessibot

No extension would have meant no more federal funds for states’ TANF programs. Also less funding for other programs states support with their TANF grants, e.g., subsidized child care, homeless services.

Congress passed an extension about 10 days ago.

So the good news is that TANF won’t die the way the TANF Emergency Contingency Fund did. States will still get their regular block grant payments through March 2012. A brief reprieve, but a whole lot better than none.

Now the not-good news. The House majority refused to approve funding for supplemental grants that have been part of TANF since it was created. And the Senate didn’t reinstate them.

These grants have been providing extra funds to 17 states that would have been disadvantaged if their funding had been based solely on the block grant formula because they had high population growth and/or had historically spent relatively little under the welfare program TANF replaced.

When Congress extended TANF last year, it provided funds for the supplemental grants only through June 2011. It also capped them below what would have been needed to cover full funding for three-quarters of the fiscal year.

The result, as CLASP reports, is that states are getting only 66% of what they’d been getting as supplements. Now, at least for the time being, zero.

Congress shorted the supplement grants even though many of the states had unusually high child poverty rates. Quick check of the new Census figures shows that this is till true.

All but six of the affected states have child poverty rates higher than the very high 21.6% national rate. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports significant increases in poverty or deep poverty rates in 11 of them.

As CBPP notes elsewhere, some of the states have been hit disproportionately hard by the recession. A double whammy for them. Many more families poor enough to be eligible for TANF. Big budget shortfalls due to drops in tax revenues.

At least three of the 17 states have already taken the ax to their TANF programs.

New Mexico, for example, has cut benefits by 15%, leaving a family of three with just $380 per month.

Arizona has imposed a two-year time limit on benefits — even for children in families where adults don’t receive them.

Florida has cut funding for substance abuse treatment. Also imposed a drug testing requirement that denies benefits to applicants who fail. Research indicates that only a small percentage will. So do initial results. But the tests are yet another barrier to participation.

Hard to know whether the cut in supplemental grants made a critical difference. All three states have very conservative Republican governors and two of them Republican-controlled legislatures as well. So TANF would probably have been in the bull’s eye anyway.

Consider too that other states — and the District of Columbia — have also enacted benefits cuts, shorter time limits and other policies to reduce TANF spending.

Still, it seems reasonable to expect that a loss of a full year of supplemental grants will trigger more cutbacks. We’ll find out out — unless Congress decides to reverse its decision when it, once again, must extend the current TANF law or reauthorize it for the longer term.

The brevity of the extension is also not-good news because it suggests that House Republican leaders may decide to “reform” welfare reform within the next few months.

These are not folks that I’d like to see reshaping a program that’s supposed to provide a safety net for the nearly 6.7 million poor families with children and a pathway out of poverty for those who could, with the right mix of services, find living wage jobs — if only the jobs were out there.

Photo credit: Paul G

Presumably, the intention of the law is to dissuade welfare recipients from doing drugs. Apparently that is a recreation best left for the privileged.

An excellent article on this topic in Time Magazine points out that “several studies, including a 1996 report from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, have found that there is no significant difference in the rate of illegal-drug use by welfare applicants and other people.”

This finding makes sense, as a universally accepted mantra of the social sector is that people of all backgrounds can slip into poverty. The poor are just like you and me. Some use drugs, some don’t.

So if welfare recipients are not statistically more likely than those in the general population to take drugs, then what is Florida doing? Reading through the comment section of the Time article I came across the following comment, which highlights a commonly used justification for bad public policy.

If this policy stops even one person from doing drugs and getting welfare it’s worth it. Working people are not afraid of drug testing and you shouldn’t be either.

Wow, really? Two points here. First of all, I’m the kind of person that gets nervous at a DUI checkpoint, even if I haven’t had a drink of anything alcoholic in days. So while I don’t do drugs, I’d be irrationally afraid of failing a drug test anyway.

Second, if the goal is to simply stop one person from doing drugs, without respect to cost or anything else, there are a lot of ways of doing that.

Good public policy cannot be defined by one positive outlier. Instead, public policy, whether government interventions or initiatives of non-profit organizations, should be established with clearly defined objectives and constraints.

Social Objective

In this case, the objective might very well be reduction of drug use amongst welfare recipients. But this benefit is bounded by certain constraints. The most obvious constraint is money, especially since the policy was framed as a cost saving initiative, as deviant doping welfare recipients would be kicked off the dole, saving Floridians the burden of cutting fat welfare checks.

Of course, drug tests aren’t free. And given the fact that drug use amongst welfare recipients mirrors that of the general population, it’s not a problem unique to the poor. Indeed, the Time article notes that

…of the first 40 applicants tested [in Florida], only two came up positive, and one of those was appealing. The state stands to save less than $240 a month if it denies benefits to the two applicants, but it had to pay $1,140 to the applicants who tested negative. The state will also have to spend considerably more to defend the policy in court.

Clearly, this policy, like most poor policy, is driven by moral precepts. But it doesn’t have to be this way, especially in non-profits organizations where one would hope rationality trumps political considerations.

This Florida law, like many ill conceived interventions, suffers from a poorly defined social objective.

With limited resources available to the social sector, it is essential that policy makers of all shades of the political spectrum cast aside personal bias in favor of sound public policy. Sound public policy necessitates well defined, and well researched, social objectives.

This policy lacks a clearly defined social objective, ultimately costing the state precious resources and welfare recipients unnecessary hassle and humiliation.

Photo credit: Francis Storr

He’d promised to end welfare as we knew it. And, with a stroke of the pen, he did.

Cash assistance would henceforward be time-limited — a five-year lifetime maximum, with some limited, optional exceptions. None for program “graduates” who later suffered setbacks.

The federal government would pay states a fixed amount, based on what they were spending under the program TANF replaced. But they’d get bonus rewards for “decrease[s] in illegitimacy.”

States would have a good bit of flexibility, but they’d have to construct programs that, as the bill’s name implies, promoted personal responsibility and provided work opportunity, i.e., got recipients off the rolls and into jobs.

Big focus on personal responsibility — not be be confused with responsible personal choices.

The PRWORA includes, among other things, detailed work activity requirements, beefed-up child support enforcement, a related benefits cut for single parents who didn’t cooperate, a mandatory program component to reduce the rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies, especially among teenagers, and some extra requirements for teens who had babies anyway.

The legislation was controversial from the get-go. Clinton reportedly wasn’t altogether happy with it, but went along because he’d already vetoed two more extreme Republican alternatives.

Peter Edelman resigned from a high-level position in the Health and Human Services Department because, as he later explained, the bill wasn’t welfare reform at all.

It wouldn’t promote work effectively. It would “hurt millions of poor children.” And it would deny federally-funded assistance to “hundreds of thousands of immigrants” who were legally authorized to live here — children included.

Similar views from other prominent poverty experts, including Senator Daniel Moynihan, who called the bill “the most brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction.”

Needless to say, conservatives thought it was quite a fine thing. And they generally still do, though an upcoming hearing suggests that some Republican House members want to further tighten up on those work requirements.

I’ve put in my two cents on a number of occasions. Basically, I’m persuaded by the substantial body of research showing that the “success” the Republicans tout has little or nothing to do with enabling TANF recipients to find — and keep — living wage jobs.

Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich, best known for her classic Nickled and Dimed, sum up the evidence well.

Legal Momentum offers an even broader point-by-point indictment in its review of what’s happened to poor women and children in the 15 years since “welfare reform” began shredding the safety net.

What I think we need to understand is that the defects don’t reflect poor implementation. They’re an outgrowth of why welfare was “reformed” to begin with.

I recall TANF’s pre-history well, from my husband’s days in the Carter administration’s social policy planning office. The big deal then, as it was under Clinton, was to put a curb on federal welfare spending — especially support for single mothers.

By this measure, TANF has succeeded.

Congress has consistently level-funded the program, notwithstanding rising living and program operations costs and the growing number of families in need. At the same time, it’s allowed states to use unspent TANF funds for other, more politically-popular programs.

States have responded by adopting policies and condoning — if not actually encouraging — practices that minimize their caseloads.

The end result, says Ehrenreich, in a scathing review of our poverty policies, is that some recipients refer to TANF as “Torture and Abuse of Needy Families.”

TANF will expire at the end of September unless Congress reauthorizes it or, as it did last year, passes a short-term extension. The latter seems more likely, given the other preoccupations — and hyper-partisan battles — on Capitol Hill.

But sooner or later, the White House and Congress will turn their attention to reauthorization.

One would hope that they’d reform welfare reform to provide a genuine safety net for parents who can’t support themselves and their children, plus education, training, child care and whatever else those who can work need to embark on career paths that will lead them out of poverty.

But, as Legal Momentum observes, “Congress could also consider proposals that would take TANF an even less effective safety net.” Might even pass some of them in one of those bad compromises that gave us the program we have today.

In the meantime, watch out for what happens to TANF when Congress gets busy on the spending cuts required under the new debt ceiling/deficit reduction deal.

Photo credit: Debbie R

I got a call from someone who follows my blog — a homeless mother who lives in Rockville, Maryland. She hoped I could advise her.

I couldn’t, but I’d like to tell her story because it speaks to a couple of policy issues that ought to be high on the agenda — here in the District of Columbia and nationwide.

For reasons I hope are obvious, I’m not going to use my caller’s name. Let’s just call here N.

She’s working, but earning only $8.00 an hour. Absent father pays no child support. So she and her kids depend in part on the cash benefits they get from Maryland’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

The program is about to impose full family sanctions, i.e., to cut off their benefits entirely. This, it seems, on the recommendation of the contractor that delivers the program’s job-related services.

N said that partial sanctions were first applied when a caseworker who was fired didn’t tell his successor she’d been working. Another round of partial sanctions when the new caseworker failed to submit a routine report verifying that she had been.

Both times she was told not to worry. Everything would be fine. But the caseworker then said she hadn’t applied for a particular job, as instructed. N said she had and provided such proof as she could.

But the caseworker either wouldn’t or couldn’t reverse the full family sanctions decision. So N appealed. Appeal denied, which is hardly surprising since she was up against a large multi-state job services contractor and an agency equally committed to defending itself.

This is a fine illustration of what can happen when a state adopts a full family sanctions policy. All but five have one now. And the District is about to join them.

Sanctions and Due Process

On the one hand, states — and the District — have strong incentives to impose full family sanctions. Legal Momentum cites several in federal policy. I’d add plain old budget constraints.

On the other hand, those same budget constraints can mean little or no oversight of the operations that state agencies contract out. Note how N’s caseworkers papered over the lapses — and impacts — of the partial sanctions.

But even the best system won’t prevent misunderstandings and mistakes. That’s why TANF programs should include a pre-sanctions conciliation process.

If the objective is truly to bring participants into compliance, then why rush to sanction when there could be remedies that wouldn’t leave them and their children without enough money to live on?

It’s also why strong due process protections are so important. If all else fails, TANF participants deserve advance notice of what they’re accused of and the sanction awaiting them — and in a form they can understand. They deserve an impartial hearing that lets them tell their side of the story.

That said, TANF participants are likely to be at a disadvantage when it comes to formal hearings and the like. So, I think, would most of us be.

Which brings me to another policy issue.

N’s story shows why we need well-funded legal services programs to advise and represent low-income people when they have to deal with the powers-that-be, including complex and often unfriendly bureaucracies.

As I’ve written before, nonprofit legal services programs have been struggling with a funding crunch for some time now.

Part of the problem is that Congress has consistently under-funded the Legal Services Corporation, which provides grants to somewhat over a third of the country’s 500 or so nonprofit legal services programs.

They and others have also fallen victim to state budget cuts — and, very importantly, a huge fall-off in income from IOLTA (Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Account) programs.

In 2009, the Legal Services Corporation reported that fewer than 20% of the legal problems low-income people experienced were handled with the help of an attorney.

The Corporation’s budget got cut by $15.8 million in the continuing resolution that’s keeping the federal government funded now.

So I had a sinking feeling when I gave N the contact information for the Maryland Legal Aid Bureau’s Rockville office.

She needed a lawyer — actually had needed one for some time. But what are her chances of getting help with what’s now an urgent and fairly challenging problem?

What chances will other poor moms have if the Senate goes along with the House of Representatives’ spending rollback plan?

Photo credit: Sean MacEntee