by Kinara Flagg, Legal Intern,
and Joan Entmacher, Vice President for Family Economic Security,
National Women's Law Center
Last week, Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty announced a plan to cut back on welfare benefits in an attempt to close the city’s budget shortfall. The budget cuts disproportionately fall on programs that serve low-income families, with the deepest program cut a $6.2 million reduction in the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program.
TANF provides a safety net for some of the poorest District families, overwhelmingly single mothers and children. Benefits are already modest – just $428 per month for a mother and two children – and job readiness services are limited.
The Mayor proposes to give the District’s Department of Human Services the authority to reduce – and eventually entirely eliminate – benefits for entire families for failure to meet TANF work requirements. The stated goal is to encourage more TANF recipients to prepare for employment, and the proposal also would increase benefits for those who succeed in meeting work requirements. But studies in other states have found that tougher sanctions don’t improve employment outcomes, because those most likely to be sanctioned are those facing the greatest barriers to employment: low education levels, physical or mental disabilities, children with disabilities, or domestic violence. Especially at a time when District unemployment is at a 25-year high, and other supportive services (including an employment training program for TANF recipients!) are targeted for cuts, it is particularly likely that this new policy would simply push the most vulnerable families deeper into poverty, as the DC Fiscal Policy Institute reports.
If you live in the District and think that this is unfairly targeting poor women and children, call your Councilmember today. Ask him or her to protect the safety net for poor women and children and to drop the Mayor’s TANF proposal from the budget.
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