Weekly Wonk: TANF's Tensions Raise Deeper Questions
Trump 1.0's TANF Chief Asks "What’s the safety net actually for?"
From the Founder’s Desk
Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk.
Thirty years ago this month, then-President Clinton claimed “we are ending welfare as we know it” as he signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.
The president’s pen stroke punctuated a period of significant safety net policy debate and experimentation, replacing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
TANF represented a bipartisan consensus shift on the fundamental purpose of the safety net, which policymakers redesigned to prioritize connection to the labor force.
Changes to cash assistance, child care, and more aimed at effecting a vision of the safety net as a mechanism for promoting family stability and economic mobility through work.
That has meant a shift away from direct economic assistance, which today is about a fifth of the total $37.5 billion in annual federal and state TANF spending.
Thirty years later, the unignorable structural tensions encoded in that bipartisan compromise created cross-partisan convergence on the need for a new approach.
TANF rests upon workforce participation rate metrics that create downward pressure on caseloads, and broad spending categories.
The program has seen high-profile misuses of funding. Total unspent funding equals 60 percent of its annual federal allocation.
The debate typically centers on policy design, administrative mechanics, and oversight. Those matter, but they flow from resolution of claims on competing visions for purpose.
As we enter this milestone year for the current safety net, Wonk pieces from leaders and thinkers across the ideological spectrum will highlight what they see as the core tensions and tradeoffs that matter.
Kicking us off is a Deep Dive from Clarence Carter, who currently serves as Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Human Services and oversaw the TANF program for the first Trump Administration.
His piece focuses on the importance of starting from the question of the safety net’s purpose.
We’re actively sourcing more views like this from leaders across the political and policy spectrum; if you’re interested in offering yours, drop us a line.
We’ve also got a new premium brief on what the overlooked origin of Family First means for your strategy, and a signal of looming changes to what that law funds.
Also worth watching; the Senate approved a bipartisan funding deal through December 11th. That would punt a funding fight, pending House action.
Let’s get into it.
Weekly Wonk Deep Dive
Thirty Years Later, TANF's Next Generation Should Begin with a Different Question
Thirty years after welfare reform, the central challenge is no longer how we administer public assistance, but whether we have clearly defined what the safety net is ultimately intended to achieve.
By Clarence H. Carter, Commissioner of Tennessee Department of Human Services
Thirty years ago, the creation of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program marked one of the most significant shifts in American social policy.
The reforms of 1996 established enduring principles that remain important today: work matters, public assistance should be temporary, families should be strengthened, and states should have the flexibility to innovate.
Those reforms answered important questions for their time. But after three decades of experience, it is becoming clear that one fundamental question remains unresolved:
What is the purpose of the American safety net?
DEFINING SUCCESS
In my view, the safety net should exist to reduce economic, social, and developmental vulnerability while creating pathways for individuals and families to move beyond public support.
The objective is not simply to administer benefits successfully. It is to promote greater stability, stronger families, increased opportunity, and ultimately the freedom for people to act in their own best interest.
That distinction matters because it changes what we measure.
Too often we evaluate programs based on outputs rather than outcomes. We measure eligibility determinations, participation rates, compliance, and transactions.
Those measures tell us whether a program is operating. They do not necessarily tell us whether families are better off. The next generation of reform should ask different questions:
Are families becoming more stable?
Are children more likely to thrive?
Are parents moving toward sustainable employment?
Are communities becoming stronger because public supports are working together rather than independently?
These questions are harder to answer than whether benefits were delivered or requirements enforced.
But they are closer to what the safety net is ultimately intended to accomplish.
BEYOND MORE GOVERNMENT OR LESS
For years, our national debate has centered on whether government should provide more support or less. That framing often divides people into familiar camps before the more fundamental conversation begins.
Yet after working in human services at the federal, state, and local levels, I have become convinced that it is the wrong place to start.
Americans care deeply about families experiencing hardship. That is not a partisan value. It is part of who we are.
We demonstrate that commitment through substantial public investment and through thousands of organizations, communities, and individuals committed to help others.
The question is not whether we care enough. The question is not whether we spend enough.
It is whether the safety net is designed to translate that commitment into meaningful results.
TANF reshaped the framework of public assistance. It established expectations around work, created greater accountability, supported family strengthening, and empowered states to develop solutions suited to their citizens.
What it did not fully resolve was the overarching purpose of the safety net itself. If we cannot clearly define what success looks like, we should not be surprised when our programs struggle to produce it.
FLEXIBILITY AS A TOOL FOR LEARNING
That is why I continue to believe state flexibility is essential; not as an end in itself, but as a means of continuous learning.
State experimentation helped produce the 1996 reforms, but innovation should not be viewed as a single chapter in TANF’s history. It should become a continuing feature of how we public policy develops.
Flexibility also creates a challenge: states can use the same authority in very different ways, producing wide variation in access, spending, and outcomes.
Innovation therefore requires meaningful accountability, for how states use federal funds and also whether families are better off.
The federal government should continue establishing broad national objectives and measures of progress.
Within that framework, states should have the opportunity to test new approaches, evaluate results, share what works, and continue refining how we serve families.
The goal is not flexibility alone, but a system capable of learning from it.
ORGANIZING AROUND A COMMON PURPOSE
As we consider the next generation of TANF, we should resist reducing the debate to a choice between expanding or shrinking government.
That framing obscures a more fundamental question whether existing resources are organized around a common purpose.
Answering those questions also requires us to think differently about the structure of our safety net.
Today, public supports are distributed across more than one hundred federally authorized programs administered by numerous agencies and overseen by multiple congressional committees.
Together these programs represent an enormous public investment. Yet too often they often function independently, even when serving many of the same individuals and families.
Families do not experience their lives one program at a time.
Employment affects housing. Housing affects child well-being. Family relationships influence workforce participation. Physical and behavioral health affect economic opportunity. Human lives are interconnected.
Our public systems should be organized around that reality.
That is why I continue to believe state flexibility is essential—not as an end in itself, but as a means of continuous learning.
Do our policies strengthen families? Do they reduce vulnerability? Do they expand opportunity? Do they create pathways toward independence and flourishing?
These questions do not eliminate ideological differences. They clarify what those differences are—and focus the debate on what public assistance is intended to accomplish, not simply how large it should be.
WHAT DECISION MAKERS NEED TO KNOW
Thirty years after welfare reform, the next TANF debate should begin by defining what the safety net is intended to accomplish.
That means looking beyond the size of government— and beyond whether programs successfully administer benefits— to ask whether families are becoming more stable, children are thriving, and parents are moving toward sustainable employment, and reducing their need for public supports.
TANF also leaves policymakers with a central structural tension: states need flexibility to test different approaches, but that flexibility must operate within a framework capable of measuring results and learning from variation.
The next generation of reform will therefore require more than new policies or administrative changes.
It will require clearer national objectives, meaningful accountability, and a shared understanding of what success looks like.
THIRTY YEARS LATER, A DIFFERENT QUESTION
Thirty years ago, welfare reform challenged the nation to rethink how assistance was delivered. The next generation of reform should begin one step earlier: by defining what the safety net is designed to achieve.
That answer will not eliminate political disagreement or make the policy choices simple.
But it will give policymakers a clearer basis for deciding what to measure, how to hold programs accountable, and where state flexibility can produce meaningful learning.
Once we answer that question together, the policy choices before us become much clearer.
From the Wonk Briefing Room
Before the ink signing Family First into law was even dry, conversations shifted from the possibilities it represented to the limitations it encoded.
That’s typical with a new law.
At the same time, the narrative around the law hyper-focused on its prevention components. What talk remained of congregate care reform mostly focused on how hard it would be to operationalize.
As our latest premium brief makes clear, a myopic memory of family-first origin story is warping our field’s understanding of how to craft and advance major policy reform.
How Congregate Care Reform Helped Make Family First Possible
BY DOUG STEIGER, SENIOR CONTRIBUTOR
Family First is often remembered as a prevention services law. That shorthand obscures how the legislation became politically and financially possible.
Congregate care reform did more than generate savings to help pay for prevention.
It brought Republican leadership, offered a response to concerns about poor outcomes and high costs, and gave skeptical lawmakers a system reform to support alongside new federal spending.
Prevention and congregate care appealed to different political interests. Together, they created a bill that could move. That is the more useful Family First lesson.
Major federal child welfare legislation is rarely about one policy. Each of us often misremembers it that way because we remember the one policy that specifically brought us through the door.
Family First became possible because congregate care reform and prevention services brought different priorities, constituencies, and fiscal effects into the same package.
Looking back at that combination is useful because no comparable coalition has yet emerged.
Be on the lookout for the forthcoming companion piece on a different way to understand seeming contradictions in the prevention parts of Family First, and why it matters for your strategy.
To read the full brief and access all our premium resources, join the Wonk Briefing Room. Individuals can sign up here, or get the team membership rate here.
Organizations interested in going even deeper can reach out to learn more about our partnerships that help you leverage and apply our intel in your strategy.
Wonkatizer
Who Wins When the Statute and Handbook Argue?
What Happened
On July 31, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) published a brief questioning a key element of Family First implementation.
The brief argues that the Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse handbook, which drives its approach to evaluating programs, is more restrictive than the Family First statute requires.
Why it Matters
The brief’s core argument is that the handbook is a form of policy guidance that is more restrictive than the law requires. That matters as a signal of policy making to come.
While it’s possible to read this as a technical evidence brief, it’s part of a larger pattern of analysis like this serving as the evidence that forthcoming policy announcements reference. The brief gestures of this in discussing potential revisions or replacement.
What to Watch
The question isn’t whether ACF revisits the handbook, but when. It’s worth being ready when that foreseeable shift happens soon.
That’s it for this week.
Stay sharp, Wonks.
~ Z
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