Administration For Children And Families (acf)

TANF

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program is a federal block grant that gives states significant flexibility to fund a broad array of programs aimed at helping low-income families break the cycle of poverty and achieve economic self-sufficiency. States use TANF to fund monthly cash assis- tance payments to low-income families with children as well as a wide range of services that include work activities, work supports and supportive services, child- care, administration and systems, tax credits, pre-K/Head Start, child welfare, and other services.

The TANF program serves 1.8 million individuals. Since 1996, when the program was reformed, federal TANF outlays have been $16.5 billion. The state match is $14.9 billion, bringing the total state and federal TANF investment to $31.4 billion. The TANF statute requires that states engage 50 percent of single-parent fam- ilies in work for at least 30 hours a week (20 hours a week for single parents with children under age six, though states have the option to waive the requirement for families with children under the age of six, and most do). States also have 90 percent work requirements for two-parent families to engage in work for 35 hours per week. Because of the “Caseload Reduction Credit,” states’ work engagement targets are reduced if their assistance caseloads have fallen since 2005. As a result, 21 states had a work engagement target of zero percent in 2017.

Generally, states apply their work requirement only to beneficiaries receiv- ing basic assistance, who account for 22.3 percent of TANF outlays. The Trump Administration proposed a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) rule to “increase program integrity and reduce fraud, waste, and abuse” that would have prevented an individual from qualifying for SNAP simply because he or she received a pamphlet from the TANF program.60 This rule defined non-cash benefits as those that are worth at least $50 a month and received for at least six months. The tenets of this rule should be applied to the TANF program as well. This defi- nitional change would apply the TANF work requirements to any noncash benefit worth $50 a month and received for six consecutive months.

To increase transparency, HHS should clarify how states, in their quarterly and annual reports, ought to track and audit the outcomes from how they spend TANF funds to meet the TANF program’s four statutory purposes. Additionally, TANF priorities are not implemented in an equally weighted way. Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy are virtually ignored in terms of priorities, yet these goals can reverse the cycle of poverty in meaningful ways. CMS should require explicit measurement of these goals.

Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) and Personal Responsibility Educa- tion Program (PREP). TPP is operated by the Office of Population Affairs in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health; PREP is operated by the ACF Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation. Both programs should ensure that there is better reporting of subgrantees and referral lists so that they do not promote abortion or high-risk sexual behavior among adolescents. CMS should ensure that Sexual Risk Avoidance (SRA) proponents receive these grants and are given every opportunity to prove their effectiveness. SRA programs, both at ACF and at OASH and both discretionary and mandatory, should be equal in funding and emphasis. Qualitative research should be conducted on both types of programs to ensure continuous improvement.

In addition, certain provisions should be employed so that these programs do not serve as advocacy tools to promote sex, promote prostitution, or provide a funnel effect for abortion facilities and school field trips to clinics, or for similar purposes. Parent involvement and parent–child communication should be encour- aged and be a part of any funded project. Risk avoidance should be prioritized, and any program that submits a proposal that promotes risk rather than health should not be eligible for funding.

Site visits should be revamped to ensure adherence to these optimal health met- rics, and a cost analysis of programming as compared to students served should be a metric in funding (taking into account that in certain cases, intensive programs will serve fewer students and can have more positive results). These same param- eters should apply to sex education programs at ACF. Any lists with “approved curriculum” or so-called evidence-based lists should be abolished; HHS should not create a monopoly of curriculum, adding to the profit of certain publishers. Furthermore, lists created in the past have given priority to sex-promotion text- books. HHS should create a list of criteria for evaluating the sort of curriculum that should be selected for any sex education grant programs, both at OASH and at ACF, with the aim of promoting optimal health and adhering to the legislative language of each program.

Adoption Reform. There are roughly 400,000 children across the nation on the waiting list for foster care and 100,000 awaiting adoptive families, and the opioid/ fentanyl crisis is putting more at risk every day. Unfortunately, many of the faith- based adoption agencies that serve these children are under threat from lawsuits, or else their licenses and contracts have been halted because they cannot in good conscience place children in every household due to their religious belief that a child should have a married mother and father.

HHS, through ACF and the Assistant Secretary for Financial Resources (ASFR), should repeal the unnecessary 2016 regulation61 that imposes nonstatutory sexual orientation and gender identity nondiscrimination conditions on agency grants and return to the policy of maximizing the options for placing vulnerable children

in their forever homes. ACF and OCR should also survey their programs to consider whether additional waivers of HHS grant conditions—waivers the Biden Admin- istration revoked in 2021—are needed for faith-based agencies.

Additionally, Congress should pass the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act62 to ensure that providers and organizations cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The Office of Refugee Resettlement should be moved to the Department of Homeland Security. Having health and welfare functions managed by HHS and border security functions managed by DHS has created intolerable failures in both. HHS and ORR have forgotten their original refugee-resettlement mission and instead have provided a panoply of free programs that incentivize people to come to the U.S. illegally. Even more troubling, ORR has too often placed children into dangerous situations when releasing them into the country.

Nearly all of HHS’s care, custody, and placement of children is done through cooperative agreements with private agencies, many of which may have broken federal law by inducing or being accomplices in illegal immigration. Those arrangements could be handled far more effectively by DHS. Congress should reform the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act63 to transfer all ORR duties for unaccompanied alien children to DHS and eliminate the Flores settlement agreement.64

Regardless of where ORR’s functions reside, ORR staff and care providers should never be allowed to facilitate abortions for unaccompanied children in its cus- tody, including by transporting minors across state lines from pro-life states to abortion-friendly states. Pregnant, unaccompanied girls in ORR custody should be treated with dignity, not trafficked across state lines to be victimized by the abortion industry. ORR should withdraw its policy of allowing elective abortions for children in ORR care and issue a new policy of instructing care providers not to allow girls to be transported for elective abortions. HHS OGC and the White House should insist that DOJ fight to defend that policy up to the U.S. Supreme Court in light of Dobbs.

Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) Congress established Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1935 to assist single-parent families who were suffering financially from the loss of a bread-winning husband and father. Within two decades, however, the majority of families receiving aid were depen- dent because of paternal abandonment rather than death. Today, nearly a third of America’s children live without a father present in the home, and a fourth of them are enrolled to receive child support.

The glaring issue in child support enforcement today is a non-resident father’s ability to provide full or consistent child support payments. The literature reflects this divide as fathers have been categorized as “deadbeat” dads, then as “deadbroke” dads, and now as “disconnected” dads who do not commit to the mother and child.

Child support in the United States should strengthen marriage as the norm, restore broken homes, and encourage unmarried couples to commit to marriage. Child Support Tax Credit. National or state guidelines and tax law should be updated to ensure that nonresident parents with child support orders can receive a nondependent, child support tax credit. Single filers of up to $41,756 and married or joint filers of up to $47,646 would be eligible for a child support tax credit similar to the current earned income tax credit.

Filers could receive a maximum of $538 in annual returns for one child and a maximum of $3,584 in annual returns for two or more children (based on a credit rate of 34 percent). A child support tax credit would use the low-income, nonresident parents’ own earned income and history of employment to assist them further in the task of caring for their children. The key to this policy is that it empowers fathers with their own resources and money rather than creating another government assistance program (or a fully refundable credit) devoid of the father’s own monetary efforts. This way, the non- resident father’s role as financial provider and relational figure is affirmed, and much-needed financial resources are given to the children.

Visitation. Visitation is key to revitalizing child support and increasing pay- ment frequency. The most effective way to lower a nonresident parent’s monthly child support order is to spend more court-accounted-for time with the child. For example, Texas combined its child support court with its visitation court to ensure that resident and nonresident parents received state-mandated financial support orders and enforceable visitation orders.

Child Support Payment and Interactive Smartphone Application. Each state should be induced to implement a high-tech, easy-to-use application to cen- tralize child support payments. As with Venmo or Cash App, nonresident parents would link their bank accounts and provide one-click monthly payments (or con- tribute incrementally throughout the month while tracking how much is due). Additionally, the nonresident parents could track “informal” gifts from money, groceries, clothes, sports gear, and more through the app.

This would address one of the main issues within current child support pay- ment systems: nonresident parents claim that they are spending much of their own money to provide for children outside of their monthly payments and resident parents’ claim that they spend little and neglect their official child support orders. Currently, only the latter claim can be tracked reliably. This process would enable nonresident parents to track the amount of informal support they provide and the reason for it while ensuring that the resident parent acknowledges and accepts the contribution.

Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) Program. The HMRE program is part of the ACF Office of Family Assistance. The following pol- icies should be implemented.

Utilize HMRE funding or grants to provide state-level high school education resources and curriculum on healthy marriages, sexual risk avoidance, and healthy relationships. Early interventions and prevention are much more cost-effective than are efforts to reach people already in broken relationships.

Allow child welfare funding to be used for marriage and relationship education. Congress should adopt the following recommendation from a report issued by members of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee: Children are far more likely to experience abuse when they are raised outside of their married-parent family. Title II of the Child Abuse Preven- tion and Treatment Act provides grants to communities for the purpose of preventing child abuse and neglect, and one of the stated purposes for which the grants can be used is for efforts to increase family stability. However, Congress could change the law to make it clear that Title II funding can be used for healthy marriage and relationship education.  Funding provided under Title IV-B of the Social Security Act—which provides grants to states for foster care and adoption services—can also be used for promoting healthy marriage. States should consider using some of their Title IV-B funding for providing healthy marriage and relationship education for families at risk of having their children placed in foster care.65

Provide educational information on healthy marriage and relationships at Title X family planning clinics. HHS should require clinics it funds under Title X (family planning) to provide information to customers about the importance of marriage to family and personal well-being and refer them to available federal, state, and nonprofit marriage resources.

Ensure proper assessments with enough time to assess HMRE programs. Although some widely available assessments of HMRE programs report poor outcomes, many of these assessments either utilized a poor methodology or tried to measure program success prematurely. Recent assessments have shown increasing effectiveness and positive community- level marital outcomes.66

The HMRE program should receive a fair and realistic assessment. Additionally, the positive role of faith-based programs should be protected and prioritized so that these programs do not receive undue scrutiny or pressure to conform to nonreligious definitions of marriage and family as put forward by the recently enacted Respect for Marriage Act.67

Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations that maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family. Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; or poorer behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.

For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father. Despite recent congressional bills like the Respect for Marriage Act that redefine marriage to be the union between any two individuals, HMRE program grants should be available to faith- based recipients who affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.

Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood (HMRF) Program. This program is located within the ACF Office of Family Assistance. Its goal, like that of the HMRE program, is to provide marriage and parenting guidance for low-in- come fathers. This includes fatherhood and marriage training, curriculum, and subsequent research.

Implement a pro-fatherhood messaging campaign. With nearly 41 percent of children born without a married father in the home (and nearly 69 percent among black Americans), the fatherhood problem is clear.

Similar to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s 2022 fatherhood bill, HMRF funds should be used to support national messaging campaigns that affirm the role fathers play in the lives of their children, that recognize the financial hardships the fathers themselves face, and that seek to provide relationship education to fathers who were raised without a father in the home.

Fund effective HMRF state programs. Grant allocations should protect and prioritize faith-based programs that incorporate local churches and mentorship programs or increase social capital through multilayered community support (including, for example, job training and social events). Programs should affirm and teach fathers based on a biological and

sociological understanding of what it means to be a father—not a gender- neutral parent—from social science, psychology, personal testimonies, etc.