The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program is designed to help disadvantaged or low-income families achieve self-sufficiency. TANF is administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and its purposes are “to provide assistance to needy families” so that children can be cared for in their own homes; “reduce the dependency of needy parents” by promoting job preparation, work and marriage; prevent and reduce “the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies;” and encourage “the formation and maintenance of two-parent families” (Administration for Children & Families ACF). Because TANF is mainly known as the program that distributes cash to eligible individuals/families, many individuals oppose this safety-net under the idea of people, who are benefiting from the program, “scamming the system,” among other premises and/or stereotypes. But what’s the truth behind TANF as a social problem? How and why is this safety-net program linked to racism? Using the policy analysis framework from the Jimenez et al. (2015), we will explore how racism shaped the implementation of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the systemic and/or disproportionate effects of the policy related to race; and discuss the policy implementation more explicitly.
TANF AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM
The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant was created by the 1996 welfare reform law. The social problem that the policy seeks to address focuses on poverty and helping families become more self-sufficient and independent. In pursuing these goals, the TANF reform focuses on whether and how much single parents, especially non-white mothers, should be expected to work and if, by providing disincentives to work and raise children in two-parent families, the program itself contributed to dependency (Falk 2017). In 1996, president Bill Clinton changed TANF “as we know it,” under the premises that the legislation was estimated to save about $54 billion over six years, mainly via the reduction of the food stamp program as well as from benefit cuts to non-citizen who were legal immigrants.
A social problem is as a condition that harms a significant number of people or society. Since its beginning, TANF has been contributing to systemic racism, mostly harming people of color in particular. In the article, “How racism has shaped welfare policy in America since 1935,” Alma Carten (2016) explains that black Americans were victims of pervasive racial discrimination in employment during the 30s and 40s when they typically worked in unskilled jobs, paid in cash and “off the books,” which made them ineligible for social insurance programs that required contributions through payroll taxes. Carten (2016) states that the criteria for eligibility and need were state-determined, “so blacks continued to be barred from full participation because the country operated under the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court in 1896.” Nowadays, TANF has affected single mothers due to strict work requirements over two years of receiving benefits, and fathers who did not pay child support were threatened with imprisonment. Furthermore, TANF has also created social and racial tension, such as opposers asking whether or not welfare recipients should get drug testing.
POLICY OBJECTIVES
TANF policy objectives and goals focus on alleviating and preventing poverty among children and families and to create effective pathways to economic opportunity, “including subsidized jobs, access to mainstream education and training and individualized services for those with barriers to employment” (Lower-Basch 2013:2). TANF target population is families in poverty. However, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities claim that in 1996, 68 families received cash assistance for every 100 in poverty. Then, since last time TANF was reauthorized in 1996, the number reduced to 31 families for every 100 families in poverty, followed by 2016, when for every 100 families in poverty, just 23 families received TANF cash assistance (See Appendix A).
Despite research finding white as the most beneficiaries of the government safety net, TANF recipients, particularly racial minorities, often face implicit assumptions that seem to drive the policy. While the explicit racial language in public policies is both illegal and rare today, researchers have found implicit assumptions about racial minorities that seem to drive the TANF policy. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva claims that examination of welfare leavers since the 1996 welfare reform laws indicate that “white privilege operates even at low-level service jobs [and that] employers were less likely to hire black than white welfare leavers and paid the black welfare leavers they did hire less” (2011:56). In the same way, William Wilson states that there is a widespread notion in the United States that “the problems plaguing people of color in the inner city have little to do with racial discrimination or the effects of living in segregated poverty [and] tend to deemphasize the structural origins and social significance of poverty and welfare” (2011:20). In other words, people who think this way, essentially believe that people are on welfare due to their own fault.
In the article, “Why Welfare is Racist,” Frances Fox Piven (2003) states that policies to assist the poor “will be designed to shore up racial hierarchy” (323). Furthermore, Fox Piven claims that “when racial difference is thus joined to economic and social degradation, racial prejudice flourishes… the implementation of TANF thus creates its own theater of racial degradation” (2003:334). One of the ten worst cases of welfare fraud that created these ‘theater’ of racial tension was the case of Linda Taylor, best known as “the Welfare Queen´ and the subject of many of Ronald Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign speech narratives. Some people believe that the Welfare Queen was a “racist malarkey—a coded reference to black indolence and criminality designed to appeal to working-class whites” (Levin:2013). Taylor, whose real name was Martha Miller, was listed as White in the 1930 and 1940 census, but due to her darker skin and darker hair, plus Reagan’s rhetoric, many people believed she was black, native American, and/or Asian, thus creating racial tension and stereotypes about minorities.
POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
One of TANF objectives is to support single parents with children, especially single, non-white mothers. By providing health insurance and free lunches at school, as well as offering tax credits to parents, federal policymakers have made reducing poverty among children. However, as Caroline Fredrickson states, “one of the ways to fall from the middle class into poverty, or from poverty into destitution, is to have children” (2015:148). In her book, Under the Bus, Fredrickson also mentions how the child care policy allows mothers to work, but there was no warranty that eligible children will be taken care of. In consequence, many mothers, especially Black and Latinas were losing their jobs and staying in the same loop of poverty. There also the question on whether or not welfare policies have effects on abortion rates. Nevertheless, as Fredrickson narrates, women, in particular, were being penalized for having babies due to the lack of support from policies like the Child Care and Development Block Grant that came out of the welfare reform.
Since 1996, TANF has been set at $16.5 billion each year since 1996; as a consequence and due to inflation, its value has fallen by almost 40 percent (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities). According to an information memorandum from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ Office of Family Assistance, one of the challenges TANF faces is employment. The memorandum states that,
While work requirements in TANF have encouraged custodial parents receiving assistance to pursue employment, increasing work among noncustodial parents, who are typically fathers, remains a significant challenge. When noncustodial parents are out of the labor force, they suffer a decrease in life satisfaction and their families suffer from a lack of reliable child support payments. Helping needy families rise out of poverty and dependence on government benefits through employment and reliable child support payments is a central tenet of TANF.
In response, DHH proposed extending employment services to noncustodial parents (64 Fed. Reg. 17725, dated April 12, 1999). Overall, families receiving TANF cash assistance must be engaged in a work/training or educational activity for at least 30 hours a week, and 20 hours for single parents with children under the age of 6. Yet, the educational activity excludes parents who are pursuing their graduate-level programs, including undergrads part of a medical school.
OUTCOMES AND ANALYSIS
As Roberta Rehner Iversen claims, “implementation problems resulting from faulty logic in TANF policy influenced and were compounded by barriers resulting from organizational and personnel incompetence” (2000:145). In this policy analysis, we explored how racism shaped the implementation of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the systemic and/or disproportionate effects of the policy related to race; and discussed the policy implementation more explicitly. We learned that there is still so much to do regarding supporting poor families, especially minorities, in becoming more self-sufficient and less dependent on public assistance or welfare.
Nevertheless, despite the walls being put to the population this policy is intended to help, especially non-whites, TANF families have shown strength and resilience. Therefore, why not bringing people who benefit from this program to the table so policy-makers can take notes using real people’s experiences and stories of struggles, challenges, and successes instead of only focusing on numbers gathered from data?
Works Cited
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Dietrich, David. “The New Racism: The Racial Regime of Post-Civil
Rights America.” Pp. 41-67 in Covert Racism: theories, institutions, and experiences, edited by Coates, Rodney D. 2011. V.32. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV. Retrieved October 16, 2018 (http://dlib.scu.ac.ir/bitstream/Hannan/468240/1/9789004203655.pdf).
Carten, Alma. 2016. “How racism has shaped welfare policy in America since 1935.” The
Conversation. Retrieved October 15, 2018 (https://theconversation.com/how-racism-has-shaped-welfare-policy-in-america-since-1935-63574).
Falk, Gene. 2007. “The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Block Grant: A
Legislative History.” Congressional Research Service. Retrieved October 10, 2018 (https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44668.pdf).
Fox Piven, Frances. 2003. “Why Welfare is Racist.” Pp. 323-335 in Race and The Politics of
Welfare Reform, edited by Schram, Soss, and Fording. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press.
Fredrickson, Caroline. 2015. Under the Bus. New York, NY: The New Press.
Iversen, Roberta Rehner. 2000. "TANF Policy Implementation: The Invisible Barrier, "The
Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare: Vol.27: Iss. 2, Article 8. Available at:
Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare: Vol.27: Iss. 2, Article 8. Available at:
Levin, Josh. 2013. “The Welfare Queen.” Slate. Retrieved October 10, 2018
Lower-Basch, Elizabeth. 2013. TANF Policy Brief. Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP).
Retrieved October 15, 2018 (https://www.clasp.org/sites/default/files/public/resources-and-publications/files/TANF-Reauthorization-Goals.pdf)
Wilson, William J. 2011. “The Impact of Racial and Nonracial Structural Forces on Poor Urban
Blacks.” Pp. 20-40 in Covert Racism: theories, institutions, and experiences, edited by Coates, Rodney D. 2011. V.32. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV. Retrieved October 16, 2018 (http://dlib.scu.ac.ir/bitstream/Hannan/468240/1/9789004203655.pdf).
APPENDIX A: TANF CASH ASSISTANCE
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