governments and individual caseworkers made increasing use of noncash benefits, including “vouchers” for rent or food. In the late twentieth century, the national government used noncash programs, such as food stamps and rent supplements, to meet an ever larger share of the needs of the nonworking and underpaid poor.
Congress enacted TANF against the background of these compromises to the cash assistance principle and took a huge leap further away from that New Deal principle. TANF policy opened the floodgates for states to divert funds from cash to noncash purposes, including to services like marriage promotion. Not all of TANF’s noncash provisions were as valuable to recipients as the cash would have been; some may not have been of any value to them at all. What’s more, some of TANF’s noncash services were not dedicated to poor families: for example, marriage promotion activities, though paid for by TANF, typically are open to anyone who wants to participate.49 PRWORA permitted states to use the TANF funds they received from the national government “in any manner that is reasonably calculated to accomplish the purpose” of the TANF program.50 In addition, TANF policy gave states explicit “authority to use [a] portion of [the block] grant for other purposes” than providing direct assistance to impoverished parents and children, including up to 30 percent of their TANF funds in a year for child care, the creation of electronic benefit (EBT) systems, employment programs chosen by state administrators, or other social service programs that might not reach the poorest mothers or fathers at all.51
PRWORA allowed and incentivized a dramatic drop in the cash aid available to impoverished families, overwhelmingly mothers with young children in desperate circumstances. The law promoted this outcome by cutting the overall aid available and by limiting poor people’s access to cash in particular. The incentives worked: in 1996, approximately sixty-eight of every one hundred poor families received cash benefits under the AFDC program, but by 2013, only twenty-five of every one hundred families in poverty were receiving cash assistance. Overall, the number of families receiving welfare under AFDC or TANF plunged 70 percent between 1994 and 2013.52
Thanks to TANF policy and national and state rules consistent with it, by 2006 only thirty-two out of one hundred poor families received welfare assistance. In 2011, when the United States was still in recession and unemployment was at historic highs, the number had dropped to twenty-seven. In other words, as economic uncertainty, unemployment, poverty, and inequality all worsened, the nation’s main program of cash aid for needy people did progressively less.53 The ratio of poor families served by TANF dropped even further in later years, faster than has the number of poor families. In 2015, only twenty-three of every hundred impoverished families received TANF overall. All the states did less for TANF recipients than they had done for needy mothers and children in the public assistance regime that existed before 1996.54
The loosening of certain forms of national oversight made the divergences between states dramatic: In 2012–13, there were still two states (California and Vermont) that served over 60 percent of families that fell under the federal poverty line. Although both states were less responsive to poor people than they had been in the pre-TANF era, on a national scale they were leaders in reducing family poverty.55 At the other end of the scale, ten states in those years reached less than 10 percent of impoverished families.56 In 2015, the “TANF-to-Poverty” ratio ranged from four in Louisiana to sixty-five in California, and the number of states whose TANF programs served fewer than one in ten poor families had risen to fourteen.57 Perhaps most disturbing, TANF covered fewer people who were in what researchers from the World Bank call “deep poverty”—the kind we often think we do not have in this country, poverty that makes the United States compare poorly with countries across the globe ($2.00 per day or less in income). Prior to President Clinton’s signing of PRWORA, welfare lifted 62 percent of children who lived in “deep-poverty” families from that deep poverty. By 2010, the percentage had dropped to 24 percent.58 And by 2015, forty-six U.S. states had more families living in deep poverty than they did receiving public assistance under TANF.59
Alongside dramatic cuts in overall aid to impoverished families were equally dramatic shifts in how states directed that aid, that is, cuts in cash available to poor and extremely poor people. Legislation reauthorizing TANF, which President Bush signed in 2006, accelerated the shift away from cash aid for poor people by inviting states to spend increasing percentages of their block grants on social and moral services.60 By 2013, states spent on average only 25 percent of their TANF funds on cash assistance; some states spent much less on cash aid, reaching only seven out of every one hundred poor families.61 As mentioned above, PRWORA mandated “maintenance-of-effort” by states on TANF, but effort could be maintained through spending on services favored by states rather than on cash needed by families. TANF permitted state administrators to channel increasing shares of their TANF funds to other programs and services for impoverished families and for people who were not necessarily poor or TANF clients. Every dollar taken from the TANF block grant for marriage promotion, for example, reduced the funds available for income or supports specifically for impoverished parents and children. According to a report released by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in 2015, “because states can spend TANF funds for a broad range of activities, they can shift funds that they have previously used to provide assistance directly to families to plug state budget holes—and many states have taken that option.”62
Legislating Inequality
The complex politics of gender and the relevance of a reproductive justice approach appear most indelibly in TANF policy at those points where child-bearing and poverty meet. Members of Congress who voted in favor of the statute specifically affirmed a policy that impaired women’s reproductive rights by punishing families in which mothers bear children while receiving welfare. Enacted by individual states in the years immediately preceding 1996, the so-called family cap, or child exclusion, refuses public assistance to any child born to a mother while she is receiving aid. While PRWORA does not require states to adopt the family cap, it endorses states’ decision to do so.63 In further reproductive regulation of poor mothers, PRWORA created incentives and funding streams for states actively to deter pregnancy and childbearing among poor women. Consistent with the rhetoric in the TANF “findings” section about young women’s childbearing, the law allows states to spend TANF funds to discourage teen childbearing through pregnancy prevention programs and the enforcement of strict and discouraging eligibility rules for TANF participation by unmarried teen mothers. Further, the law includes an “illegitimacy bonus,” prize money to the top five states that reduced the number of nonmarital births while also reducing the abortion rate below 1995 levels.64 A separate section of PRWORA allocated funds to promote abstinence before marriage through sex education programs that instruct restraint from sexual activity among “those groups which are most likely to bear children out-of-wedlock.”65
The aspect of PRWORA that appears most responsive to women’s claims is its language about family violence. The law permitted state governments to gain federal certification “to ensure that the state will screen for and identify domestic violence” and recuse victims and potential victims of violence from TANF requirements, including time limits.66 A growing body of research in the 1990s had tied women’s poverty to misogynistic violence: The leaders in the field were Ellen Bassuk and her colleagues, who discovered that virtually all the women who were part of the new “family homelessness” were victims of physical and sexual violence, and Jody Raphael, who argued that violence was a leading source of women’s need for welfare.67 The downside of this Family Violence Option was that it was merely an option: a voluntary program state governments could choose to create, possibly to help family violence survivors or possibly to relax performance standards states have to meet under TANF (or both); a discretionary program states could mount with the assistance of experts from the domestic violence support community, or not; an also-ran in a law whose mandatory sections cast suspicion on low-income mothers and increased their economic vulnerability.68
Restrictions on immigrants permeate PRWORA, including its TANF provisions. These
