The "vanishing Poor": Connecticut's Response to Welfare Reform
| Pages | 278 |
| Publication year | 2021 |
71 CBJ 278. THE "VANISHING POOR": CONNECTICUT'S RESPONSE TO WELFARE REFORM
On April 12, 1997, the Connecticut Bar Foundation held a symposium on recent welfare reforms as they affect Connecticut. This article is a summary of the speakers' remarks at the symposium, followed by a few post-symposium observations. The symposium was held at Quinnipiac College School of Law and attendance was by invitation only. Most of those attending were public and private welfare agency administrators and caseworkers. Also present were some legislators, academics and lawyers in private practice with a special interest in welfare issues. The symposium consisted of four panel presentations, preceded by Professor Anne Alstott's overview of recent changes in welfare laws. The first three panels dealt with accommodations to recent welfare reforms by different kinds of Connecticut agencies: the first panel to accommodations by state agencies, the second to accommodations by municipal agencies and the third to accommodations by private agencies. The final panel dealt with needed revisions to existing welfare laws. In addition to the panelists, each panel also had a commentator who made concluding remarks after the panelists had spoken. Many of the panelists gave their personal opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of recent welfare reforms and some raised questions as to what impact the reforms would have in Connecticut. The symposium program appears as an appendix hereto and lists the names and affiliations of the scheduled participants.
In her consideration of welfare law changes, Professor Alstott discussed a number of recent federal and Connecticut changes in welfare laws, but devoted most of her allotted time to the highly important federal program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), established by federal legislation in 1996.(fn1) By this 1996 legislation, Congress substituted
the new TANF program for a program that had been in effect for many years, Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC). Professor Alstott views TANF as making three major changes in welfare laws: (1) it redefines federal and state authority for funding welfare programs for families with children; (2) it significantly increases authority of the states to design welfare programs for families with children; and (3) it creates new federal restrictions on what the states can do with federal funds, and to some extent state funds, in providing welfare assistance to families with children. She then expanded on these basic changes.
The principal funding change brought about by TANF is to shift from matching grants to block grants federal financial allocations to the states for family aid. AFDC was a matching grant program: the federal government would match, typically dollar for dollar, whatever a state spent for aid to families with dependent children. Under TANF, each state annually receives from the federal government a block grant, the same amount each year, for providing assistance to needy families with children. The block grant varies in amount from state to state and is based on the level of federal AFDC funding in an earlier period. However, to receive the full federal grant, the state must annually add for TANF purposes a substantial amount of its own money, referred to as the maintenance of effort requirement. The minimum annual maintenance of effort contribution generally is seventy-five or eighty percent of what the state earlier spent on AFDC. Failure to meet this spending minimum can result in the federal grant's being cut, dollar for dollar, by the amount the state's spending falls below the minimum. Except for this qualification, federal block grants generally will remain constant in amount over time, irrespective of whether the economy of the state is good or bad and irrespective of whether the number of families in the state needing welfare help increases or decreases. The old days of automatic up and down in federal spending with state spending has ended. Connecticut and every other state must adapt to the new funding pattern.
TANF greatly expands the authority of each state to determine which needy families will receive benefits, conditions for receiving benefits, and the nature and amount of benefits.
Compared to AFDC, the states have much greater discretion in how needy family welfare programs are structured. However, reflecting underlying conflicts and tensions over the nature of welfare for families and the appropriate role of the federal government in providing family welfare, TANF imposes some significant new restrictions on the states as to family eligibility for welfare assistance and recipient employment requirements. Those favoring more autonomy for the states prevailed, for the most part, in how TANF is structured, but only after important concessions to those wanting greater federal intervention in some respects. Examples of new family eligibility restrictions are that eligibility ends after five years of receiving benefits, teenage parents can receive benefits only if living with their parents or a responsible adult, and no benefits to convicted drug felons. Although recipient work and work preparation requirements did exist earlier, under TANF they are stricter and more numerous. TANF now requires that most recipients engage in work when ready or within two years, whichever occurs first. Work for this purpose, however, may be defined very broadly by each state. TANF also provides that as of 1997, twenty-five percent or more of recipient families in a state must be working or participating in work preparation activities and the percentage goes up gradually in succeeding years. Also, what constitute acceptable work participation activities have been narrowed from what earlier was allowed, and there are fewer exemptions than in previous work participation requirements.
In trying to understand what the TANF program provides, Professor Alstott said that we should realize that at places the statute is vague, inconsistent, and badly drafted, which makes for uncertainty as to meaning on some very important points. Through guidelines, the federal Department of Health and Human Services has attempted some clarification, and further clarification will come from subsequent departmental regulations. The department probably is doing the best it can, given the previously mentioned conflicts and tensions that pervaded Congressional consideration of the statute and the eventual statutory language that was passed. The statute really is of two minds and seeks to achieve two quite different objectives very difficult to resolve: far more re
sponsibility in the states but at the same time sharp limits on state authority.
A question of great importance to Connecticut is what effect the TANF program and the 1996 federal statute creating TANF will have on Connecticut welfare assistance programs for families with dependent children. Connecticut's current program for providing assistance of this kind is jobs First, established by the state legislature in 1995. The program's goals are moving families with dependent children off welfare into jobs in a relatively short period of time and reducing welfare costs to state government. By waivers from the federal authorities, Connecticut. need not comply with provisions of the federal statute that are inconsistent with jobs First requirements. However, there are two very significant exceptions to this: block grant funding required by the federal statute still applies, despite the waivers, and so do most of the TANF job participation requirements for welfare recipients. Some of the key provisions of the Connecticut jobs First program are these: families with an employable adult are limited to twenty-one months of welfare assistance and will not qualify for general assistance when the time expires; for good cause shown, a six-month extension beyond the twenty-one months will be allowed, with the possibility of further six-month extensions; cash assistance will be cut approximately in half for any child conceived while the family is receiving assistance; those persons subject to the twenty-one month time limit, with certain exceptions, must participate in an employability program; and recipients who secure employment may keep all their earnings, up to the federal poverty level, for the remainder of the twenty-one months.
In addition to TANF and jobs First, there have been recent changes of importance in a number of other welfare laws for relieving poverty in Connecticut. Some of these changes are in Connecticut's general assistance laws. General assistance consists of a variety of different state and local programs providing usually cash assistance to needy individuals and families without minor children who are not receiving assistance under welfare programs for the elderly or disabled. Most states have general assistance programs, and these kinds of programs have been available in Connecticut for many
years. However, in 1995 the Connecticut legislature made some significant changes in general assistance.(fn2) Among these changes are some reductions in the dollar amounts paid per recipient or family and restricting employable general assistance recipients to a twenty-four month period of eligibility, with some possibility of securing extensions beyond this period. The 1995 statute also provides that the state Department of Social Services shall take over the administration of the general assistance program in fourteen towns during 1997, and in the remaining towns in 1998. Among other recent changes in welfare laws of significance to Connecticut are restrictions imposed by Congress in 1996 making nonlegal...
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