Rural communities — both nationally and in most states — will benefit disproportionately from the American Rescue Plan’s temporary expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit.

States have critical policy choices to make: they can exacerbate inequities and damage the economy, or they can set another course.

To fund the investments that would help build a more equitable recovery, President Biden is expected to ask the wealthiest households to pay a fairer amount in federal taxes. With the nation’s...

Millions report that their households did not get enough to eat or are not caught up on rent payments.

Beyond the COVID-19 public health emergency, the Administration should make additional, permanent changes to make it easier for more people to enroll in coverage through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provides benefits broadly to low-income households that meet the program’s eligibility requirements, but its coverage of non-elderly adults not...

The federal-state unemployment insurance (UI) system helps many people who have lost their jobs by temporarily replacing part of their wages. (See “Policy Basics: Unemployment Insurance.”) Under...

The Act extends the Child Tax Credit to families of all sizes in Puerto Rico and provides funding to substantially expand Puerto Rico’s local Earned Income Tax Credit.

SNAP is essential to helping low-income households put food on the table.

Vouchers help more than 2 million low-income households afford decent, stable housing, usually by helping them rent a modest unit of their choice in the private market.

One of policymakers’ top priorities in recovery legislation should be to provide housing vouchers to a larger share of families in need.

A decade of budget cuts has severely undermined the agency’s ability to perform its fundamental jobs of enforcing the nation’s tax laws.

What Is the Housing Voucher Program? Individuals and families with low incomes use vouchers to help pay for privately owned housing. The program is federally funded and run by the Department of...

This budget request marks an important break from more than a decade of underinvestment across a range of areas.

To make further strides toward universal coverage an essential priority for recovery legislation, Congress should make broader, permanent improvements to marketplace coverage.

When President Trump took office in January 2017, he inherited an economy in its 91st month of economic expansion following the end of the Great Recession in June 2009. That expansion continued into 2020, becoming the longest on record, but a sharp contraction in economic activity arising from COVID-19 ended it.

Raising corporate taxes by a modest amount will not undermine the economic recovery and, in fact, using those revenues to finance needed investments will help make the economy stronger.

The current crisis calls for a permanent subsidized employment program that can respond to short-term needs and support workers who are disadvantaged even in good economic times.

What Is TANF? Congress created the TANF block grant through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, as part of a federal effort to “end welfare as we know...

Various laws, regulations, and guidance that federal policymakers put in place since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic expand access to testing, vaccination, and treatment for the virus.

The American Rescue Plan Act includes $12 billion in key investments to food assistance programs to mitigate the nation’s extraordinarily high levels of hunger and hardship.

As the President and Congress turn to economic recovery legislation this spring and summer, however, they have a historic opportunity to make permanent progress by addressing the underlying weaknesses in our economy and our public policies that made the stopgap measures of the last year so necessary.

Congress and the President, no longer bound by multi-year caps on discretionary funding, have the opportunity this year to reset non-defense discretionary funding levels to remedy existing shortfalls.