President Biden’s 2023 budget calls for a range of policies that would boost opportunity and reduce poverty, improve health and well-being, and advance widely shared prosperity.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant, created in 1996, provides temporary financial assistance to few families below the poverty line — including those with no other means...

Understanding which policies states have implemented can help federal policymakers update those program rules.

President Biden’s 2023 budget calls for a range of policies that would boost opportunity and reduce poverty, improve health and well-being, and advance widely shared prosperity, funded by proposals to make the nation’s tax system stronger and fairer.

The temporary pandemic unemployment programs significantly increased the coverage, duration, and adequacy of unemployment benefits compared to regular UI, substantially reducing hardship and providing important stabilization and impetus for recovery for a sharply declining economy.

Thirty-one states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have enacted their own version of the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to boost the incomes of people paid low wages. State...

Disability Insurance: A Crucial Part of Social Security Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) is an integral part of Social Security. Workers contribute to SSDI and earn its protection in...

Policymakers in at least 14 states are using temporary budget surpluses to call for costly and permanent tax cuts targeted more to wealthy people and profitable corporations than to those who need...

The COVID-19 pandemic and economic downturn prompted widespread expectations of severe declines in health insurance coverage, as people lost their jobs and saw their incomes plunge. But the federal government swiftly enacted relief legislation and took other policy actions that stabilized health insurance coverage, increased affordability, and mitigated adverse impacts on health care access and equity during the public health emergency.

Once the federal government ends the PHE, which is expected to happen no sooner than mid-July, states will resume their regular processes and begin reviewing all enrollees’ eligibility. The risk of mass coverage loss is high — experts estimated in recent months that over 15 million people will lose their coverage at the end of the PHE, and that number is likely higher today.

States had to meet several conditions to receive the federal funds, collectively called a Maintenance of Effort (MOE) requirement, as well as a “continuous coverage” requirement that prohibits states from terminating most Medicaid enrollees’ coverage until after the public health emergency (PHE) ends, as determined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Eighty-six years after President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935, Social Security remains one of the nation’s most successful, effective, and popular...

This toolkit is designed to help state and local WIC agencies leverage data from Medicaid and SNAP to measure enrollment gaps and increase enrollment using tools to plan, launch, and/or strengthen data matching and targeted outreach to eligible families who are not receiving WIC benefits.

Chairwoman Maloney, Ranking Member Comer, and distinguished members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Michael Leachman, Vice President for State Fiscal...

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

The robust policy response helped make the COVID-19 recession the shortest on record and helped fuel an economic recovery that has brought the unemployment rate, which peaked at 14.8 percent in April 2020, down to 4.0 percent.

In this and future tax filing seasons, states can help certain current and former Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) participants meet their basic needs by electing what’s known as the “tax offset option.” That is, states can elect to give families who are owed child support any support that the IRS deducts from a non-custodial parent’s tax refund due to past-due child support.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the nation’s oldest program for providing cash assistance to families with very low income, is instead laden with undignified, coercive requirements designed to exclude people due to past conduct rather than current need, and in some cases even to control their reproductive decisions.