Aid To Families With Dependent Children Research Articles

Goldberg v. Kelly: The Case, the Clerk, and the Justice

Goldberg v. Kelly: The Case, the Clerk, and the Justice Michael Nelson (bio) During his nearly thirty-four years on the Supreme Court, Justice William J. Brennan wrote 461 majority opinions, including those in landmark cases such as Baker v. Carr, New York Times v. Sullivan, Cooper v. Aaron, Frontiero v. Richardson, and Texas v. Johnson.1 Yet Brennan described his opinion for the Court in Goldberg v. Kelly as “probably the most important thing that came out of these chambers from me.”2 Brennan was not alone in that assessment. According to Stephen Breyer, who is perhaps as deeply versed in the subject as any justice in the history of the Court, “Goldberg v. Kelly revolutionized administrative law.”3 Yale Law School Professor Jeffrey Mashaw described it as the opening salvo in a “due process revolution.”4 Henry Friendly, the chief judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, suggested that the case caused “a greater expansion of procedural due process. . . than in the entire period since the ratification of the Constitution.”5 Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin wrote, “Goldberg v. Kelly is one of those cases that is so big, its influence so persuasive, its implications so immense, that it is difficult to get a firm grip on it.” Toobin recalled “that I was assigned to read the case in no fewer than five different classes in law school: Constitutional Law (what due process means and who is entitled to it and for what?); Property (do welfare benefits count as property?); Civil Procedure (how much process is ‘due’ process?); Administrative Law (how much process is ‘due’ process—specifically?); and Law of the Welfare State (that course was basically about Goldberg v. Kelly).”6 The Case The Goldberg in Goldberg v. Kelly was Jack Goldberg, New York City’s Commissioner of Welfare. He was appealing a lower court ruling in favor of John Kelly and nineteen other welfare recipients. Their benefits were terminated by their caseworkers for various reasons, and their only recourse was to file a written appeal to their caseworker’s supervisor. Even if they made such an appeal, [End Page 162] their benefits would remain cut off unless and until they prevailed. Welfare owed its existence to a patch-work of state and federal laws, the most important of which was the Social Security Act of 1935. In addition to its most prominent feature—old-age insurance—the act provided modest financial support for other categories of people, including dependent children. Commonly referred to as welfare, this support came in the form of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a program jointly funded by the state and federal governments to provide financial support for single-parent households headed by unmarried, divorced, or widowed women. Widows featured prominently among early beneficiaries, but over time the typical AFDC recipient was more likely to be a politically less sympathetic unwed mother. Most states responded to this change by authorizing local program administrators to deny or cut off benefits to families in which, for example, a man was living in the home. But New York, an unusually generous state, provided additional payments to eligible recipients through its Home Relief program to help cover additional housing, clothing, and certain other needs. The origin of Goldberg v. Kelly lay mostly with lawyers at New York City’s Mobilization for Youth (MFY) Legal Unit and Columbia University’s Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law (CSWPL). For years, such legal representation as AFDC beneficiaries were able to obtain when their benefits were terminated or reduced usually had come from Legal Aid Society lawyers, whose limited number, narrow mission, and slender resources restricted them to helping individuals navigate existing laws and regulations rather than challenging the laws and regulations themselves. According to legal scholar Martha F. Davis, “Despite eighty-nine years of representing the poor, Legal Aid lawyers had never appealed a case to the Supreme Court.”7 In 1964, however, MFY expanded its focus on “organizing the unaffiliated—the lower fifth of the economic ladder” by creating a unit to mount legal challenges to “social policy and administrative practices rather than to supply legal help to clients.”8 One year later, Columbia’s...

Introduction

Previous articleNext article FreeForum: 25th Anniversary of Welfare ReformIntroductionLaura KawanoLaura KawanoForum Editor Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTwenty-five years ago, the structure of the social safety net in the United States was fundamentally changed. The federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) entitlement program was replaced with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) — a block grant allocated to states and other subfederal regions. The new legislation introduced mandated work requirements and limited how long families could receive benefits, while giving states much discretion over how to spend funds. Around the same time, the Earned Income Tax Credit was enhanced to further support work among low-income families, and Medicaid was expanded to provide health insurance to children in low-income families. By prioritizing personal responsibility and work, advocates promised that these new policies would propel low-income families into self-sufficiency. However, concerns remained over whether states would adequately prepare cash assistance recipients to find work and how families would fare when they permanently lost access to benefits.The goal of these policies was to revamp the safety net in ways that would translate into long-run improvements for American families. On its 25th anniversary, this Forum presents three papers that examine how families have fared over this period. This long-run perspective is particularly useful, as these reforms were introduced during one of the longest economic expansions on record, making it difficult to disentangle their early effects from the strength of the underlying economy. The more recent US economic experience can help shed light on the longer-lasting effects of these policies during weaker economic times like the Great Recession and the more recent Pandemic Recession.The first paper by LaDonna Pavetti, Ali Safawi, and Danilo Trisi documents the contraction of the cash transfer system since the introduction of TANF, with particular attention to how these trends varied by geography and racial groups. They examine the role that the weakening of our cash assistance system has played in the increase of the number of families living in deep poverty and offer several recommendations for improving the program. The next two papers consider the effects of the bundle of policy changes that occurred and provide evidence that, on net, they did not lead to persistent disadvantages for those affected. The paper by Jeehoon Han, Bruce Meyer, and James Sullivan shows that along with the shift away from cash transfers documented in the first paper, tax and in-kind transfers increased. Focusing on single-mother-headed families, the main group targeted by these policies, they find that incomes for those in the bottom decile fell, but argue that this is due to an increase in the underreporting of income in surveys. Instead, when looking at measures of consumption, the material well-being of the worst off improved faster than for those higher up the consumption distribution. The final paper by Jacob Bastian, Luorao Bian, and Jeffrey Grogger shifts our attention to those who were adolescents at the time of safety-net reform and estimates its effects on their outcomes as young adults. They find that while women’s labor supply increased between the ages of 18 and 22, these gains did not persist into later ages, although it is difficult to separate the longer-run effects of safety-net reform from that of the Great Recession. Marriage rates among women fell, but there were no significant changes in childbearing, either out of wedlock or in total. While these latter two papers find some improvements for low-income families, they by no means imply that they are now well off.Today, proposals on both the political left and right make lifting children out of poverty a central goal. Analyses of the long-run effects of our most recent experience of sweeping safety-net reform hold important lessons for evaluating the potential paths that we might take. This Forum adds to the growing body of evidence on these effects. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by National Tax Journal Volume 74, Number 3September 2021 Published for: The National Tax Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716432 Views: 139 HistoryPublished online August 31, 2021 © 2021 National Tax Association. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Changes from AFDC to TANF in the welfare reform

This study seeks to present a conceptual framework on the importance of the federal government increase the funds for child care programs. United States Congress passed an act: “Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)” and was signed by President Bill Clinton and in 1997, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children Act become the “Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act (TANF). In 1996, the grants were no dependent on state spending on welfare and were earmarked to provide time-limited benefits to a border range of low-income families. The AFDC was replaced by TANF. TANF changes the time limit to five years for receiving cash assistant and required most recipients to work. AFDC was a program that entitled. So that any family meets the federal and the state requirement should receive cash assistance. TANF is funded by the federal government and individual states, TANF provides support to low-income families with children. Also, one biological parent must be absent. TANF replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program which began in 1935 in order to support widows and orphans. The purpose of welfare reform is to increase state flexibility, keeping the children in their homes and parents depending on themselves rather than the government. The federal government should increase the funds for the child care program. This study has reached an understanding of the necessity of reconsidering the rules of Welfare care programs.

No Unnecessary Burden: Taxpayers and the Politics of Work, Family, and Welfare

The history of the Social Security Amendments of 1967 illuminates the contours of fiscal citizenship. This watershed law created both work requirements for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) recipients and new policy instruments, including federal child support enforcement, to compel poor men to fulfill their financial obligations to their families. Welfare reformers claimed that such changes were necessary to protect the rights of taxpayers against the “criminal” predations of welfare recipients. These policy changes initiated in 1967 redefined poor women's non-work, as well as their sexual and reproductive decisions, as crimes against taxpayers. Welfare recipients contested this logic and the policies that flowed from it by insisting on the value of their own domestic labor and rejecting a narrow view of taxpaying citizenship. The resolution of these questions played a critical role in revising the American social contract.

Restoring the Entrails of Welfare Reform

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 famously “ended welfare as we [knew] it” by replacing the state-operated Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with a revised funding scheme called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). In the summer of 2012, controversy erupted over a memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Administration for Children and Families (ACF), concerning state options for TANF performance reporting. Opponents of the Obama administration claimed the policy initiative specified in the memorandum signaled a fundamental change in direction of the national welfare policy established by PRWORA—that it “gutted” welfare reform. The memorandum has not (as of 2016) been rescinded, and the issues raised in the ensuing controversy remain unresolved. We review the controversy. We argue that while there is some justification in criticism of the Obama administration's strategy, the initiative addressed an important problem: the inadequacy of the program's performance measure given the variation in resources available to states in meeting the program's goals. The ACF memo was in our judgment a responsible step toward finding methods for improving TANF performance and, as conducted, the guts debate retarded this search.

Editor's Letter

Editor's Letter

Uncontrolled Experiments from the Laboratories of Democracy: Traditional Cash Welfare, Federalism, and Welfare Reform

In this chapter I discuss the history and basic incentive effects of two key U.S. cash assistance programs aimed at families with children. Starting roughly in the 1980s, critics of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program argued that that program – designed largely to cut relatively small checks – failed to end poverty or promote work. After years of federally provided waivers that allowed states to experiment with changes to their AFDC programs, the critics in 1996 won the outright elimination of AFDC. It was replaced by the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, over which states have enormous design discretion. In this chapter I argue that the empirical evidence on AFDC’s behavioral impact was never as compelling as AFDC’s critics maintained. Nor, for the period up to about 2012 (the endpoint of this chapter's analysis), is there any substantial empirical evidence supporting what I call the “triumphalist” position that the wave of state and federal welfare reforms that took place in the 1990s importantly explains the observed increase in employment among single mothers. Either the economic boom of the late 1990s, or some other difficult-to-measure change, appears to have played a more important role than welfare reform. What is more, the uncontrolled experimentation of the last two decades has left the U.S. with a crazyquilt collection of state programs that do not lend themselves to the kind of empirical research that would be necessary to benefit from the Brandeisian idea of states as laboratories of democracy.

FROM WELFARE TO A WORK‐BASED SAFETY NET: AN INCOMPLETE TRANSITION

The passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which we label welfare reform, decisively “ended welfare as we knew it” by eliminating the federal entitlement to cash assistance that Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) had provided for 60 years. The new cash assistance program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), is a fixed federal block grant that allows states to spend federal and state funds flexibly on cash assistance or a range of other services provided to needy families with children. PRWORA requires only that states enforce participation in work or work-related activities and impose time limits on the receipt of cash assistance from federal funds. Because it is not an entitlement program, TANF does not require states to provide benefits to all eligible families, nor does it require them to assume responsibility for guaranteeing unemployed recipients who reach their time limit a job if they cannot find one. As a result, the transition to the new “work-based safety net” remains incomplete: neither thefederal government nor the statesreplaced theentitlement to cash assistance with an entitlement to participate in work or work-related activities. TANF includes incentives that encourage states to minimize their cash assistance caseloads, even when recessions increase the number of eligible families. First, the amount of block grant funds has not changed since the program was enacted. A state’s allocation is not responsive to population growth or increased economic hardship. Second, funds not used for cash assistance can be reallocated to other related purposes. Third, states can satisfy the work participation benchmarks either by getting more recipients into work-related activities or jobs (which can be expensive) or simply by keeping caseloads small. In contrast to this reduction in public responsibility, TANF requires more responsibility from recipients. Indeed, it achieved its goal of eliminating long-term dependence on cash assistance. A recipient can no longer reject a job offer and continue to receive cash assistance. If she does not cooperate with the welfare agency, she can be sanctioned and her family can be removed from the welfare rolls. She can also be removed when she reaches her time limit, even if she is actively seeking work and willing to work for her cash assistance.

Welfare Crises, Penal Solutions, and the Origins of the “Welfare Queen”

This article contributes to the scholarship on mass incarceration by highlighting the ways penal expansion intervened in the history of other state institutions. It argues that the increasing criminalization of welfare fraud was instrumental in undermining political support for key social welfare programs, particularly Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). In the 1970s, lawmakers and welfare administrators enlisted law enforcement’s expanding authority to contain growing welfare costs and counter demands from the welfare rights movement. It was from these anti-welfare fraud campaigns that the racialized caricature of the “welfare queen” entered the political lexicon. Recruiting the criminal justice system further stigmatized AFDC recipients by positioning them as criminally suspect, financially secure, and morally unworthy. I argue that while increased penalties for welfare fraud did not swell the penal system to the same extent as initiatives like the War on Drugs, they shaped popular knowledge about poor families and undermined faith in the state’s capacity to mitigate inequality.

More money, fewer lives: the cost effectiveness of welfare reform in the United States.

We evaluated the economic benefits of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) relative to the previous program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). We used pooled mortality hazard ratios from 2 randomized controlled trials-Connecticut Jobs First and the Florida Transition Program, which had follow-up from the early and mid-1990s through December 2011-and previous estimates of health and economic benefits of TANF and AFDC. We entered them into a Markov model to evaluate TANF's economic benefits relative to AFDC and weigh them against the potential health threats of TANF. Over the working life of the average cash assistance recipient, AFDC would cost approximately $28000 more than TANF from the societal perspective. However, it would also bring 0.44 additional years of life. The incremental cost effectiveness of AFDC would be approximately $64000 per life-year saved relative to TANF. AFDC may provide more value as a health investment than TANF. Additional attention given to the neediest US families denied cash assistance could improve the value of TANF.

From the Physical to the Fiscal: Monetizing the Poor

One effect of the deteriorating fiscal condition of governments is the effort to “reform” the “welfare state.” Often expressed using the rubrics of the New Public Management (NPM) and Public/Private Partnerships (PPP), a significant component of this effort is harmonious with a neo-liberal ideology incorporating commercial business practices into public sector organizations, which has been allied with the financialization of government, the capitation of welfare recipients and asset-based welfare. We examine the transformation of public entities into quasi-commercial ones by first contextualizing the rise of NPM, PPP, financialization, capitation and asset-based welfare within the historical evolution of incorporating business practices into government. And second, we examine the processes by which the State of Wisconsin replaced the forty year old AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) program with a new W-2 (Welfare Works) welfare reform program. Finally, we explore implications.

Shrinking the Public Safety Net or Helping the Poor Play by the Rules? The Changes in the State-Level Policies That Affected Low-Income Families With Children in the Welfare Reform Era

Despite the claimed success of the 1996 Welfare Reform, little research using multivariate regression has examined changes in multiple public safety-net programs. Thus, we still do not know whether public safety-net programs for the poor have shrunk or increased nationwide, along with the sharp declines in cash assistance. Using state-level data between 1994 and 2002 and state fixed-effects model, this study examines changes in nine safety-net programs designed for low-income families with children along with decreases in support from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)/Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and the results indicate that the decline in AFDC/TANF support was not associated with increases in support for the economic self-sufficiency of low-income families; safety-net programs for the poor shrunk during the 1996 reform. As there is an increasing need for an effective use of public dollars to assist the poor in the present recession, future researchers should turn their attention to the study of multiple safety-net policies.

Conditional Bureaucratic Discretion and State Welfare Diffusion under AFDC

AbstractIn this article, I evaluate whether a state's level of bureaucratic discretionary authority with respect to welfare policy makes that state more or less likely to participate in policy diffusion with other states that share similar levels of bureaucratic discretionary authority. Using data on levels of access to welfare services in the late Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) era (1976–90), I find that bureaucrats across states who are granted high-discretionary authority engage in policy diffusion with one another. Diffusion based on similarity in discretionary authority is more pronounced when bureaucrats possess high compared with no discretion and does not occur when bureaucrats possess low discretion. Moreover, diffusion between high-discretion bureaucrats operates concurrently with geographic- and economic-driven forms of diffusion that have been well documented in the policy diffusion literature. Results demonstrate that a state's choice of how much discretion to give bureaucrats can open or close channels of diffusion that are available to policymakers in that state.

Nixon's New Deal: Welfare Reform for the Silent Majority

Utilizing recently opened politically sensitive materials at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, this article shows how welfare reform became increasingly important to the Nixon administration's political ambitions for a new conservative majority, consisting of southern white conservatives and northern working‐ and middle‐class white voters. Welfare reform rose to the top of the president's domestic policy agenda for a number of reasons, but the president selected the Family Assistance Plan (FAP) over more conservative alternatives in keeping with his political aims: the FAP would redistribute federal welfare to the white working poor in northern metropolitan areas, while simultaneously increasing federal welfare spending in southern states. As the 1970 midterm elections approached, however, the predominant political focus for the FAP became the effort to appeal to blue‐collar, northern white‐ethnic voters. In the aftermath of the disappointing results from those elections, President Nixon and his political team became convinced that a New Deal–style redistributive strategy was ineffective in appealing to conservative voters in the “silent majority,” especially southern conservatives who were opposed to any expansion of federal welfare, even when they would benefit directly. Instead, Nixon began to emphasize the FAP's value as a platform for launching strong rhetorical attacks on welfare. While the president subsequently pulled back from pushing for FAP's legislative enactment, offering an important explanation for the measure's failure, his antiwelfare rhetoric was politically successful, providing subsequent national conservative leaders with a political formula for utilizing antiwelfare rhetoric to build support among white working‐ and middle‐class voters.

Trajectories of Maltreatment Re-Reports From Ages 4 to 12:

This study identified trajectories of maltreatment re-reports between ages 4 and 12 for children first referred to Child Protective Services (CPS) for maltreatment prior to age 4 and either removed from the home or assessed by a CPS intake worker as moderately or highly likely to be abused/neglected in the future, absent intervention. Participants (n = 501) were children from the Southwest and Northwest sites of the Consortium for Longitudinal Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN). During the 8-year follow-up period, 67% of children were re-reported. Growth mixture modeling identified four trajectory classes: No re-report (33%), Continuous re-reports (10%), Intermittent re-reports (37%), and Early re-reports (20%). Membership in classes with relatively more re-reports was predicted by several factors assessed at age 4, including physical abuse; living with a biological/stepparent; caregiver alcohol abuse, depression, and lack of social support; receipt of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC); and number of children in the home. For a subpopulation of high-risk children first reported in early childhood, risk for maltreatment re-reporting may persist longer than previously documented, continuing 8 to 12 years after the first report.

The emergence of race in national welfare politics: the 1962 and 1967 amendments to AFDC

This article traces the influence of post-war shifts in gender and race relations on the politics of federal welfare in the 1960s. It describes a conservative turn in the politics of welfare during this decade, driven in large part by the rising importance of race within the context of federal welfare policymaking. Contrasting President Kennedy’s Public Welfare amendments in 1962 with amendments to welfare added to President Johnson’s 1967 Social Security increases, the article identifies the declining influence of gender-based concerns and an increase in the importance of race in national welfare policymaking by the latter half of the decade. This shift occurred simultaneously with a move away from a rehabilitation framework designed to encourage work and self-sufficiency through expanded social services for welfare families, toward an employment-focused framework that required work from adult welfare recipients, enforced through punitive sanctions. In explaining the changes in national welfare politics during these years, I analyze the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) demographics and growth, public opinion survey data, and the partisan and ideological composition of congress. A content analysis of New York Times welfare coverage during each of these policymaking efforts, along with a close reading of congressional hearings and floor debates, provides empirical evidence for the shift from gender to race in national welfare politics. The article demonstrates that increasingly liberal gender norms and advances in civil rights for African Americans provided the impetus for reactive efforts by conservatives to re-impose post-war gender and racial norms where possible, with one manifestation being the restrictive and racially pejorative welfare politics that emerged in Congress by the late 1960s.

Children's well-being, adult poverty, and jobs-of-last-resort

This article addresses the failure of the 1996 welfare reform act (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act [PRWORA]) as an anti-poverty program demonstrated by the fact that approximately half of all ‘welfare leavers’ have fallen back into poverty within a year or two of their exit. The proximate cause is that, because of “barriers to work” or insufficient demand, leavers end up working too few hours over the course of a year. To address this failure, we propose a program of jobs-of-last-resort, called Promise of a Job (POJ), based on an examination of the design, costs, and results for a large number of transitional-job and welfare-to-work programs. In this article, we estimate POJ's costs per participant and overall costs of implementation, as well as the impact such a program would have on reducing adult and, particularly, child poverty. We find, in examining past data, that had POJ been applied to just those Americans who were on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)...

Do Outside Options Matter Inside Marriage? Evidence from State Welfare Reforms

I analyze the impact of the early 1990s state waivers from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) guidelines to understand how changes in options outside of marriage affect household expenditures. AFDC waivers decreased the public assistance available to impoverished divorced women and thereby reduced a woman's bargaining threat point in marriage. Using the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) and an empirical synthetic control approach, I find that decreases in potential welfare benefits altered the expenditure patterns of two-parent families. Waivers were associated with increased expenditure on food at home relative to restaurant meals and decreased expenditure on child care and women's clothing, suggesting greater home production and decreased consumption by women. Such changes are evident only for households containing a woman with a reasonable probability of receiving welfare benefits if her marriage ended. The changes in expenditure patterns suggest that reductions in a wife's outside options cause her utility within marriage to decline.

Have Welfare-to-Work Programs Improved over Time in Putting Welfare Recipients to Work?

The authors examine data from 21 random assignment evaluations of 76 experimental welfare-to-work programs conducted in the United States between 1983 and 1998 to determine whether the impacts of these programs on employment improved over time. Welfare-to-work programs have long played an important role in the federal assistance program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), now called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Over the 16-year period covered by the experiments, an increasing percentage of control group members received services similar to those offered to program group members. As a result, the differential participation in program service activities between the program and the control group decreased steadily over time, reducing the impact of these programs on employment. The negative influence of the reduced incremental services was nevertheless offset by other factors that resulted in program impacts remaining essentially constant during the study period. The authors suggest ways to improve program impacts in future experiments.

The effect of the original introduction of Medicaid on welfare participation and female labor supply

This paper uses the fact that states introduced Medicaid programs at different times between 1966 and 1972 to estimate Medicaid’s effect on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) participation. Using state-level data, we find that the introduction of Medicaid accounted for approximately 10% of growth in AFDC caseloads from 1964 to 1974, a time period during which there was thought to be significant unexplained growth in caseloads. Analysis of individual-level data indicates that Medicaid’s effect on AFDC participation occurred through its effect in increasing the number of eligibles who participated in the program, and not because of increases in eligibility or reductions in workforce participation.