SENT BY NATIONAL CHILD ABUSE COALITION CALL OR EMAIL YOUR CONGRESSPERSON OR THE PRESIDENT TODAY. SPREAD THE WORD
May 18, 2023
The Honorable Kevin McCarthy The Honorable Hakeem Jeffries
Speaker of the House House Minority Leader
H-232, The Capitol H-204 O’Neill House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515 Washington, DC 20515
The Honorable Charles Schumer The Honorable Mitch McConnell
Senate Majority Leader Senate Minority Leader
322 Hart Senate Office Building 317 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510 Washington, DC 20510
Dear Speaker McCarthy, Minority Leader Jeffries, Majority Leader Schumer, and Minority Leader
McConnell:
On behalf of the National Child Abuse Coalition, a coalition of 28 national organizations focused on the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect in the United States, we write to express our strong concerns with the work requirements being proposed for key federal programs including Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) as part of the ongoing debt ceiling negotiations. While we welcome the opportunity to partner with you in making TANF work better for children and families, the expanded work requirements being considered would have serious and cascading consequences for children, including increased risk of: higher rates of abuse and neglect, higher numbers of children in foster care, and decreased support for kinship caregivers raising children within and outside of the child
welfare system. When families experience material hardship, they are more likely to be the subject of a child abuse or neglect investigation. Nearly 85 percent of families investigated by child protective services have incomes
below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. Almost 70 percent of families with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty line reported experiencing a material hardship in 2017, including difficulty paying for housing, utilities, food or medical care. Accessing sufficient resources through TANF and other benefits effectively buffers against repeat involvement with child protective services by up to 50 percent for families with children under age four.Although imperfect, TANF is a critical federal tool that makes a big impact for children. Importantly, the first goal of TANF is to support needy families so that children remain safely at home. When families have greater access to the resources in TANF, both the incidence of child abuse and neglect and entries into the foster care system are reduced. The connection between poverty, material hardship, and child abuse and neglect investigations is consistent in many research studies. As such, concrete support in times
of need is considered a key “protective factor” to prevent families from becoming involved in the child welfare system. For states that have made work requirement policy expansions or changes not dissimilar to those being considered in current debt limit talks, research has illuminated the harmful consequences to children and families, including the following key findings:
● States that impose total benefit loss as the most severe sanction for failing to meet TANF work requirements saw a 23.3 percent increase in substantiated child neglect reports, 13.4 percent increase in foster care entries due to neglect, and 12.7 percent increase in total foster care entries.
● States that implemented TANF time limits of less than five years saw a 34.4 percent increase in substantiated maltreatment reports and a 37.3 percent increase in substantiated neglect reports.
● Each additional state policy that restricts access to TANF is associated with 50 additional children with substantiated neglect reports, 22 additional children entering foster care due to abuse, and 21additional children entering foster care due to neglect per 100,000 children.
● From 1985-2000, reductions in AFDC/TANF benefits were a major predictor of dramatic growth in foster care caseloads: over that period, a 10 percent reduction in the average monthly benefit for a family of three was associated with a 2.3 percent increase in the foster care caseload rate.
The research is clear that even modest economic support to families through programs like TANF go a long way towards preventing both child maltreatment and child welfare system involvement, which is expensive and can be harmful for families who could be better served in other ways. Analysis of National
Child Abuse and Neglect Data System data shows that a one percent increase in TANF caseloads is associated with a rate of 4.21 fewer neglect victims, 2.47 fewer abuse victims placed in foster care, and 2.34 fewer neglect victims placed in foster care per 100,000 children. Other research has shown that a 10
percent increase in state public benefit levels through TANF for a family of four is predicted to reduce foster care placements by 8 percent. Furthermore, easing TANF restrictions is associated with fewer children experiencing substantiated neglect and fewer children placed into foster care.
The changes being proposed to expand existing work requirements would provide more incentives for states to reduce their TANF caseloads. The added strain of a sudden loss of cash benefit support is yet another economic stressor that puts already at-risk families at even higher risk of system involvement.
This would be costly for children who enter the child welfare system and for society broadly. The need to prevent child abuse and neglect and keep children safely at home, consistent with TANF’s statutory goal,is urgent: the trauma of removing children from their families and placing them in out-of-home care can disrupt healthy development and wellbeing. Very young children often experience attachment disruptions, emotional damage, and developmental delays, while older children face psychological and behavioral issues and poor educational outcomes compared to children outside the system. To increase the risk of child welfare system involvement for children and youth by denying families economic support goes against the fundamental American value, and TANF statutory goal, of keeping families safely together and out of government systems as much as possible.
In addition to these human costs, research has found significant financial costs of reducing TANF benefits: Every $1 in TANF cash assistance payments lost to families per year would cost society $8 per year in the form of spending on children and parents’ worsened health and increased need for child
protective services. In addition, if 25 percent of families affected by a work requirement lose monthly TANF cash benefits, the economic and societal costs could total $7.4 billion per year; if half of families do, the costs could reach almost $15 billion per year due to increased spending on children and parents’
worsened health and increased need for child protective services. And if states opt to stop providing cash assistance to families unable to meet work requirements, the economic and societal costs could be as highas $29.6 billion per year due to back-end services to address children and parents’ worsened health and increased need for child protective services. Finally, the additional work requirements being proposed to the TANF program will also decrease access to critical benefits for grandparents and other kin caregivers, who play a key role in keeping children with their families both within and outside of the child welfare system. Namely, work requirements do not account for uncompensated childrearing and caretaking by family members critical to keeping children safe, happy, and healthy. The TANF Child-Only program is one of the few sources of concrete support for kinship caregivers in the United States, particularly grandparents, who often assume caregiving responsibilities unexpectedly when a crisis occurs. This population of caregivers rely on concrete economic support to care for their children successfully, keeping them safely with families and out of foster care. The Child-Only benefits would also be subject to the expanded work requirements being proposed, and the overall impact of work requirements on TANF would not only scare grandparents away from seeking the help they need, but it would detrimentally disincentivize states from opening Child-Only cases, because these cases are factored into state and federal calculations of TANF recipients who are
complying with work requirements. As a result, fewer kinship families would have access to essential support to help meet children's basic needs.
Thank you for your consideration of these concerns, and for your commitment to the well-being of children and families. We hope that you will consider us partners in your efforts to make improvements to the TANF program more broadly by considering such legislation separately from a debt limit
conversation; we oppose current efforts to expand TANF work requirements as part of the urgent debt ceiling negotiations underway, as doing so would have severe consequences for America’s most vulnerable children and their families. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at
nationalchildabusecoalition@gmail.com.
Sincerely,
Rebecca M. Robuck
Executive Director
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