By Jackie Jones

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) , heralded as welfare reform during the Clinton administration, comes up before Congress next year for reauthorization.

Whether the program, which was purportedly intended to assist the needy while gradually moving them off assistance and into the workplace, will continue as presently constructed or morph into something else remains to be seen. But for those who fear being pushed out of the program during an economic downturn without an immediate end in sight, whether there’s an extension on the horizon or a change in benefits, it feels a lot like walking a tightrope over a fraying net.

Under TANF, states are given grants for assistance and allowed to determine how to disburse the money. Most states offer basic aid, such as housing assistance, health care, direct cash payments, food stamps, child care assistance and unemployment, but are free to determine how much and to whom.

TANF’s predecessor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children – the formal name for welfare as most Americans knew it – ran from 1935 to 1996. Most observers agreed it wasn’t an ideal system, but it was assailed primarily by conservatives who said the program had created disproportionate numbers of long-term recipients. TANF makes it harder to obtain assistance and has time limits.

What will TANF probably look like after Congress takes it up next year?

“We don’t know,” said Peter Edelman, co-director of the Georgetown (University) Law Center, an expert on poverty and public policy, and author of Welfare and the Poorest of the Poor.

“The conversation has just barely started. I think that the likelihood is that they’re not going to make a lot of changes in the TANF system,” some thing Edelman doesn’t think is a good idea.

The variances from state to state are a problem, he said. Additionally, TANF is helping fewer people during the economic crisis than it did during the boom years of the Clinton years.

‘For the first time since we introduced federal welfare in the midst of the Great Depression, needy families with children can be turned away.’

–The American Prospect

“Caseloads are down,” Edelman said. “They are 10 percent of what they were 10 or 15 years ago. It’s hard to get on; they hassle you while you’re on and they try to kick you off. The number of poor children receiving aid has been cut in half.”

“TANF’s predecessor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, was deficient in many ways (it provided only minimal subsistence and did not offer a ladder out of poverty), it was countercyclical. That is, it automatically expanded when more families became eligible,” according to The American Prospect. “TANF, which is funded through fixed block grants to the states, does not share this important feature. For the first time since we introduced federal welfare in the midst of the Great Depression, needy families with children can be turned away.”

In order to assist many poor – including newly poor recipients who are receiving aid for the first time – other programs that helped the poor, such as child care and job training, may be cut to allow states to provide direct, cash payments to the unemployed.

According to minutes of the Federal Reserve Governors’ Federal Open Market Committee meeting in January, it will take several years for the economy to recover, perhaps well beyond the end of 2011.

The Fed governors and Reserve Bank presidents projected that “Given the strength of the forces currently weighing on the economy, participants generally expected that the recovery would be unusually gradual and prolonged: All participants anticipated that unemployment would remain substantially above its longer-run sustainable rate at the end of 2011, even absent further economic shocks,”

Basically, expect higher than usual unemployment to continue for at least the next two years, the Fed said.

Edelman said you also shouldn’t expect TANF to catch many of those falling between the cracks.

“It’s not an antirecessionary tool,” Edelman said. “Caseloads are going up a little. Food Stamps are up a little because it’s a basic federal entitlement, but in terms of playing the role as a safety net it’s more like hole in the safety net.”

That said, Edelman pointed to a number of moves by the Obama administration to assist the poor.

‘It’s really important for (people) not only to be somewhat informed, but to tell their congressmen and their senators to step up. Be ready when it comes up and demand that it has an adequate safety net for people and that they’ll be watching what the Senate does.’

–Peter Edelman

More money has been put into the Food Stamps program, increasing the child credit and extending unemployment insurance, as well as putting some money into TANF and 20-25 percent of the current budget was dedicated to help low-income people (referred to as “vulnerable people” in administration parlance).

“They didn’t want credit for it,” Edelman said. “…It just creates a political problem.”

“The Obama administration has enriched the match for Medicaid. States all worry that they have to pay for something, right now particularly. They are being held harmless for the first three or four years,” so they don’t have to immediately absorb the costs of expanded programs.

“It’s really important for (people) not only to be somewhat informed, but to tell their congressmen and their senators to step up,” Edelman said. “Be ready when it comes up and demand that it has an adequate safety net for people and that they’ ll be watching what the Senate does.”

He added that it was important that the media put a human face on who is being affected by inadequate welfare assistance.

Edelman described the case of a woman who followed all the rules on TANF, found work, got off the system, was buying a home and then lost her job. She has exhausted unemployment, hasn’t found work, but doesn’t qualify to return to TANF.

People in need of assistance cover a multitude of backgrounds, from those who have struggled to stay gainfully employed to those finding themselves in need of help after years of continuous work.

“There’s no separate population, some group of people who are called welfare recipients,” Edelman said. “They are in and out of the labor market, people who have real problems.”

Jackie Jones is a freelance writer as well as a career and fitness coach for those who want to get their lives in shape. Her website is www.jonescoaching.net.