Mahagani Jenkins appreciated the extra money—it just wasn’t enough. For an on-and-off six months, she was a participant in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, known as TANF, receiving between $200 and $300 in monthly cash assistance. Jenkins, who received the benefits for four months while pregnant, used the funds to prepare for the birth of her son, purchasing necessities like diapers, baby clothes, and bottles.

When she qualified for TANF in 2022, Jenkins thought she might receive a larger amount. “It didn’t really help me be able to pay my bills, or anything else like that,” she told me.

This confusion was partially due to a lack of communication from the local office that was responsible for administering TANF. Jenkins, who is based in Denver, wasn’t aware of the program requirements—or the fact that there was an income cap to receive the assistance. It was determined that she earned too much income to qualify for more assistance, and so she dropped off the benefits cliff that so many low-income families are forced to confront.

“I ended up making too much money. I didn’t know what the limit was. I didn’t even know there was a limit until, obviously, I went over the limit, and it just got cut off,” Jenkins said.

Obtaining TANF benefits requires the recipient to be either working or actively searching for employment, but getting a job can push someone over the income threshold and off assistance. The purpose of TANF is, in part, to decrease reliance on government aid, but the very low income cap for obtaining the benefits across states means that one can still be very poor and not qualify for the program. In Colorado, the maximum amount a single person can earn and still obtain TANF benefits is just over $250 a month.

After her son, Ezra, was born, Jenkins was able to qualify for TANF again, but she lost the benefits shortly thereafter—this time, a failure to comply with stringent child support requirements tripped her up. While helpful on a small scale, TANF simply did not benefit her as much as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—also known as food stamps—and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants and Children, commonly called WIC.

But Jenkins’s experience reflects that of many would-be TANF recipients: In 2020, only 20 percent of eligible families participated in the program. “If the amount was larger, it would have played a bigger role, because at the time I wasn’t working when I had first found out I was pregnant,” she said. “So that was why I ended up on TANF. But then, once I found out how much I was getting monthly—$200 for a month. You can’t live on that as an adult.”

What Jenkins did not know at the time is that the amount granted to each state to spend on TANF was first decided in the mid-1990s and has not been increased since.

“Well, that would make sense, because back then, that might have been great,” Jenkins reflected. “But we’re in 2024, and a lot of things have changed.”

TANF was designed to provide low-income households with benefits—often in the form of cash assistance—while encouraging recipients to end their “dependence” on aid programs. However, it forces participants to jump through numerous bureaucratic hoops to obtain aid that is often insufficient to meet their needs.

“It’s a really important source of income as a last resort if you have nothing else. You can get SNAP to buy food, you can get Medicaid to cover your health expenses. But if you need to buy shampoo, or diapers, or anything like that, then you need TANF,” said Heather Hahn, the associate vice president for management in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute. Although research generally confirms the effectiveness of cash assistance in reducing poverty, TANF is far from a cure-all: The average of $500 per month for a family of three “is not going to lift anybody out of poverty,” said Hahn, an expert on TANF.

TANF was born of the “welfare reform” movement in the 1990s, a cross-partisan endeavor embraced by the likes of Democratic President Bill Clinton and Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which grew from the expansive social service policies established in the New Deal. The AFDC was a federal entitlement program that reimbursed states for a portion spent on cash assistance.

The program became increasingly controversial in the 1980s and 1990s, as it was thought to disincentivize work and marriage, and it enforced no time limit on receiving aid. This maladroit perception of the AFDC was also racialized, thanks in part to President Ronald Reagan’s infamous denouncement of the so-called “welfare queen”: a Black woman allegedly using government assistance for ill purposes. This perception of the AFDC was pervasive across parties; in his 1992 campaign for president, Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it.”

The end goals of “welfare reform” are apparent in the title of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, massive bipartisan legislation that ended the AFDC cash assistance program, replacing it with TANF block grants. “Personal responsibility” and “work opportunity” were the explicit priorities, rather than an emphasis on poverty reduction.

“Those are big values that a lot of people can get around, can support, and gave it the political support that was necessary for passing the law,” said Hahn. “Those values, though, do not necessarily reflect the reality and the experiences of people who are seeking assistance.”

Under the current program, states are given a fixed amount of money for TANF and are required to contribute a portion of funding as well, known as “maintenance of effort.” States can then use those funds for the four purposes of TANF laid out in the 1996 law: to provide assistance so children can be cared for in their own homes or the homes of relatives, to reduce the dependency of parents on........

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