On Jan. 14, President George W. Bush urged congressional leaders to quickly adopt his welfare reform proposal. The president has not offered any changes from the package that he proposed last year. That package was adopted by the House of Representatives with some changes. The Senate Finance Committee adopted a considerably different proposal, which never made it to the Senate floor. NACo took issue with the president’s proposal and the House bill because of arbitrary work requirements, insufficient child-care funding and other provisions.
The president asked congressional leaders to enact a bill by March 31. The House leadership is expected to introduce last year’s bill with minor changes within the next couple of weeks. Instead of going through the committee process, the leadership plans to bring the bill directly to the House floor.
The Senate, on the other hand, will take a different approach.
Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) is writing his own bill, which is likely to differ from the House version. Additionally, the Senate is expected to go through the committee process, which means that the March 31 deadline will most likely not be met. Current funding for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant expires March 31. The Omnibus Appropriations bill that was being considered on the Senate floor at press time, however, extends the program for the rest of the year.
Work hours
The centerpiece of the president’s proposal and the House bill was a change in work requirements. Both proposals expanded the overall number of hours to 40 hours a week while the Senate Finance Committee left the overall number of hours at 30. All three proposals would require 24 hours of direct work activities and the remainder in other activities.
Under current law, single-parent families must be participating in work for 30 hours a week and two-parent families for 35. It should also be noted that both the president’s proposal and the House bill eliminated a current provision that allows single mothers of children under the age of 6 to participate in work activities for only 20 hours a week.
Definitions of work activities
A second piece of the work-requirement puzzle has to do with the activities that count toward work. The president’s proposal and the House reduced the number of activities that count toward direct work from 12 to 6, while the Senate Finance Committee expanded the activities.
Under the president’s proposal and the House bill, vocational education and job searches, for example, would no longer count toward the 24 hours of direct work activities. On the other hand, the Senate Finance Committee’s bill expanded the activities that can be counted as direct work. For example, last session’s bill would have allowed more time for job search and vocational education to be counted than under current law.
One of the unanswered questions in the Senate is whether the new Finance Committee bill will keep the 30 hours of work and the added flexibility in work activities. Even if it does not, however, the Senate is not expected to go as far as the president’s proposal and the House bill.
NACo supports the 30 hours of work included in the Senate, the 20-hour limit for mothers of children under age 6 and the expanded definition of work activities. In addition, NACo would like to clarify the definition of work activities to ensure that mental health and substance abuse treatment are included as allowable activities.
Child-care funding
A second point of contention is child-care funding. In this instance, the president’s proposal and the House bill differed significantly. The Bush proposal would fund child-care programs at the current level of $4.8 billion. This figure is split into $2.7 billion for entitlement funding and $2.1 billion discretionary funding. The House increased mandatory spending for child-care to $2.9 billion a year. The Senate would have increased mandatory spending to $3.7 billion for the current fiscal year through FY05, with another increase — $3.9 billion — in FY06.
NACo and other national groups have concerns about state and local governments’ ability to sustain these mandated increases in work requirements given the current budget pressures without adequate increases in child-care funding. Grassley has already said this is one of the areas of the bill that needs to be resolved. If the bill coming out of the Senate Finance Committee has the same funding level as last year’s bill, there are likely to be floor amendments to increase that number even further.
Legal immigrants
A third major area of concern to NACo is the area of benefits to legal immigrants. Under current law, legal immigrants who arrived in the country after Aug. 22, 1996 must wait five years to qualify for Medicaid and TANF. As a result, they must often depend on emergency room care and cannot receive the job training and other support services that TANF provides. More than 40 million legal immigrants have arrived over the last five years, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service
The Senate bill had provisions that would have given the states an option to provide TANF services to new legal immigrants and Medicaid to children and pregnant women. The House bill and the president’s proposal did not have these provisions. These provisions are among the most vulnerable aspects of the Senate debate.
Social Services Block Grant
A fourth area of concern and one of NACo’s long-term funding priorities is the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG). Counties use SSBG funds for a variety of programs, including in-home services to the elderly and child protection. It is the largest source of federal funding for elder abuse prevention.
NACo supports increasing SSBG to $2.8 billion, and maintaining the 10 percent transfer authority from TANF to SSBG. Transfer authority gives states more flexibilty in funding social service programs. These provisions were in the 1996 law but were subsequently reduced to pay for the Transportation Equity Act. The program is currently funded at $1.7 billion and the appropriations committees have subsequently restored the transfer authority from 4.5 percent to 10 percent.
While all three versions would permanently restore the transfer authority, the funding is a different matter.
Neither the president’s proposal nor the House bill increased SSBG. The Senate split the increase in SSBG between the welfare bill and the charitable choice/faith-based bill (Charity Aid, Recovery, and Empowerment Act). This bill, sponsored by Sens. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), also did not pass the Senate last year, but is expected to be taken up again early this year. Santorum has gained a seat on the Senate Finance Committee and is pushing for early consideration of the bill.
Additionally, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) has introduced the Right Start for Children Act (S. 18), which includes full restoration of SSBG. Grassley has also been a long-time supporter of SSBG.
All three proposals have some common elements. For example, the definition of “assistance” is being clarified to say that child care and other support services will not be defined as assistance for individuals who are unemployed. This means that support services received under TANF will not count toward the lifetime five-year limit . The Senate Finance Committee went further and also excluded housing from the definition of assistance. NACo strongly supports these provisions because they leverage additional resources for families in their efforts to find and maintain employment.
The president’s proposal would allow carry-over funds from previous years to be spent on any activity allowed by TANF. Under current Office of Management and Budget interpretation, carry-over funds can only be spent on direct cash assistance to recipients.
Child Care and Development Block Grant
Another area that remains unclear is the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which falls under the jurisdiction of the House Education and the Workforce Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP). Last year, the Senate committee passed a bill that would have increased the mandated set-aside for quality improvements from the current 4 percent to 10 percent.
It also included a hold-harmless provision that would exempt states from the increase in the mandated set-aside if it caused a reduction in the number of families served. The Senate committee’s bill also would require states to use another 5 percent set-aside to increase reimbursements to child care providers up to the 85th percentile of the market rate by Sept. 30, 2005.
The House bill increased the set-aside to 6 percent and did not include the provider provisions. NACo expressed concerns about county and state ability to meet these requirements without significant net increases in funding.
The hold-harmless provision was offered by Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who is now the chairman of the HELP Committee. Consequently, it’s likely that the final version of the child care bill will not be as prescriptive as last year’s bill.
Last year’s Senate child-care bill would have also provided grants to states to establish state advisory councils at a funding level of $1 billion. The councils would use the funds to conduct needs assessments at the state and local level, improve state and local programs, and enhance training of early childhood development programs. Additionally, states would establish performance goals for early childhood development and there would be bonuses for states that meet these performance goals.
NACo supported more local participation in these activities. The House bill did not include these provisions. It should be noted that Gregg supported funding this program out of existing child-care funds, which NACo does not support.
Superwaivers
Finally, some of the most controversial provisions of the president’s proposal and last year’s bill are the so-called superwaiver provisions. These provisions would grant expanded authority to several federal agencies to waive program requirements in a number of federal programs in order to improve coordination.
Programs included in the waiver authority are TANF, SSBG (Social Services Block Grant), Title I of the Workforce Investment Act (in part); Food Stamps; Adult Education and Family Literacy; CCDBG (Child Care and Developoment Block Grant); the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act; Housing programs other than Section 8 rental assistance and Section 7. Waiver authority could not be used to change the role of local government’s activities related to the Workforce Investment Act.
None of the bills adopted by Senate committees included superwaiver provisions. It is uncertain at this time whether they will include these provisions under the new Senate leadership.
