Editorial: Welfare claims

Not all, or perhaps even most, Kansas families that have left the welfare rolls did so because parents had found jobs and become self-supporting.

As state lawmakers continue their efforts to reduce assistance to Kansas families in need, they make a lot of claims that aren’t fully supported by the data.

For instance, when Sen. Michael O-Donnell, R-Wichita, recently voiced support for a bill that would lower the lifetime limit for assistance and set other new restrictions, he pointed to the reduced number of Kansans receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families as evidence that new restrictions have been effective in encouraging people to get jobs and climb out of poverty.

For a certain number of Kansans, that probably is true, but there are other factors that undoubtedly are reducing the overall number of families that receive cash assistance from the TANF program. Only households with children are eligible for cash assistance from TANF, which also funds various other programs that help needy families in the state.

An obvious one is the reduction in the lifetime limit for cash assistance. Last year, that limit was reduced to 36 months from 48 months. The bill passed by the Senate earlier this month would further reduce that limit to 24 months. Federal law allows up to 60 months of TANF assistance. The Kansas Department for Children and Families estimates the reduction to 24 months would affect 420 Kansas households.

In addition to the lifetime limit, some recipients likely have found it difficult to qualify for TANF assistance because of new work and anti-fraud rules that would be further tightened by the new legislation. One provision of the bill requires recipients to accept any “suitable employment offer” and forbids them from quitting any job at which they are working at least 30 hours per week.

Most Kansans, including many TANF recipients, support the idea of helping people gain education and find work as a way to climb out of poverty. However, though Kansas has seen modest increases in employment in the last several years, it’s unlikely that the large decrease in TANF recipients can be attributed to people getting jobs and becoming financially independent. DCF officials offer anecdotal success stories, but they say the difficulty of following up on people who leave the TANF program makes it impossible to come up with firm data on whether they left the program because they had a job or for some other reason.

DCF statistics show a spike in TANF cases in FY 2011 when the state was still recovering from the Great Recession, and a corresponding 17.7 percent reduction in those numbers in FY 2012. However, large decreases in TANF cases also were reported for the next three years: 27.7 percent in FY 2013, 18.1 percent in FY 2014 and 13.6 percent in FY 2015. The amount the state spent on cash assistance dropped from $52 million in FY 2011 to $20.4 million in FY 2015, a reduction of about 60 percent. It’s hard to believe there is that much less need in Kansas than there was five years ago.

During that same time period the amount the state spent on employment services for TANF recipients dropped by more than half, from $10.7 million in FY 2011 to $5 million in FY 2015. With the new job requirements, a high percentage of TANF recipients are using those services, which makes the large reduction in spending for employment services puzzling.

There’s certainly more than one way to reduce the TANF rolls, and the numbers may not tell the whole story. Getting people off of assistance by helping them become self-supporting is great, but using increasingly strict rules to cut off families who still need that assistance is a strategy that many Kansans don’t support.