Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was established by the Social Security Act of 1935 as a
grant program to enable states to provide cash welfare payments for needy children who had been deprived of parental support or care because their father or mother was absent from the home, incapacitated, deceased, or unemployed. All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands operated an AFDC program. States defined "need," set their own benefit levels, established (within federal limitations) income and resource limits, and administered the program or
supervised its administration. States were entitled to unlimited federal funds for reimbursement of benefit payments, at "matching" rates that were inversely related to state per capita income. States were required to provide aid to all persons who were in classes eligible under federal law and whose income and resources were within state-set limits. During the 1990s, the federal government increasingly used its authority under section 1115 of the Social Security Act to waive portions of
the federal requirements under AFDC. This allowed states to test such changes as expanded earned income disregards, increased work requirements and stronger sanctions for failure to comply with them, time limits on benefits, and expanded access to transitional benefits such as child care and medical assistance. As a condition of receiving waivers, states were required to conduct rigorous evaluations of the impacts of these changes on the welfare receipt, employment, and earnings of
participants. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) replaced AFDC, AFDC administration, the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) program, and the Emergency Assistance (EA) program with a cash welfare block grant called the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Key elements of
TANF include a lifetime limit of five years (60 months) on the amount of time a family with an adult can receive assistance funded with federal funds, increasing work participation rate requirements which states must meet, and broad state flexibility on program design. Spending through the TANF block grant is capped and funded at $16.5 billion per year, slightly above fiscal year 1995 federal expenditures for the four component programs. States must also meet a "maintenance of effort (MOE)
requirement" by spending on needy families at least 75 percent of the amount of state funds used in FY 1994 on these programs (80 percent if they fail work participation rate requirements). TANF gives states wide latitude in spending both Federal TANF funds and state MOE funds. Subject to a few restrictions, TANF funds may be used in any way that supports one of the four statutory purposes of TANF: to provide assistance to needy families so that children can be cared for at home; to end
the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work and marriage; to prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and to encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families. ### For current information about the TANF program, see ACF web site on TANF or the Catalog of Federal Domestic
Assistance, look up program 93.558.
. 1999 Aug;10(3):298-312. doi: 10.1353/hpu.2010.0609. Affiliations
The impact of the AFDC and Food Stamp programs on child nutrition: empirical evidence from New OrleansF C Johnson et al. J Health Care Poor Underserved. 1999 Aug. AbstractThis study tests the hypotheses that the participation in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Food Stamp programs has a positive impact on children's nutritional status, after controlling for other potentially important household- and individual-level characteristics. The analysis is based on the responses of a health facility survey of 246 pairs of low-income mothers and children in New Orleans. The results indicate that participation in the AFDC and Food Stamp programs is associated with increased anthropometric status of children, but the foods consumed by children in families receiving welfare benefits were of significantly lower nutritional value than foods consumed by other children. Among the study's conclusions are the following: (1) in this low-income setting, AFDC and Food Stamp benefits are associated with higher food expenditures, higher anthropometric levels, but inferior diets, and (2) female-headed households spend more on food expenditures than other households, after controlling for other individual- and household-level characteristics. Similar articles
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How much money do you get on welfare in Texas?Maximum monthly TANF amount. What is the meaning of AFDC?Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was established by the Social Security Act of 1935 as a grant program to enable states to provide cash welfare payments for needy children who had been deprived of parental support or care because their father or mother was absent from the home, incapacitated, deceased, or ...
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