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Biden Administration to Overhaul Welfare Following ProPublica Reporting (www.propublica.org)

submitted 11 months ago by spaceghoti@lemmy.one to c/politics@lemmy.world

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Through a package of proposed reforms to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF, the administration plans to shore up the U.S. social safety net. The regulations are intended to ensure that more federal and state welfare dollars make it to low-income families, rather than being spent on other things or not spent at all.

The proposal, drawn up by the federal Administration for Children and Families, is open for public comment until Dec. 1. Once comments are reviewed, officials plan to issue final regulations that could take effect in the months after that, heading into the 2024 election.

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[-] Tedesche@lemmy.world 17 points 11 months ago

ProPublica found that in Arizona and elsewhere, money meant to help parents struggling to raise their children is instead used to investigate them for alleged child maltreatment — which often stems from the very financial circumstances that they needed help with in the first place.

Under the Biden plan, Arizona would likely have to find other ways of funding its aggressive child protective services investigations of poor parents and use welfare dollars to help families stay together rather than removing their kids into foster care.

As someone who works with low-income folks and sees plenty of CPS cases play out, I think the article is being pretty slanted in its coverage here. It's depicting CPS investigations as being weaponized against the poor, but this is far from the truth in my experience. Funny how people stop caring about "putting children's safety first" when it becomes politically convenient to do so. In my experience, it's actually pretty rare that a family be investigated by CPS due to unavoidable problems related to poverty. I'm not going to say it never happens, but it's far from the norm in my experience. More often, the issue is a combination of poverty and the parent not doing something they should have or otherwise making bad decisions. One can of course argue that said bad decisions are due to social problems linked to the client's impoverished background, and that's true, but it's not a direct consequence of the parent not having enough money to take care of their children, and the distinction is important. One is an issue of one government system punishing a person for another government system's failure, not the parent's; the other is a much more complex societal systemic issue that is not a problem with government systems per se, but rather a sociological problem that requires a much more complex solution. The article's framing of this issue is simplistic and seems deliberately misleading for political purposes. Bad reporting.

[-] quindraco@lemmy.world 47 points 11 months ago

Do you have experience in Arizona, specifically? These allegations about weaponizing CPS to go after poor people for being poor are state-specific.

[-] Tedesche@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

No, and to be fair, I was assuming they were more general in their accusations.

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this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023

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