TANF

Ford School professors Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan coauthored an article with Amy Widman for The Regulatory Review on why people are often unable to access what they are entitled to from the government and how to solve this problem. "Tens of billion...

“I can’t talk about this without smiling. We are getting ready to eliminate extreme poverty for families with babies in Flint.”  Ford School Hermann and Amalie Kohn Professor of Social Justice and Social Policy Luke Shaefer is speaking about “RxK...

Kalena Thomhave (MPP ‘21) and Eli Gold (MPP/MS ‘21) spent much of last year working on research relevant to their academic interests—she on access to TANF cash benefits and he on utility affordability—as would be expected of any final-year MPP studen...

Temporary Assistance For Needy Families, or TANF, was created as part of the 1996 Welfare Reform bill as a way to give cash assistance to those most vulnerable. Yet at a time when millions of Americans are in dire need of cash assistance, the program...

Sandra Danziger and $2.00 a Day are cited in The New York Times piece, “Political rifts over Bill Clinton’s welfare law resurface as aid shrinks.” The piece, which examines the mixed legacy of welfare reform on the occasion of its pending 20th annive...

In “Why the very poor have become poorer,” Christopher Jencks reviews $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, for the June 9 issue of The New York Review of Books. Written by Luke Shaefer and Kathryn Edin, $2.00 a Day (Houghton Mifflin Harc...

On Tuesday, September 1, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. Written by Luke Shaefer and Kathryn Edin, the book movingly documents the troubling rise of extreme poverty in the wake of America’s 1996 w...

In a recent Atlantic article, “The End of Welfare as We Know It,” author Alana Semuels explores the state of the welfare system today, focusing in on Arkansas in the years following President Bill Clinton’s 1996 reforms. Semuels argues that the 1...

When living in extreme poverty, people make use of whatever assets they have as a means of survival, whether it means selling plasma, junk yard scrapping, food stamps or sex just to get by. "It's both depressing and uplifting," Luke Shaefer says of w...

A research study by Sandra K. Danziger, Sheldon Danziger, Kristin S. Seefeldt, and Luke Shaefer, "From welfare to a work‐based safety net: An incomplete transition," was published in the November 2015 edition of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Man...

A research article by Sandra K. Danziger, Sheldon Danziger, Kristin S. Seefeldt, and Luke Shaefer, "Increasing work opportunities and reducing poverty two decades after Welfare Reform," was published in the November 2015 edition of the Journal of Pol...

During the twentieth century, the U.S. both saw the development of a social welfare system to serve nonelderly families and a subsequent dramatic overhaul of the cash welfare part of that system. The first part of the course considers the development...

During the twentieth century, the U.S. both saw the development of a social welfare system to serve nonelderly families and a subsequent dramatic overhaul of the cash welfare part of that system. The first part of the course considers the development...