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CIAO DATE: 10/5/2006
New Goals and Outcomes for Temporary Assistance: State Choices in the Decade after Enactment
Margy Waller, Sean Fremstad
August 2006
Abstract
State officials are spending Temporary Assistance funds quite differently from the early years after welfare reform.1 States now spend a majority of Temporary Assistance funds on benefits and services other than cash assistance, and the beneficiaries of these benefits and services include a substantial number of families who do not receive cash assistance.
These trends have important policy implications. To learn more about these funding allocations and policy decisions, the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program commissioned reports from respected analysts at nonprofit organizations with expertise in budget and social policy in each of three states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.2 After interviewing state officials, analysts from national and state organizations, and reviewing state demographics for about ten places across the country, Brookings staff choose these three states for an in-depth report because they represent three different models of program administration: Wisconsin delegates some decisions to county and local administrators, Ohio uses a mixed model of state and county administration, and Pennsylvania is a state-administered model.3 However, in the final analysis, it appears that state level decisions were more influential in all three states for most outcomes.
