The Status of TANF Leavers in the District of Columbia

Copyright © January 2001. The Urban Institute. All rights reserved. Except for short quotes, no part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from The Urban Institute.

This project was funded under contract JA-AC-CS-80071-01 between the District of Columbia and The Urban Institute with funds from the US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation under grant 98ASPEE304A. The authors would like to thank Sarah Brauner and Tracy Roberts for their excellent research assistance. The views expressed in this report are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Urban Institute or its sponsors nor should they be construed as representing the opinions or policy of any agency of the Federal and District Governments. The authors are responsible for any errors in the analysis of the data.

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Executive Summary

In 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) eliminated the federal entitlement program that provided cash aid to low-income families with dependent children (AFDC) and replaced it with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant. While states and jurisdictions like the District of Columbia (DC) must use TANF money to aid low-income families, TANF emphasizes moving families from cash assistance to work.

Because the goal of welfare reform is not simply to reduce the number of families on public assistance but to help families become self-sufficient, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the US Department of Health and Human Services (ASPE) funded the District of Columbia and 13 other jurisdictions (states/counties) to study families leaving the welfare rolls and assess how they are faring in terms of their employment, earnings, use of public assistance programs, family circumstances, and overall well-being.

This study reports on the status of former welfare recipients in the District of Columbia, focusing on two groups of families that left the TANF program: those that left in the last quarter of 1997 and those that left in the last quarter of 1998. The study uses administrative data from the DC Department of Human Services for the 1997 and 1998 groups as well as interviews with a sample of those that left in 1998, conducted approximately one year after they left.

Our major findings are:

• Between June 1997 and December 1999, DC’s cash assistance caseload fell by 23.8 percent, to 18,028 families. This decline is smaller than the 36.9 percent drop in caseloads nationwide; however, caseload declines in urban areas, in general, have lagged behind the national average. In addition, it is important to note that DC did not adopt some of the policies used in other states to reduce its caseload, such as eliminating all cash benefits to families in which the head fails to comply with program requirements.
• Families leaving TANF in DC are typical of DC’s entire caseload in most respects; however, leavers are slightly less likely to have larger families and to have children under age 6 than the typical TANF recipient.
• Our survey of families that left TANF during the last quarter of 1998 shows that 60.3 percent were working at the time of the interview; another 19.5 percent had worked at some point after leaving TANF. This employment rate is similar to those found in studies of TANF leavers in other jurisdictions as well as in national surveys.
• The typical (median) TANF leaver with a job works 40 hours a week and earns over $8 an hour. Less than half of working leavers report receiving employee benefits like paid sick days or pension plans, but almost two-thirds have paid vacations.
• While only 31.7 percent of employed leavers have health insurance through their jobs, 40.7 percent are covered by Medicaid. Overall, 21.6 percent of employed adult leavers (the head of the TANF unit) and 19.3 percent of their children are uninsured.
• Working leavers generally spend a half hour or less commuting to work, and their commuting costs are, on average, less than $3 a day. Nearly three out of five use public transportation to get to work.
• By far the most common source of child care for working leavers with children of any age is school: 51.6 percent report that their children attend school. Friend and relative care is more common than formal day care: 20.5 percent of employed leavers send their child(ren) to a friend or relative and 15.5 percent have a friend or relative come over to mind the child(ren), compared with 11.8 percent of families using licensed child care providers and 5.0 percent using family day care. Among working leavers with young children (3 years old and younger), the use of informal care is even greater. Given the relatively low use of formal care, it is not surprising that fewer than 1 in 20 employed leavers report receiving help paying for child care from the welfare office.
• Among jobless leavers, 23.6 percent report they could not afford child care at some time after leaving TANF and one in eight say lack of child care is a major reason for not working.
• Jobless leavers generally rely on public assistance to get by. More than four out of five leavers received some support from TANF, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and/or the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program at some time after leaving TANF and about three-quarters received some assistance in the month prior to the survey.
• When asked about specific experiences of hardship, such as difficulties paying rent or having utilities cut off or having to skip or reduce the size of meals, working and jobless leavers reported similar levels of difficulty. In addition, there was little difference in the reported incidence of hardships before and after exiting TANF.
• Most families that left TANF in DC stayed off. About one-quarter of leavers returned to the TANF rolls within a year’s time. This is consistent with findings from other studies of welfare leavers.

Overall, our study of TANF leavers in the District of Columbia reveals that many families have made the transition from welfare to work. In terms of their labor market success and ability to stay off TANF, DC’s TANF leavers resemble TANF leavers in other states. Nevertheless, it is important to note that a substantial minority of leavers is not making the transition to work. Over 20 percent of leavers return to TANF and continue to use up their five-year lifetime allotment of federal assistance. Forty percent of leavers are jobless a year after exiting, and 20 percent of all leavers have not worked at all since exiting. Most non-working leavers rely on TANF or other public assistance programs to get by. Finally, in terms of the material hardships they experience, leavers are neither better nor worse off than they were while on TANF, but the absolute levels of these hardships remain relatively high.

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