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.
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.
Do you have experience in Arizona, specifically? These allegations about weaponizing CPS to go after poor people for being poor are state-specific.
No, and to be fair, I was assuming they were more general in their accusations.
I don’t think the administration is making this move predicated on “putting children’s safety first”. They’re doing it because using funds that are earmarked for social safety net purposes (providing more support for families in need) to instead punish those who are in need of those funds - even when that punishment is deserved - does not address the thing the money was intended to resolve and this the request for funds is disingenuous.
We can roleplay this…
Person 1: “Hey, can I borrow $50? My impoverished sister can’t afford food for her family this week.”
Person 2: “Sure, here you go. Wait, what are you doing?”
Person 1: “Well, I think my neighbor might be neglecting their kids so I spent that $50 on investigating them, just in case.”
Person 2: “But I gave you the money to help your sister, not to investigate someone who may or may not have done anything wrong”
You see the problem?
I understand the issue being highlighted in the article, and I wasn’t commenting on that specifically. I was merely expressing disjunction with their characterization of the CPS system in the sense that they implied there was a hostile motive behind it in a general sense. In my experience, this isn’t true.
As mentioned elsewhere, the article is talking specifically about Arizona, due to investigative reporting on their handling of the funds. I realize that it may not be true everywhere, but do you have a reason to believe Arizona does NOT have the problem called out in the article?
I’ve already said I wasn’t talking about the funding issue. At this point, you seem to be willfully misunderstanding me, so I’m not going to continue responding.
… But the article is about the funding issue? I’m not willfully misunderstanding anything. I’m asking whether your statement is directly related to the article or just a tangent that is only marginally related.
You seem to have intentionally misrepresented the article’s content so that you could say “Not All CPS” which is just not a good look for you
Do you think money allotted to the state for welfare should be used to fund CPS investigations?
Do you think the foster care system is well run?
Interesting, I’m glad I got your perspective in addition to the article, thank you. The article clearly has an opinion and doesn’t treat the issue neutrally.
You said it’s true that the bad decisions these parents make are due to social problems linked to their poverty - sure it’s not “directly” the cause, but wouldn’t making sure this funding helps those families reduce the chances of them making those bad decisions?
I’m sure even if we helped impoverished families as much as we could financially, there would still be a need for CPS to step in and protect children. So it seems like both need funding. But since this money was meant to help families in poverty, using it instead to boost CPS does seem wrong, in that right-wing “punish people instead of improving society” kind of way.
Funding is insufficient to address the problems I pointed to in my comment. It’s not about money; it’s about parenting and the related psychological skills. The only thing that can address that is complex social support; not just teaching of specific skills but relational improvements. I’m a therapist in a community mental health clinic. In addition to definable psychiatric disorders, I can tell you that at least half of what we treat is effectively the psychosocial consequences of generational poverty. In other words, we deal with “ghetto”, “ratchet,” “x-trash” people. These are people who don’t necessarily qualify for any psychiatric diagnosis, but are nonetheless folks who no one wants to deal with in life. They’re the products of bad parenting, who haven’t been taught how to manage their emotions, and thus react in extreme ways to minor stressors, which makes them an annoyance and a threat to people we consider “normal.” These folks need re-parenting. They’re broken in a real sense, and I don’t put it that way to diminish them. They weren’t given the things we take for granted, and as such they can’t function in ways we expect them to. And it’s not fair to expect “normal” people to tolerate them either, because those “normal” people weren’t prepared to deal with them. This is a hugely complex problem and it requires a solution that likely requires decades to fix, because it is generational in nature.
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.
I don’t get this reasoning. Whether some problem is the “direct” or “indirect” consequence of poverty does not matter for whether poverty reduction programs like TANF are effective. It’s a non sequitur.
You imply that improving the delivery of social supports like TANF will not be effective at helping the poor (who are, after all, the direct cause of their own problems in your experience!). But other rich countries with better social safety nets enjoy much better outcomes for the poor than the US. It’s strange that you criticize a systemic change to the delivery of welfare to the poor for not being “complex” or “systemic”. I’m not sure how blaming the poor for their problems is more “complex” or “systemic”. On the contrary, that’s highly individualistic and moralizing.
