The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services said Wednesday that a “work first” approach fails the majority of its welfare recipients, leaving most trapped in a cycle of unemployment and poverty.
DHS Secretary Teresa Miller made the assertion during a Senate Appropriations Committee budget hearing that largely focused on the department’s struggle to find residents receiving temporary cash assistance find long-term employment.
“What we are finding is that our ‘work first’ approach has not been successful,” she said. “We are not serving this population well. Nothing in our program has been focused on getting people into self sufficiency.”
Miller said the employment assistance agencies that work with DHS often place recipients into low-skill, low-wage jobs that are rarely “a good fit or long-term solution.”
“Now we don’t focus so much on getting people into a job,” she said. “Instead we want to make sure that when they get into a job, they have the education and training to keep that job.”
About 100,000 residents receive benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, of which about 75 percent are children, Miller said. Another 1.7 million receive food stamps in the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). The number of TANF program recipients has decreased 75 percent since the mid-1990s, which some critics argue is due to onerous work requirements placed on applicants over the years.
Gov. Tom Wolf’s $36.1 billion budget proposal includes a $1.2 billion increase in DHS funding, in part to redesign the TANF program and help recipients find lasting employment. It’s the single biggest departmental increase in his spending plan.
“You agree, we agree, the governor supposedly agrees … we have to encourage more people into work,” Sen. David Argall, R-Schuylkill, said. “And maybe the first job isn’t a good job … but one good thing leads to another, and so I would hope some way that we could find a way … to get people trapped in the welfare system into a medium job in the beginning, a good job later on.”
Miller said the TANF population, in general, faces a lot of barriers to employment, such as child care needs and a lack of education or the ability to pay for it. A single parent with two children – the typical case – receives $403 monthly under TANF, while SNAP benefits total $4 per day per household member.
“When I look at the benefits we provide, I don’t know how anyone could live comfortably on that,” she said. “I don’t think that’s disincentivizing people. … That’s why the TANF redesign is so important to me. We have to do a better job of helping people and helping them help themselves.”
A report from the Independent Fiscal Office ranked Pennsylvania 39th in the country for TANF workforce participation rates, with just 23 percent of recipients employed.
Miller also worried about the impact of impending rule changes for SNAP that the federal government approved in December. She told the committee that close to 100,000 residents will be at risk of losing access to the program in April under the new requirements that able-bodied recipients ages 18 to 49 without dependents must work 20 hours a week to keep their benefits.
“I don’t think people are sitting at home on SNAP and not working just because they are lazy,” Miller said. “The one point I always like to make, study after study shows that access to food improves health outcomes and reduces health care costs. We don’t pay for the SNAP benefit at the state level, but we absolutely pay for the health care costs for people who don’t have access to food.”
