The White House has called for an overhaul of federal child support enforcement to shift more responsibility for children’s welfare from the government to parents, part of the administration’s larger welfare reform agenda.
In a previously unreported report to congressional Republicans, White House officials recommended requiring parents to cooperate with child support enforcement in order to be eligible for government benefits, including for programs that do not currently have such requirements, such as food stamps and housing aid.
Such requirements are needed to save taxpayer money and “demonstrate that parents, rather than the government, should be the primary source of economic support for children and families,” the officials said in a draft of welfare reform recommendations sent by the White House to congressional Republicans obtained by the Washington Examiner.
The recommendations also call for redirecting funds to work training for absent parents who owe child support.
The administration’s recommendations were tied to the public release in July of a report from Trump’s economic advisers that found that many beneficiaries of federal safety-net programs could work but do not.
Many of the reform proposals listed in the document are ones that administration officials have promoted in other venues, such as instituting stricter work requirements for federal benefits and passing a national paid-leave program — a pet project of Ivanka Trump.
The call for tightening child support enforcement is new for the White House but echoes the direction of GOP policy at the state level. In Wisconsin, for instance, Gov. Scott Walker backed stricter child support requirements as part of a broader welfare reform package, some of which became law.
While conservatives generally favor requiring absent parents to contribute more to their children’s upbringing rather than having the government provide greater resources, there are practical limits to the idea.
One is that the process of identifying deadbeat fathers and collecting money from them could force the mothers to confront men who’ve treated them abusively. Another is that piling debts on a noncustodial parent who is already behind could lead him to give up trying to pay support altogether, or to face incarceration for failing to pay.
The White House recommendations acknowledged those realities by endorsing “appropriate” modifications to child support obligations when parents go to prison. The administration also, however, calls for requiring the criminal justice system to notify other agencies when the parent leaves prison in order to resume requiring payment of the full obligation.
President Barack Obama, as one of his later acts in office, reworked federal rules to require states to allow prisoners to request lower child support payments. At the time, congressional Republican leaders like Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., then the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee with oversight of welfare, accused Obama of overreach.
