Cash support for custodial families is taken away

From THE CENTER ON BUDGET AND PRIORITIES

Almost two-thirds of custodial families nationwide receive services from the federal child support program — nearly 8 million custodial parents and 13 million children. Child support can be a significant source of income for families struggling to make ends meet, helping them pay for children’s basic needs and other costs that often can only be met with cash, like housing, food, school supplies, and clothing. But families who are receiving or have received cash assistance from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, who make up nearly half (46 percent) of participants in the child support program, often do not receive child support payments made on their behalf. Instead, those payments are kept by the state and split with the federal government as repayment for the family’s TANF cash payments, a policy known as “cost recovery.” In 2023, state and federal governments kept $896 million in child support payments.

There’s broad consensus among parents, researchers, policy analysts, advocates, and program administrators that Congress should require all child support to be paid to families. But states do not need to wait for Congress. Using existing options, they have considerable flexibility to direct all child support to current and past TANF participants.

By expecting families to repay cash assistance, cost recovery policies fail to recognize the difficult economic circumstances that forced them to turn to TANF in the first place. Child support can be an especially important source of income for these families. In every state, TANF cash benefits are at or below 60 percent of the federal poverty line; in 17 states they are below 20 percent of poverty.

Custodial families participating in TANF are generally headed by women with low incomes, and, to a disproportionate extent, women of color. The unfairness of cost recovery policies can land particularly hard on Black women, who have worked hard to provide for themselves and their families — despite long-standing structural racism and sexism in the labor market that have severely limited their employment prospects and depressed their wages.