This case study describes Nava's work with the state of Montana’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) agency to build an API prototype, which is part of Nava's larger work inform a national API standard.
This article explores innovative strategies to improve access to public benefits by reducing administrative barriers and leveraging technology for a more user-friendly experience.
This paper introduces a method for auditing benefits eligibility screening tools in four steps: 1) generate test households, 2) automatically populate screening questions with household information and retrieve determinations, 3) translate eligibility guidelines into computer code to generate ground truth determinations, and 4) identify conflicting determinations to detect errors.
The DBN’s Rules as Code Community of Practice (RaC CoP) creates a shared learning and exchange space for people working on public benefits eligibility and enrollment systems — and specifically people tackling the issue of how policy becomes software code. The RaC CoP brings together cross-sector experts who share approaches, examples, and challenges. Participants are from state, local, tribal, territorial, and federal government agencies, nonprofit organizations, academia, and private sector companies. We host recurring roundtable conversations and an email group for asynchronous updates, insights, and assistance.
The first half of Rules as Code Demo Day was wrapped up with Thomas Guillet who has contributed to Open Fisca France and beta.gouv. He demoed the code for Mes Aides—or My Benefits—which is France’s social benefit simulator that leverages open source rule models for over 600 benefits while keeping the displayed complexity to its minimum.
This resource is a research paper examining the role of the public safety net in insuring job losers against income loss, analyzing which government programs provide financial support and how benefits vary based on pre-job loss income levels.
In response to COVID-19, the Workers Lab and Steady developed the "Income Passport" to streamline gig workers' unemployment benefit applications by pulling income data directly from gig platforms and financial accounts. This tool reduced manual verification time, helped prevent fraud, and improved workers' access to full benefits, with successful tests in Alabama and Louisiana demonstrating significant time savings and improved service delivery.
18F, a consultancy within the U.S. General Services Administration, developed a prototype API and pre-screener to model federal SNAP eligibility rules, aiming to simplify benefits access through open-source technology.
The NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity (NYC Opportunity) developed the NYC Benefits Platform, including ACCESS NYC, to help residents easily discover and check eligibility for over 80 social programs.
In this report, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation examines benefits cliffs – the loss of eligibility for public safety-net programs and benefits they provide as income rises above eligibility limits.
Closing the Medicaid coverage gap could significantly reduce healthcare disparities as 65% of those affected are people of color, specifically impacting low-wage workers and caregivers who often experience economic and health vulnerabilities.
