As family’s earnings rise, those earnings increases are often offset by declines in public assistance benefits (commonly called “benefit cliffs” when the declines are sharp) and increases in taxes owed. At the same time, refundable tax credits—which offset taxes owed and are delivered as a tax refund—can boost income. These interactions can be confusing and make it difficult for parents to anticipate how increasing their work hours, hourly wage rate, or both will affect their benefits, taxes, and income to support their families. This study estimates what happens to benefits and taxes when earnings increase and also explores how people perceive public benefit interactions, trade-offs, and benefit cliffs as they increase their work hours or earn higher wages.
Article announcing five new projects by the Office of Management and Budget that will improve experiences the public has with the government during significant movements in their lives. These “life experience” projects are at the center of a new model for how the Federal Government should better design and deliver benefits, services, and programs to the American people during the moments in their lives that matter most.
Rent relief distribution in 2020 was slow and inequitable, because local programs instituted strict eligibility criteria beyond what was required by the CARES Act. As a result of these hurdles, incomplete applications were a major barrier to distributing funds. This report describes the rent relief challenges during the pandemic, as well as a few possible fixes to help the next round of aid distribution.
The purpose of this document is to outline possible technical approaches to supporting a cash assistance program. The report aims to both capture individual approaches as well as overarching insights taken from across the approaches taken by different organizations.
People who are self-employed can receive a higher CalFresh benefit amount because of a 40% automatic deduction for expenses. Yet, many who would be considered self-employed for the purpose of CalFresh don’t think of themselves as self-employed. Code for America researched how to help CalFresh applicants correctly identify themselves as self-employed. This article describes their various experiments and efforts to help people understand their status as self-employed.
Code for America describes its work building the P-EBT online application and the consulting it provided to 10 states regarding implementing the program in a quick, effective, and human-centered way. Despite herculean efforts among human services and education agencies to get P-EBT off the ground, there were a few key technological, operational, and logistical barriers that consistently got in the way and hampered a smooth rollout of the program across the country.
In response to the COVID-19 crisis, the federal government authorized a new emergency program, Pandemic EBT (P-EBT), to replace school meals with money for groceries while schools are closed. Code for America describes its efforts to launch an accessible, online P-EBT application under an accelerated timeline due to to immense demand caused by the pandemic.
The BenePhilly SNAP Demonstration Project (henceforth “BenePhilly”) represents an innovative and successful approach to streamlining access to public benefits. It sought to increase participation in SNAP among eligible senior households in Philadelphia by utilizing existing state and federal data to reach seniors who are likely eligible for, but not participating in, SNAP, as well as simplify the SNAP application and enrollment process. This report summarizes preliminary findings from BenePhilly’s 18 months of operation (June 2010–December 2011).
A playbook by New America describing lessons learned from past recessions, recent pandemic-inspired innovations, and complementary benefit spaces like SNAP and WIC.
The structure of many social safety net programs ignore systemic barriers rooted in structural racism that disproportionately affect people of color. Instead, these programs are meager and punitive, designed to blame individual shortcomings. The current economic crisis and its disproportionate impacts highlight the need to redesign safety net programs to rectify these inequities and ensure everyone can access the resources they need to provide for their families.
