What Works Cities helps local governments improve residents’ lives by using data and evidence effectively to tackle pressing challenges. The Certification Assessment helps cities benchmark their progress and develop a roadmap for improvement.
This article from Civil Eats explores how expanding online purchasing options for SNAP recipients can improve food security, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article examines how the decentralization of safety net programs after welfare reform has led to growing inequality in benefit generosity and access across U.S. states.
This report evaluates state government websites for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), providing links to each state's site and assessing the information and services they offer.
Though the rhetoric of “waste, fraud, and abuse” is ubiquitous when it comes to welfare programs, low-income households receive little relief from benefits programs. Most efforts to make public benefits systems more “efficient” actually just waste time and money in practice. They instead serve to stigmatize low-income families and chip away at the little assistance that remains available to them.
Executive Order 14058, issued by President Joe Biden on December 13, 2021, aims to enhance the federal customer experience and service delivery to rebuild trust in government.
There is a key disconnect between policymakers’ intent and implementation of policies. A user-centric, iterative, and data-driven approach can result result in digital technology that provides much needed data and insights at a substantially lower cost.
California’s SNAP program faced record application volume due to the COVID-19 crisis, and other states must anticipate similar demand. This post summarizes key takeaways from GetCalFresh’s real-time data and client communications, and offers recommendations for how other states can implement effective responses.
The National Health Law Program released an updated Guide to Modified Adjusted Gross Income, including sections on ACA tax filing and reporting, clarification on commonly asked questions about Social Security Income, and updated IRS tax filing thresholds.
