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.
The article examines the effects of Arkansas’s Medicaid work requirements, finding substantial coverage losses and no significant increase in employment, compounded by widespread confusion among beneficiaries about the policy.
This report offers a detailed assessment of how AI and emerging technologies could impact the Social Security Administration’s disability benefits determinations, recommending guardrails and principles to protect applicant rights, mitigate bias, and promote fairness.
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, together with the Food Bank Council of Michigan and the Michigan Department of Education developed a comprehensive Food Insecurity Map and a closed-loop referral system for nutrition and economic supports.
American Public Human Services Association (APHSA)
The CARES Act Stimulus Payments Report by New America analyzes the implementation and impact of the Economic Impact Payments (stimulus checks) distributed during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting accessibility challenges and policy recommendations for future direct payments.
It is necessary give the public servants who manage safety-net systems the technology tools and incentives to track critical outcomes and meet people where they are.
A modernized public benefits system would better serve program participants, administrators, policy makers, and taxpayers. This paper proposes a set of principles both define the desired future state and outline the values that shape decision making along the way. Practices describe the processes needed to achieve modernization.
A New America report examines the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program, highlighting its role in aiding low-income tax filers and offering recommendations to enhance public benefit access through improved tax filing assistance.
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.
It is frequently assumed that when rules are implemented as code, a rules engine is necessary. However, it is possible for policy people and engineers to effectively work together to code logic that drives technological system without needing a mediating rules engine at all.
