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.
The existing system for evaluating state safety net programs does not adequately capture the human experience of accessing services. This new National Safety Net Scorecard is a more meaningful set of metrics that can effectively asses the true state of the current program delivery landscape and measure progress over time, creating a more human-centered safety net.
The share of WIC-eligible families participating in the program has declined, though the number of individuals eligible for WIC has likely grown substantially. By working together, state WIC, Medicaid, and SNAP leaders can use data to assess the extent to which WIC is reaching eligible families and enroll more of them.
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.
Technology enables governments to engage in “pilot” projects to see where they are headed and course-correct along the way, as opposed to evaluating the results over the course of multiple years. Delivery-driven government utilizes technology and “pilot” projects to see institutions and processes through the eyes of users, allowing for more effective service delivery.
Rules as Code proposes that governments create an official version of laws and regulations in a machine-consumable form, allowing the rules to be understood and actioned by computer systems in a consistent way.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
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.
Code for America highlights the importance of recognizing the effects of intergenerational trauma on communities that have been systemically marginalized when conducting research.
Eligible people struggle to maintain their case status for critical safety net services, often due to administrative hurdles and poor communication. Code for America piloted text message reminders to support Louisianans, which helped clients avoid costly churn. Text messages are an underrated, efficient solution for human service agencies to meet client expectations and improve case outcomes.
Though the CARES Act provided much-needed relief to millions of Americans, around 5-10 million of the most vulnerable American households have not yet received their full payment. This report lays out a set of technical fixes regarding the delivery of the first stimulus payments, a set of fixes to address other critical tax credits, and several medium-term reforms to increase earned income tax credit (EITC) access for low-income families.
