This Urban Institute report identifies strategies to improve young people’s access to public benefits through targeted outreach, benefit navigation, cross-organizational partnerships, and streamlined eligibility processes.
This report outlines state Medicaid program priorities, including expanding access to services, addressing health disparities, and implementing cost-containment measures amid post-pandemic uncertainties.
This section of the Building Resilience plan outlines strategies to improve the long-term solvency and sustainability of state unemployment insurance (UI) trust funds through better funding practices and legislative reform.
This report reviews global AI governance tools, highlighting their importance in ensuring trustworthy AI, while identifying gaps and risks in their effectiveness, and offering recommendations to improve their development, oversight, and integration into policy frameworks.
This report outlines the foundational requirements and policy choices that states must consider as they prepare to implement mandatory Medicaid work reporting under H.R. 1.
This report examines Georgia’s Medicaid demonstration testing work requirements—the only such active program in the nation—and provides detailed findings on administrative costs, implementation challenges, and federal oversight weaknesses.
This brief synthesizes the manner in which the political and social service environments affect the intergenerational stability of non-citizen families, offering insights into programmatic supports.
American Public Human Services Association (APHSA)
mRelief recently completed a research study to investigate whether there are specific parts of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; also known as food stamps) benefits application process that make it difficult to complete. We conducted interviews with mRelief users and SNAP outreach workers (individuals whose job responsibilities include providing SNAP application assistance in person or over the phone) in Illinois. We also conducted group interviews with SNAP outreach workers to collaborate with them to uncover findings and develop recommendations.
The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and its induced recession underscored the crucial importance of unemployment insurance (UI) to workers, and to the stability of the American economy. Temporary federal expansions of unemployment systems during the pandemic showed how they can quickly be scaled to increase benefit levels and to include categories of workers who were not previously eligible, such as the self-employed, caregivers, and low-wage workers. And, states showed that separate programs can be set up to provide similar benefits to workers who are explicitly excluded from unemployment insurance—in particular immigrants who do not have a documented immigration status.
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.
SNAP Waivers and Adaptations During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Survey of State Agency Perspectives in 2020 is a study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Health and Social Policy (IHSP) based at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA). This research seeks to understand perspectives from state SNAP administrators on the successes, challenges, and lessons learned from waivers and flexibilities used to preserve equitable access to SNAP during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on state agency survey responses, this report summarizes key findings from the first calendar year of pandemic response and provides policy considerations for the future of SNAP. This research was supported by Healthy Eating Research, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Johns Hopkins Institute for Health and Social Policy
This report recommends updating the methodology used by the Census Bureau to calculate the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) to reflect household basic needs and replace the current Official Poverty Measure as the primary statistical measure of poverty. The report assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the SPM and provides recommendations for updating its methodology and expanding its use in recognition of the needs of most American families such as medical care, childcare, and housing costs.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
