This Issue Spotlight explores the challenges that recipients of public benefits programs offering cash assistance encounter in accessing funds through financial products or services, with a specific focus on assistance provided on prepaid cards.
Professor Don Moynihan discusses how administrative burden is an effective tool to make it difficult for people to access certain types of benefits, noting that this is particularly harmful to communities of color.
As a part of Benefit Data Trust (BDT)’s Medicaid Churn Learning Collaborative, BDT has created a memo describing strategies for states to collect current mailing addresses of Medicaid beneficiaries in advance of the Medicaid continuous coverage requirement — in effect under the federal public health emergency — unwinding.
The pandemic has shown how difficult it can be for the US to succeed with major technology projects. Various leading design thinkers discuss strategies for building more efficient and effective government technology.
The first half of Rules as Code Demo Day was wrapped up with Thomas Guillet who has contributed to Open Fisca France and beta.gouv. He demoed the code for Mes Aides—or My Benefits—which is France’s social benefit simulator that leverages open source rule models for over 600 benefits while keeping the displayed complexity to its minimum.
The Increasing Stimulus Payment Take-up in California report by the California Policy Lab examines barriers to accessing federal stimulus payments and provides strategies to increase take-up among eligible Californians, particularly low-income and non-filers.
Little is known about how agencies are currently using AI systems, and little attention has been devoted to how agencies acquire such tools or oversee their use.
Through the interviews, ULP sought to capture details of claimant experience, see how and why system failures occurred, and make recommendations for reform now—before another financial or public health crisis suddenly causes state unemployment rates to spike.
APHSA's President and CEO reflects on lessons and opportunities the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and constructs a national narrative around the moment.
American Public Human Services Association (APHSA)
This U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) strategy outlines a roadmap for modernizing the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system to enhance efficiency, equity, and access for workers.
This piece highlights promising design patterns for account creation and identity proofing in public benefits applications. The publication also identifies areas where additional evidence, resources, and coordinated federal guidance may help support equitable implementations of authentication and identity proofing, enabling agencies to balance access and security.
