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.
This brief examines how state Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs adapted policies during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic to address emerging challenges.
For the past year, modernization teams at the Department of Labor (DOL) have been helping states identify opportunities to automate rote, non-discretionary, manual tasks, with the goal of helping them speed up the time that it takes to process claims. This post provides more context on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and potential use cases in unemployment insurance.
This paper argues that a human rights framework could help orient the research on artificial intelligence away from machines and the risks of their biases, and towards humans and the risks to their rights, helping to center the conversation around who is harmed, what harms they face, and how those harms may be mitigated.
The Unemployment Insurance Equitable Access Toolkit contains common equity recommendations, promising practices, and insights, represented visually as a different floor of an agency office building, compiled in one interactive document.
This report highlights lessons learned from improving economic stability and well-being outcomes for young parent families, focusing on interagency collaboration, community engagement, data-driven improvement, and aligned services to guide future efforts.
Expanding access to free tax assistance through virtual Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) programs can help low-income filers claim essential tax benefits without incurring preparation fees.
This research brief explores the different philosophies and implementation methods of modular procurement, including the advantages and disadvantages of each method, and the cultural and structural changes a procurement office should consider when making the switch to modular procurement.
National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO)
