Many low-income households lack the savings to weather financial shocks like layoffs, and SNAP plays a crucial role in helping them manage essential expenses during difficult times.
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.
Our existing maze of family tax benefits — including the CTC, Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), and head of household (HoH) filing status — has several structural deficiencies that make overhauling the system a prerequisite for any effort to boost support for families with children. The report offers several options for expanding and streamlining family tax benefits to address these issues.
This paper introduces a method for auditing benefits eligibility screening tools in four steps: 1) generate test households, 2) automatically populate screening questions with household information and retrieve determinations, 3) translate eligibility guidelines into computer code to generate ground truth determinations, and 4) identify conflicting determinations to detect errors.
This policy brief explores how federal privacy laws like the Privacy Act of 1974 limit demographic data collection, undermining government efforts to conduct equity assessments and address algorithmic bias.
This webpage links to materials ASPE has prepared as it leads work on how federal agencies and programs can meaningfully and effectively engage people with lived experience.
Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE)
This toolkit provides practical guidance for agencies, researchers, and community partners to embed racial equity throughout every stage of data integration and use.
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.
On May 19, 2023, the Digital Benefits Network published a new, open dataset documenting authentication and identity proofing requirements across online SNAP, WIC, TANF, Medicaid, child care (CCAP) applications, and unemployment insurance applications.
Nava PBC developed a prototype API and digital screener in Montana to streamline eligibility and enhance program access, illustrating how API standards could improve interoperability and modernize WIC systems nationwide.
