Last week the Center on Budget Policy and Priority released an analysis of federal block grants and their negative consequences.  The analysis, Block-Granting Low-Income Programs Leads to Large Funding Declines Over Time, History Shows, examined 13 different block grants including TANF, Child Care, SSBG, Housing as well as some other human service funding sources and found the same patterns: significant loss of funding and as a result and inability to address the need.

Overall the paper highlights that these block grants have lost 27 percent of funding since 2000 when adjusted for inflation.  When the block grants are adjusted both for inflation and population growth the loss in funding is 37 percent and when adjusted by economic growth—growth in the gross domestic product the loss totals 45 percent.  The Center also released, Lessons from TANF: Block-Granting a Safety-Net Program Has Significantly Reduced Its Effectiveness, which argues that block grants have the impact of lessoning a program’s effectiveness over time.

As noted here last week, SSBG has been hit hard both with budget cuts totaling $1.1 billion in less than eight years and would be close to $7  billion if it were adjusted for inflation according to the 2016 House Ways and Means Committee Greenbook. Also of note TANF has lost more than 32 percent of its value due to inflation since 1996.  More relevant for child welfare, a 1995 House-passed child welfare block grant would have provided approximately $5 billion to state child welfare systems in 2016 instead of the approximate $8 billion.

 

Block Grants:

The Center on Budget Policy and Priority analysis of 13 block grants showed that since 2000, these block grants have lost 27 percent of funding…when adjusted for inflation and population growth the loss in funding is 37 percent…

As the Children’s Monitor highlighted last week…

The 1996 TANF block grant has lost 32 percent of its value due to inflation…

SSBG not only has lagged due to inflation which would have it at close to $7 billion today, but SSBG has been subject to extreme cuts of more than $1 billion cut down to $1.7 billion…

…A child welfare block grant passed in 1995…by the House of Representatives would have topped out at slightly more than $5 billion… When IV-B is included, that would have left states with approximately $3 billion less than they received through Title IV-E and Title IV-B in 2016