by Kali Grant and Shamaal Sheppard | Mar 20, 2025 | Brief
Work requirements in public benefits programs don’t help people work. They block access to food, health care, and housing assistance, making families and local economies worse off. This brief illustrates how work reporting requirements fail to increase work while straining state resources and imposing harmful and costly burdens on all. The brief also provides an overview of better alternatives that would be more effective at supporting employment and reducing poverty.
by Kali Grant, Megan Rivera, Estela Zuzunaga and Shamaal Sheppard | Dec 18, 2024 | Brief
Postsecondary education is more than just a pathway to a degree—for many parents, it is a dream for their children’s future. Yet the soaring costs of higher education have made this dream increasingly unattainable, forcing families to rely on risky borrowing options like the Federal Direct Parent Loan for Undergraduate Students (Parent PLUS). Parent PLUS disproportionately saddles low-income parents and parents of color with immense, often unrepayable debt. Parents can face wage garnishment or risk losing a significant source of income—part of their Social Security benefits. This system can warp the promise of postsecondary education into an intergenerational burden. This brief proposes four recommendations to improve the Parent PLUS program and help ensure students and their parents are not driven into debt-burdened poverty to access higher education.
by Jae June Lee and William P. O'Hare | Nov 19, 2024 | Brief
An accurate census ensures fair political representation and distribution of over $2 trillion in federal funds to states and local governments each year. But certain communities–including Black and Hispanic/Latino communities, low-income households, recent immigrants, and people with disabilities–are regularly undercounted. This brief, the third in a three-part series on census accuracy, provides a summary of key results and trends in accuracy from the 2020 Census and prior censuses.
by Jae June Lee and William P. O'Hare | Nov 19, 2024 | Brief
An accurate census ensures fair political representation and distribution of over $2 trillion in federal funds to states and local governments each year. But certain communities–including Black and Hispanic/Latino communities, low-income households, recent immigrants, and people with disabilities–are regularly undercounted. This brief, the first in a three-part series on census accuracy, explains the fundamental concepts needed to interpret the accuracy of census data; such as net and gross accuracy and differential undercounts.
by Jae June Lee and William P. O'Hare | Nov 19, 2024 | Brief
An accurate census ensures fair political representation and distribution of over $2 trillion in federal funds to states and local governments each year. But certain communities–including Black and Hispanic/Latino communities, low-income households, recent immigrants, and people with disabilities–are regularly undercounted. This brief, the second in a three-part series on census accuracy, describes the Bureau’s evaluation methods: Demographic Analysis and the Post-Enumeration Survey.
by Cara Brumfield and Shamaal Sheppard | Oct 24, 2024 | Brief
Since the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022, many low-income women have nowhere to turn: they face the economic repercussions of being denied abortion care and lack access to the support they need to care for a growing family. This brief looks at how abortion bans and insufficient public benefits at the state level affect women and families. It finds that states with abortion bans often do not provide enough supportive resources for growing families, like health care, food assistance, and cash support. The brief also offers federal policy recommendations to help families meet their everyday needs—no matter what state they live in.
by Laura Tatum and Natalia Cooper | Sep 5, 2024 | Brief
Medicaid-funded home- and community-based services make it possible for people with disabilities and older adults to live in their own homes and communities, where most people prefer to live. A long-standing direct care worker shortage, caused by low pay and poor working conditions and worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, threatens access to direct care. State and local governments are innovating to respond to the care crisis. This brief highlights a selection of state best practices to improve wages for direct care workers in Medicaid-funded HCBS programs and help solve the workforce crisis. By raising wages, providing good benefits, and increasing job quality for direct care workers, who are disproportionately women and women of color, states can start to build a direct care system in which all consumers, workers, and families can thrive.
by Karla Coleman-Castillo, Shengwei Sun, Kyra Weber, Kali Grant and Sierra Wilson | Apr 4, 2024 | Brief
Child care is an essential element of our social infrastructure that supports child development, family financial stability, and economic growth. But structural racism and sexism have led to the underinvestment and undervaluation of child care in the United States. This brief, published with the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) offers a new, anti-racist vision for transforming the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) into a program that actively pushes back against structural racism and advances racial equity and economic prosperity for all families. It proposes recommendations for advancing a more equitable child care system.
by Megan Rivera, Natalia Cooper, Doug Steiger and Laura Tatum | Nov 15, 2023 | Brief
All children deserve safety, protection, and the opportunity to thrive. And all families deserve support in their efforts to provide a safe and stable environment for their children. The child welfare system is vital to protecting children—but it has disproportionately failed American Indian and Alaska Native, Black, and Latinx children and families. By prioritizing preventative services, programs, and kinship care funded by the Family First Prevention Services Act, child welfare programs can increase the safety and well-being of children and families and reduce unnecessary family separation and foster care placement. This brief highlights progress made by federal child welfare administrators and outlines additional steps they can take to reduce foster care placement through equity-focused implementation of Family First in 2024 and beyond.
by Megan Rivera, Natalia Cooper, Laura Tatum and Doug Steiger | Oct 19, 2023 | Brief
All children and their families deserve resources to take care of their needs, regardless of their family structure. The child support program—which obtains and disburses financial support for millions of children and their custodial parents—should improve family economic security. Ensuring regular child support payments are directed to families and eliminating harmful enforcement measures against parents who are unable to pay would help foster child and family well-being. This brief highlights progress made by federal child support administrators and outlines additional steps they can take to build a more equitable child support program in 2024 and beyond.
