Bryce Covert and Josh Israel at ThinkProgress have posted an excellent piece on the outcome of their investigation into how seven states are diverting welfare money to forced-birther propaganda fronts operating as “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs). The total? More than $30 million diverted in this way over the past few years.
The money provided to the CPCs comes from the states’ annual federal block grant under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. In other words, taxpayers are funding these ideologically driven centers that investigations have shown flat-out lie about abortion to the women who visit them for help.
The practice of giving CPCs TANF funds was initiated in 2001 by then-Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. He asked the Bush administration’s Health and Human Services department whether this would be an acceptable use of the funds and HHS said yes.
There are rules states are supposed to follow in how TANF funds not used directly for cash assistance are supposed to be spent—promoting job preparation and work, preventing and reducing out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and/or encouraging marriage and two-parent families. But these rules aren’t enforced strictly, according to Covert and Israel.
The reporting duo looked most closely at Missouri. Under federal law, TANF recipients can only collect payments for a lifetime total of five years. But states have the freedom to reduce that even more. And Missouri has done so, cutting off cash assistance at 45 months. This has lowered welfare rolls in the state by nearly two-thirds since 2011.
So, by making life harsher for families earning below the poverty line, Missouri extracts “surplus” funds from a program supposed to be used to help raise recipients out of poverty and sends most of it to organizations that have no intention of helping women out of poverty or in any other way. In the most recent fiscal year, Missouri handed out $4.3 million of TANF money to the state’s 63 CPCs. Only Texas, at $9.15 million, gives more TANF money to CPCs:
“When you start diluting TANF dollars, you are inevitably taking resources from the intended recipients of TANF benefits, which are oftentimes hungry children,” said James Owens, state communications director at NARAL Pro-Choice America, which has tracked the growth of CPCs and how they’re funded. [...]
“TANF dollars are given for a reason,” Owens noted. “That reason does not include lying to women about their pregnancy options.”
The five other states besides Texas and Missouri that have been doling out TANF money in this way: Ohio ($500,000 a year); North Dakota ($500,000); Michigan ($400,000); Indiana ($1.7 million); Pennsylvania ($1 million).
In addition to this money, 11 states (including some of the above seven) take money from their own budgets to fund CPCs.
Much about the welfare reform of 1996 that created TANF needs its own reform. Up near the top of the list ought to be a rewriting of the rules to prevent states from shipping taxpayer dollars to CPCs whose “advice” can damage women’s mental and physical health. As well as a commitment to actually enforce those rules.
