After two and a half years of operating the EAT Café from 2016 to 2019, having tried various forms of advertising, changing the menu, changing the prices, and improving customer service, the café was unable to bring in enough money to breakeven. Our dreams of transforming it into a worker-owned cooperative were fading.
People tried to console us. They said, “Most new restaurants close within the first six months” and “many don’t make it past a year.” One reason we had difficulty getting stable was that we funded the café through foundation grants that had to be administered through the university. No university should administer a restaurant, as human resources takes three months to hire people and almost a year to let someone go. That timing does not work in a restaurant. Another reason was that, unlike most restaurants, we paid well. Full-time staff received health benefits. Restaurant industry partners in Philadelphia warned us that we would never be financially viable if we paid living wages and provided sick leave.1
We also refused to pay tipped minimum wage ($2.25 per hour), nor did the café accept tips. Tipped wages come straight out of slavery. Immediately after Emancipation in 1865, many southern states passed “Black codes” as a continuation of enslavement. If approached and questioned by white people, Black people had to prove they were working or they would be criminalized, thrown in prison, and then forced to work for free. Oftentimes, Black adults were forced by white employers to sign yearly contracts. Many white employers refused to pay people who had been enslaved. To survive, Black people in the South had to find the most immediate job available—even if it did not pay—to stay out of prison. Employers frequently would not pay a Black person outright, and Black people had to depend on customer tips, an unpredictable paltry wage. Still today, corporations use tipped wages to continue the plunder that spans hundreds of years. The US government allows it. But at the EAT Café, we meant to break that chain.
After a time, the original philanthropic groups that helped us get started became tired of footing the bill. So they stopped funding us. We tried to get other foundations interested in the café, but they did not want to fund it because it wasn’t “new” enough, since we had already been open for over a year. Even though we were still innovating and working on the model, it looked as if we were already successful.2 Finally, well-paying customers stopped paying well or stopped coming altogether. We became desperate and highly dependent on a generous anonymous donor. We knew that funding model was not sustainable. All along, those who enjoyed eating for free or low cost really loved the EAT Café and invited more friends. It was not empty; we were just broke. We hated to close the EAT Café in April 2019. We also didn’t want to leave the café empty while we figured out a way to pivot.
Enter summer meals for schoolchildren.
The Summer Food Service Program is a federally funded, state-administered effort that reimburses organizations who serve free meals and snacks to children and teens in low-income areas when school is not in session. It launched in 1968 as an extension of the school breakfast and lunch program. While families can rely on breakfast and lunch for their children during the school year, they struggle during summer—the season when food insecurity spikes because the kids are not receiving meals at school. In consideration of this trend, the federal government provides per child reimbursement for breakfast and/or lunch at community centers, schools, bible camps, and other locales with educational or enrichment activities.
Until 2020, only 16 percent of the children who were eligible received summer meals. Even then, they did not receive them every day nor every summer week. Summer meals distribution depends on transportation, availability and summer programming, the will of political leaders and nonprofits, and the weather. Some communities get meals delivered on school buses or by vans that become a pop-up café. Programs in other areas such as in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, DC, could reach up to 40 percent of children because they served meals at the public libraries.
In addition to the requirement to provide enrichment activities, these were the rules.
First, all children must be counted every day. They must be counted on paper (not by computer). Otherwise, the “provider” (those who make and deliver the food) will not receive reimbursement for supplying that child’s meal. For organizations with scarce funding, that can make a big difference.
Second, all meals must be eaten on-site. No one can take home leftovers unless it is the end of the meal service time.
Finally, adults are not allowed to eat.
Let that sink in.
Nutritional Development Services is a primary sponsor in Philadelphia. It was delighted to help us set up a summer meals site at the EAT Café. We were so grateful, as it provided our team with free and enthusiastic training. But then its staff sent us flyers that we were required to place around the EAT Café as a condition of serving meals. The flyers consisted of “dos” and “don’ts.” Here is one of the “don’ts,” typed verbatim:
DON’T FEED ADULTS
Don’t allow adults to take items from the Share
Table. This includes parents, volunteers, or any adults
from the community.
I’m sure this reminds you of similar signs in zoos and parks: “DON’T FEED DUCKS. DON’T FEED ELEPHANTS.” During summer meals service, adults are clearly not part of the human family, and thus not worthy of a meal.
I emailed the coordinator at Nutritional Development Services suggesting the language was hostile. They explained in their return email that “strong language was needed” because the agency hears many reports of adults “hovering for a meal or leftovers.” I disagreed with the tactic and implored the staff to change their signs. After a few weeks, they changed their poster to say, “DON’T LET THESE ITEMS GO TO WASTE.”
Every summer, those in the antihunger community hear about programs that refuse to let parents share meals or take food home. According to New Mexico’s chief of the Family Nutrition Bureau, Reagan Smetak, who provided testimony to the National Commission on Hunger in 2014, parents would eat parts of their child’s on-site summer meal, and grandparents who accompanied their children would roll food up in a napkin and put it into their purses for later. In 2018, a Colorado summer meal program made a posting in its locale. The sign stated, “Adults MAY NOT eat off of a Child’s Plate!” The flyer had a cartoon of people around a table, with three children at the table and two adults standing around. The adults each had a circle around their head with a red line drawn diagonally through it, as if to cross them out.3
While nonprofits and Indigenous communities scramble to find ways to feed kids in the summer (and some even try to be creative in finding ways to make sure adults don’t eat), the USDA already had a proven solution to summer hunger. In 2014, it began a pilot in three communities by providing thirty dollars per child per summer month to families receiving SNAP or WIC. The program, called Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT), provided money directly to caregivers. Evaluations of the program found that compared to those who did not receive Summer EBT, those who did reported a 30 percent reduction in very low food security.4 That is a profoundly positive impact.
The USDA, researchers, and advocates have known about the success of this program for years. This became important during the COVID-19 pandemic. With children suddenly out of school, thousands of people provided community meal sites as well as grab-and-go breakfasts and lunches, and the USDA finally made it possible for each state to create Pandemic EBT. This is the same concept as Summer EBT, where families whose children were receiving free/reduced meals during the school year could get extra funds on their EBT card to supplement their children’s meals at home when schools were closed. Most states opted to continue providing Pandemic EBT through the summer the following two years. Additionally, the USDA offered a federal waiver to reduce reporting requirements for each child to support physical distancing.
Do you wonder why, before the pandemic, children in the United States had no opportunity to access Summer EBT, even though the federal government had evidence it reduced food insecurity by 30 percent?
Intentional design.
Herein lies the problem not solely with summer meals but instead with all public assistance programs devised in the United States. They create a false division between parent and child; they separate the wealthy from the people who are low income, the “deserving” from the “undeserving.” Summer meals are for kids only, even if their parents are close by and hungry. Separating the wealthy from people with little money means that eligibility criteria is dependent on proving one’s income is below a certain percentage of the federal poverty line. This last part of eligibility is ostensibly to ensure that people who make a certain amount of money over a low threshold, or, in some states, if they had a felony, should not get support that they may desperately need. This ongoing separation of groups and families from each other becomes a way to target destitution.
As they try to understand the policy-related dynamics of public assistance, most researchers adhere to what is on paper or in public assistance participation data. But how public assistance programs are experienced by families and in people’s bodies is the most important wisdom there is when it comes to understanding public assistance. What I describe ahead is grounded in the lived experience of people I have interviewed. Here you find out that public assistance programs can help somewhat. Yet they can simultaneously cause harm.
I was not always clear on how public assistance programs can cause harm. The epidemiology and economics research on these programs shows that they can help people be healthier, stay safe, or stabilize otherwise turbulent lives. We also saw the benefits of SNAP reflected in our Children’s HealthWatch research. Children’s HealthWatch was built on the idea that if there were strong public assistance programs, children’s health would be better. The evidence for the positive benefits is irrefutable.5 For instance, we found that SNAP was associated with reduced child hospitalization. WIC was associated with reductions in stress, preterm birth, and underweight issues. Housing subsidies protected children from being underweight, and energy assistance promoted children’s development.
When I started Witnesses to Hunger and invited members to use their photos as their voice to advocate on their own behalf, they asked me for examples of how I advocated on poverty.
I explained, “I say things like ‘Food stamps are good medicine, but the dosage is not enough.’ I say, ‘We need to protect SNAP.’”
Some members responded with revulsion.
No, Mariana.
That’s terrible!
I don’t want to be on food stamps for the rest of my life.
I want to get off food stamps
forever.
I want out
of the system.
Shirley is a tall and fashionable Black woman who loved going to hear live jazz with friends. In addition to taking many photos of her smiley children whom she adored and of nature scenes—bushes, rabbits, trees, rainbows over the nearby row homes, and ominous clouds during thunderstorms—she took one of the most iconic photos of the exhibit. It’s one she wanted to highlight despite it being devoid of children and nature; it was a photo of a simple chain with a backdrop of drywall.
I took this picture of a chain
to show you that
welfare is like a chain.
It’s meant to keep you down.
She was not alone. Consider the insights from Jewell. When she and I talked about how she experienced Medicaid benefits, she described it this way:
Medicaid will cover my health benefits only so much.
It’s like they give you just enough,
just enough to hang yourself.
If I had not listened to members of Witnesses and absorbed their points of view, I might still be trying to advocate for public assistance programs without thought, care, or nuance.
As with everything I learned from members of Witnesses, the truth is unsettling.
Some people refer to public assistance—which includes many programs such as housing assistance, energy assistance, SNAP, Medicaid, and TANF—as the safety net. But this term is inadequate; it is not woven together like a net that catches people as they fall toward deprivation. One staff member from my team prefers to call it the safety floor because when you are in that system, you are close to rock bottom; there is nothing safe about it. It is inadequate at best. At worst, it is a basement floor that leaks sewage, equipped with chains to imprison women and children.
To participate in most public assistance programs, one needs to demonstrate “need” or eligibility. This is mostly achieved through proving a person has a low enough income in comparison to the criterion of the federal poverty line. This is a level of income that indicates whether a person is eligible for support. It is based solely on the supposed cost of food, income, and family size. The poverty line is calculated from an outdated back-of-the-napkin measure based on the cost of food from the 1960s. At that time, the average family spent one-third of its income on food. But over the years, the cost of transportation, housing, and childcare became much more important as both parents entered the workforce. These days, food is a much smaller share of family budgets compared to fifty years ago. Yet the federal government refuses to change its multiplier to match the times.
Rather than multiplying the cost of food by 3 to get the federal poverty level, the multiplier should be 7.8.6
Consider that in 2022, the federal poverty level for a family of two was $17,420. Multiplying the cost of food by 7.8 would calculate the federal poverty level to $45,292 if the federal government based its calculations on reality. Millions more people would be eligible to receive support, and food insecurity would be considerably lower because more people would get necessary assistance. But the US government, stuck deep in the past, insists on using the inaccurate calculation that undermines people and keeps them impoverished.
Food is a single basic need among many competing needs. One single cost is not fully relevant, nor is it adequate to calculate a family’s cost of living, which should be based on local housing costs along with a combination of multiple basic needs including a cell phone and ample time for rest. Administrators know the federal poverty measure is too low, so they established a variety of thresholds for program eligibility. To be eligible for SNAP, the federal threshold is 130 percent of the federal poverty line (but states can raise the threshold); for WIC, it is 185 percent of the poverty line. Unlike SNAP and WIC, which acknowledge and support families whose incomes are higher than the federal poverty line, eligibility for TANF demands that they must have income that is less than half the amount of the federal poverty line. This punishing eligibility rule has not changed since 1996.
According to Shirley, once you get TANF “benefits,” you regret it the same day. County assistance office caseworkers will put you through the wringer when you go to an office to apply for public assistance. In his book Street Level Bureaucracy, Michael Lipksy describes how frontline caseworkers often take matters into their own hands to discern whether a person is eligible for assistance. They are frontline arbiters of stigma against people with low incomes. Overworked at their jobs, they also bring in their own philosophies of what constitutes appropriate behavior.7
Interactions at the county assistance offices are described as stressful and humiliating. They are an assault on people’s time too. Many participants have complained that caseworkers are incompetent and mean. Wanda, a participant in the 2002 study, explained her encounter:
When I was reapplying for food stamps,
I remember how I was made to feel.
Because of my working schedule
I would have to take off for the day or try to get out early;
which, of course, wasn’t good work wise.
I just felt demeaned. Because, yes,
I turned in my pay stubs regularly.
But they would lose my paperwork!
They’d make me go back to the office again and again.
According to many, caseworkers act as if it is their own money they are giving out. At other times, they ask penetrating questions with unbridled judgments. Remember Joanna from chapter 1? She does not mince words.
The county assistance office is ridiculous.
Crowded.
Slow.
By the time you get seen, they’ve got an attitude,
and they’re taking it out on you.
Or they are asking so many ridiculous questions.
One lady asked me how I was making it work with no income.
I told her,
“I pick up pennies.
I do things.
What the fuck do you want to know?
How many little squares of toilet paper I use to wipe my butt?!”
Public assistance program participants are required to provide documentation justifying how they use benefits and demonstrating their efforts to find work. Collecting and presenting that evidence can be a barrier, forcing some people off the programs that were helping them in the first place.
Pennsylvania caregivers that use TANF assistance to purchase a weekly public transportation pass must prove they did so by providing a paper photocopy of a paper receipt. If they do not have access to a photocopy machine, they must go to a copy store and pay for the photocopy. That receipt must be personally brought to the office or sent by fax to a county assistance office staff person. This fax, too, costs money. It is not clear if the person at the county assistance office meant to document and maintain evidence of the receipt ever finds it or enters the receipt into the data systems. In response, people hoard their receipts deep in their purses as if they are gold because they know they will be called on to prove the fax was sent, the purchase was made, the place was visited, and pennies were spent.
To receive TANF benefits in Pennsylvania, most parents must prove they are looking for work by documenting every hour of their search. They are required to submit a form that describes with whom they spoke, the number they called, and the outcome. That record must then be scanned and entered into a database by a county assistance staff person every week. If a person does not do this—or if there is an error by the staff person—the state may, yet again, send them a bill in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS saying they owe the state money. They will then take those dollars out of the next month’s grant. Or the caregiver might get their TANF benefits cut off, potentially leaving them and their kids hungry, unable to pay rent, or, worse, homeless.
If one fails to comply or cannot provide evidence of “work activity,” they are “terminated” or “termed.” Yes, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. That is the language used in the database and in indelible ink on yellow Post-it notes stuck to state-owned file cabinets.
Systemic discrimination is embedded in the structure of the TANF “benefit” itself. Welfare offices require people to take low-wage jobs without health benefits or sick leave. These jobs also have unpredictable hours and provide little opportunity for career advancement. The reason people are forced into taking the first available job is the federal government mandates that a certain number of people receiving TANF must enter the formal workforce every month. If contractors working with states cannot show they pushed people into jobs, they risk losing their state funding. So they circle their pool of TANF participants and work hard to either get them into a job—any job regardless of pay or quality—or force them out of TANF altogether so they do not detract from the ever-important work participation rate. If TANF beneficiaries cannot find a job within about twelve weeks, they must do unpaid “community service” for twenty hours a week to keep receiving their meager financial grant.
In Pennsylvania, this fake community service can be filing papers for social services agencies like Joanna had to do or cleaning toilets like Faith was required to do at Comcast, the Philadelphia-based multibillion-dollar telecommunications conglomerate.
Let me make this plain: Comcast does not pay the worker; it is the state of Pennsylvania that pays the recipient the paltry TANF grant amount, which does not correspond to an hourly wage, nor is it considered a wage with any worker’s rights. So to continue to receive TANF support, Faith continues to show up to work on behalf of the contract cleaning company without evidence of an earned wage and at a rate far below the federal minimum wage. The contractor is not paying for her work either. You and I are, through our tax dollars and the state systems. That means your tax dollars are going toward forcing people to clean toilets at the Comcast high-rise at around $4 an hour (less than the minimum wage and with no tips), without health insurance or sick leave. Consider the other side of this sad little coin: Brian Roberts, the president and chair of the board of Comcast, made $36,370,200 in 2021.8 That is $17,485 an hour, or 4,300 times higher than the Black women cleaning his toilets. Note that Roberts’s hourly wage is about the same as the annual income for a family of two at the federal poverty level.
Republican leaders who want to dismantle the safety net for people living in poverty would be pleased to hear these expressions of disdain for the programs. Democrats, on the other hand, tense up at the idea and say, “It’s true the programs don’t work well enough. But if you bring these problems into the open, all you’re doing is giving Republicans more ideas for getting rid of the programs altogether.” It is as if the Democrats, think tanks, and advocacy organizations hold up SNAP and summer meals like shiny armor to protect “the vulnerable.” They do so in public. But behind closed doors, they complain about their inadequacy. This is another variation on knowing and not knowing as I mentioned in chapter 4.
During the Obama administration, in 2013, after Congress cut the SNAP program by over five billion dollars in favor of adding six cents per meal to the school lunch program to improve the quality, Congress threw a conciliatory crumb to those of us who balked at cutting SNAP in favor of minuscule improvements to school meals. It created a National Commission on Hunger. One million dollars was designated to establish a “bi-partisan commission to advise Congress and the Secretary of the USDA on how to address hunger in America.”9 Five members were nominated from the House of Representatives and five from the US Senate with an even split between nominations from legislators of both parties.
When I was selected and then chosen to be the cochair, I had no idea of the headaches ahead.
From the start, the commission was doomed. According to the legislative language, the recommendations the commission could consider had to be made using “existing programs.” The existing programs we have in the United States are inadequate at best, and death dealing at worst. Yet we were restricted to existing programs—the same programs that sometimes created more problems.
With the contracted help of the Research Triangle Institute, the commission was able to travel to several states to make site visits and hold hearings. With fifteen months of targeted research and support from RTI, we held eight formal hearings with over two hundred testimony submissions to contribute to the unanimous bipartisan report with thirty recommendations. In the report Freedom from Hunger: An Achievable Goal for the United States, we proposed ways to improve SNAP and other nutrition programs.10 All the commissioners agreed: the existing public assistance programs needed overhauls. SNAP and WIC, however, got a positive nod from everyone, though we had many recommendations for improvement. For transformative change, we recommended the development of a national plan to end hunger.
It was a challenge to accommodate disparate beliefs, politics, and expertise. But we managed to do so by staying focused on families, veterans, people with disabilities, and immigrants.
To improve the systems in a way that made sense would be almost impossible given the current mechanisms for program funding. Medicaid is funded through the Department of Health and Human Services, and states must match half the funding. SNAP is an entitlement program funded through the USDA, and TANF is funded through the Agency for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services and has strict work requirements. People who work at these agencies are territorial about their funds as they fight to receive them from Congress annually or every five to six years. Additionally, because of legal requirements for releasing funds to states, federal law disallows funding from one program to be mixed with another.
This inability of our systems to truly help families in crisis was the fodder that Congressman Paul Ryan and House members were using to rationalize the dismantling of SNAP. Elected Republicans sought to turn SNAP into a “block grant” to provide more “flexibility.” This may sound reasonable on the surface. But this would have also cut $40 billion from SNAP, thereby dismantling the SNAP program and eliminating its entitlement structure. As an entitlement, everyone who is eligible has the right to receive the benefit. But without that entitlement, even if a person is eligible, they may not be able to receive support as it might depend on funds available or some other behavioral barrier that a state may want to put into place. In doing so, SNAP would run the risk of becoming an atrophied program like TANF that no longer responds to national economic downturns and financial crises among families. Remember that in the introduction, I described how the existence of hunger is due to entitlement failure. Several of us knew that the loss of entitlements would inevitably create more trouble.
Several commissioners felt pressure from legislative staffers, politicians, and advocates on the Left and Right to include specific recommendations with precise words for how to make recommendations. The language Republicans used to justify block granting SNAP included terms such as merging funding streams or program flexibility. They were naming the “shit” and calling in their own cleanup crew without drawing attention to where the shit came from—low wages, poor infrastructure, racism, discrimination, and social violence. Democratic lawmakers were back on their heels trying to defend the programs as they are, desperate to keep the crumbs for people who are struggling. Democratic agency heads were instead working quietly to find work-arounds to braid and merge funding streams. But they offered no new language to the commissioners and refused to give credence to the fact that public assistance programs were a scattershot, poorly informed effort to assist people.
In the same vein as collective trauma, where people “know but don’t know,” the Democrats knew but refused to name the harm and address it. Republicans knew and were poised to reenact more trauma by making people potentially more desperate as well as susceptible to more surveillance and control.
All the commissioners agreed that the programs should be improved or restructured. To do so would demand some dismantling and merging of program rules and funding streams. Here’s the conundrum: How could we stay true to what we knew was right to help people get more supports without triggering the evisceration of SNAP (which would create more hunger)? Of course, those with Republican leanings were not as concerned the language was going to trigger support for dismantling SNAP’s entitlement status. They said they saw no harm in using the term flexibility. On the other hand, those who lived through the travesty of welfare reform and leaned Democrat were concerned the Republican Party would have another reason to dismantle SNAP. Without careful language, some of us thought all the building blocks of SNAP could be broken up through block granting. We understood that, in politics, there is no room for subtlety, nuance, and grace.
As we were finalizing the report, the presidential campaigns were heating up. People were taking Donald Trump seriously—including some members of the Hunger Commission. Others on the commission were edging toward Bernie Sanders. Our alignment was fraying, and we were losing each other’s trust. Everyone was on edge.
Each word carefully crafted, we managed to hold our consensus together and deliver the written report to every member of Congress along with the secretary of the USDA, Tom Vilsak, and Food and Nutrition Service undersecretary Kevin Concannon. The report was an example of how hunger could be addressed through bipartisan fashion.
But it became clear that other members of Congress and the USDA were mostly interested in squashing the report to minimize any potential news coverage, especially about our recommendations to increase the SNAP allotment, incentivize the purchase of fruits and vegetables, and restrict the purchase of sugar-sweetened beverages. At the end of our work, no member of Congress publicly supported the recommendations with any fervor. We had reached the end of the commission’s tenure. With no funding left, and without USDA and congressional support, we could do little to drum up media interest. The USDA, which was entrusted with overseeing the contracting process, ensured that all the money was spent out and any more staff time would be stopped on cue, on January 1, 2016. Our press release was set for a few days afterward on January 4, 2016.
Just to dig in the message that our endeavor was useless, the USDA decided to house the report, testimonies, and commission minutes and notes on a time-honored government website called the “cybercemetery.”
The report was dead on arrival.
It felt like getting hit from multiple directions. We dodged left, then right, then left, then over the unbelieving trolls of the think tanks and national organizations, and delivered the report to its own tombstone.
I was knocked out by the experience.
Concussed.
Such a star-spangled clash makes you want to reconsider everything. Our political systems are clearly not meant to help people living in poverty. Policymakers and those with some say in the matter can be so dysfunctional as to knock you out cold.
Under the guise of “helping,” public assistance programs have administrative and procedural structures meant to separate, surveil, and control.
As if a magnified echo of the summer meal program that throws parents to the side, the American horror of separating children from their parents at the border has become commonplace. Over the past several years—and yes, even in the Obama administration—the US government has been separating infants, toddlers, preschoolers, school-age kids, and teenagers from their caregivers with whom they were traveling. Under the Trump administration, border patrol and immigration officers were not just separating children from families but also putting the kids in cages or giant warehouses with no beds. The children were forced to sleep on cement floors without blankets; they were provided no soap, toothpaste, and other matters of basic hygiene, including diapers. Worse, some were left to die from flu or COVID-19.11
Over thirty thousand children were separated from their parents and caregivers during the Trump administration. Several thousand children were “lost” in the system. The Agency for Children and Families, the government agency meant to care for these children, the same one that funds the foster care system and TANF, could not seem to find their parents.12
Some might think these are unprecedented times. This traumatizing separation has been standard US policy since our founding, however. The US government separates children from parents to “save” the children and punish the parents.
A clear example is the separation of Indigenous children from their parents. The US government forced families to relinquish their children to boarding schools run by the Department of Interior between 1819 and 1969. Boarding school is a misnomer. Many such “schools,” including the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where they are still rematriating the remains of Indigenous children who died while there, are better known as work camps and acts of war against Indigenous people. The schools were meant to “get rid of the Indian and save the child.” The forced separation of children from their parents was an official government policy that attempted to weaken and destroy Indigenous cultures as well as force assimilation into white society and thus into the capitalism that keeps the US government running.13 It was also an act of warfare over land and resources; it was slavery for the children and yet another form of starvation for their parents.
While Canada has begun to reckon with its history through a yearslong truth and reconciliation process, the United States has yet to acknowledge and repair the massive damage done. Family separation simply continues. Take, for instance, the foster care systems in South Dakota. The Lakota Child Rescue Project found that the state government of South Dakota is financially incentivized to take Lakota children away from Lakota caregivers and place them into the state foster care system, which allows for adoption by non-Indigenous people. South Dakota receives $12,000 for every child it moves into non-Indigenous adoption.14 This is in direct violation of the 1978 federal law called the Indian Child Welfare Act, which is meant to ensure that Indigenous children, if they must be removed from their current home, stay with kin among the same nation.
Removing children from parents, especially among Black and Brown families, happens in a quiet, highly systematized fashion through the US foster care system. Most social workers working in child protective services are white women. Their record is not good. Based on reviews over many decades of an increasingly punitive foster care system, almost two-thirds of child removals are because a family lives in deep poverty. Most children removed from their homes are children of color. Dorothy Roberts, in her book Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, describes the foster care system as an attempt at social control, where “social problems that are rooted in poverty and discrimination become interpreted as parents’ mental depravity and inadequacy.”15 In the early 2000s, it was common practice for welfare caseworkers to knock on the door in the middle of the night in New York City to inspect children’s bodies for bruises and interrogate children.16
Some children do die at the hands of their parents and can suffer terrible abuse, as is clear from the previous chapters. But even more clear is the damage done to children and families because of the systematic tendency to remove children without first helping the parents with health care, mental health therapy, food, housing, clothing, and social supports.
Mental health professionals insist that one of the most important things a person can do when they are in distress or feel overwhelmed is to ask for help. Yet in our public assistance programs, the very act of caring for oneself and one’s child—that is, asking for help—is not viewed as a wonderfully positive form of care and concern. Rather, it becomes a liability—a reason to take a child away.
In our child hunger study, we talked with Cassie, who told us what happened to her when she asked for support at the county assistance office as she reapplied for SNAP.
I went to the welfare office.
I explained my refrigerator was broken.
I was afraid to admit that.
But I was desperate.
Instead of helping me with emergency funds,
the caseworker said,
“If you don’t have a refrigerator,
Maybe you shouldn’t have your kids.”
It is a common complaint among public assistance participants that caseworkers either do not care or have an attitude. Consider the Google ratings for a county assistance office in West Philadelphia. In 2019, its star rating was 1.8 (out of 5). Here’s a smattering of comments:17
Charles is a commanding woman who was the administrative director at the local county assistance office in West Philadelphia. When we were recruiting for the Building Wealth and Health Network, Charles allowed us to use one of the many empty cubicles there. Each cubicle had a desk, swivel chair on the inside of the desk, and straight metal folding chair on the other side.
Ruth, a doctoral-trained social worker, was the first director of the Building Wealth and Health Network. In summer 2014, she was recruiting new members for the Network at the county assistance office. Hoping to establish a warm connection with potential members, Ruth moved the swivel chair to the outside of the desk so she could be on the same side and not “professionally separated” from the potential members showing up for recruitment.
Charles saw this and became immediately incensed.
Charles: What are you doing?!
Ruth: I’m just putting the chair on the same side of the desk.
Seems more pleasant that way.
Charles: You have no idea what you are doing!
You better not do that.
That’s stupid.
Put that office chair back
on the right side of the desk.
Ruth: Well,
I’d like to try it this way.
Charles: No you won’t!
Put the chair back on the other side of the desk!
Ruth did so. But once Charles was out of sight, she moved the chair out to the front again—because as she and I agree, the other way is just wrong.
People were happy to be asked to join our program, mostly because we treated people with respect. One member of the Network explained why she joined. “It’s how you talk to us,” she said. “You don’t talk to us like we’re servants or something.” Another member observed that the regular county assistance staff “belittle you so bad, it gives you that mindset that anyone who might hire you is thinking the same way.”
Not only do caseworkers take it on themselves to be the arbiters of eligibility and propriety, but the entire welfare system is built on enacting surveillance, compliance, separation, punishment, and, for effect, humiliation.
TANF used to be Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). AFDC was a federal assistance program in effect from 1935 to 1996 created by the Social Security Act. It was created especially for white widows, and later for all caregivers of children who had very low incomes. AFDC was an entitlement program, meaning that anyone who was eligible could participate. Then in 1996 during the Clinton administration and under the leadership of Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Congress decimated the program by turning it into a block grant, instituting stringent work requirements, time limits, and severe sanctions. This change is referred to as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. In President Bill Clinton’s words, it was the “end of welfare as we know it.”
The PRWORA also proposed the new goals of TANF: “Provide assistance to needy families so that children can be cared for in their own homes or in the homes of relatives; End the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage; Prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies; Encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.” Note the dominance of heteronormative social control along with the absence of a commitment to poverty alleviation or improvement in women’s wages. The result was deeply destructive to families. More money was invested in patriarchal “responsible fatherhood” programs to the detriment of supporting the mothers who were actively caring for the kids, and promoting marriage when, much of the time, women were single by choice. Public money was siphoned from state coffers to companies that promoted marriage. Pat Gowens, the head of a Wisconsin-based advocacy program called Welfare Warriors, referred to the organizations that capitalized on this program as “marriage poverty pimps,” who would “earn living wages to teach us poor folks how to stay with our batterers and abandoners.”19
Additionally, with the PROWRA, welfare participants were no longer able to attend a university, community college, or technical school for any meaningful length of time (beyond one year). So opportunities for educating oneself to get better wages for the long term were decimated.
Funding for TANF was no longer tied to fluctuations in the national economy nor to a person’s need for support. Rather, TANF funds were locked into the amounts of AFDC that each state spent in 1996. Since then, TANF has lost more than 40 percent of its value in the financial support provided to families. Additionally, states were given the freedom to spend their TANF money as they saw fit. In some states, this included diverting money to childcare, transportation supports, abstinence miseducation, unrelated infrastructure, and “abortion prevention.”
Stop to consider that states diverted money away from mothers living in poverty in order to fund antiabortion or private religious-based “crisis pregnancy” companies, which spread misinformation about pregnancy and abortion as well as encourage people to put their children up for adoption.20 If you remember how I started this chapter, you see the pattern of parent-child separation.
In Pennsylvania, the TANF grant amount has not changed for over twenty-five years. The 1996 TANF grant amount for a mother with one child was $330 per month. A few years later, Pennsylvania state administrators reduced it to $306, and it has not been indexed for inflation since. To index for inflation is to increase funding to match the increase in the cost of living. If an amount is not indexed for inflation, then the dollar amount loses much of its value over time. For instance, if the TANF benefit had been indexed to inflation since the PRWORA, the current Pennsylvania rate would be $683.77 per month, or more than double what it is today. Instead, a mother with one child who currently participates in TANF receives $306 on their EBT card, split up into two payments across the month.
For the mother of a toddler in Pennsylvania, the benefit is equivalent to $3 or $4 an hour for a twenty-hour workweek—about half the paltry federal minimum wage of $7.25. If the mother gets a job and starts making more than 50 percent of the federal poverty line, or $8,230 per year, they are cut off from their TANF benefits and may lose their childcare support.
Alongside many other advocacy organizations in the state of Pennsylvania, members of the Building Wealth and Health Network have spoken out to improve the TANF grant amount. They encourage Pennsylvania to catch up to other states such as Massachusetts and California to increase the grant amount. But the Pennsylvania legislature refuses to budge.
Another challenge with the PRWORA was the administrative separation of food stamps (SNAP), Medicaid, and TANF. Before welfare reform, if a person was eligible for one of those programs, they were automatically enrolled in the others. After 1996, families were no longer able to apply for all three programs simultaneously but instead had to fill out a separate application for each program, oftentimes at three different moments in time with different eligibility criteria and documentation, despite the fact they were likely eligible for all three programs.
These changes created confusion not only among families but also among frontline caseworker staff and administrators themselves. In turn, this created administrative mistakes, hurdles, and headaches for everyone involved. This was matched by longer and more convoluted rulebooks.21 If a TANF participant mistakenly crosses the line of the rules, such as earning a few extra dollars on the side through their own ingenuity and entrepreneurship, they may be charged for defrauding the system. This means the state takes away money from people with little to no money to punish them.
The result? Poor health.22
Here is how it worked: People lost program eligibility for “failing to show up for appointments.” This was often an excuse for the state to “sanction” people or throw them off the program. It resulted in more caregivers showing up with their kids to emergency rooms with infections, colds, and behavioral problems because their families were suddenly destitute—unable to buy food, pay rent, or heat their homes.23 The Children’s Healthwatch research owes its existence to this massive influx of kids to emergency rooms and the horrified doctors who treated them.
Welfare reform also caused a spike in incidents of domestic violence and intimate partner violence. Mothers returned to abusive boyfriends and husbands because they were desperate for money and had no other means of subsistence.24 Despite the provision for family violence where a mom could receive support without having to work, most would not admit they were getting beaten up by their partners. Additionally, caseworkers were ill prepared, if at all, to ask about it. This had chilling effects all around.
Gingrich was almost able to implement something even worse. He and others in the Republican Party wanted to exclude teen mothers from accessing TANF. Instead, they were planning on simply taking away their children. As Representative Bill Archer (R-TX) said, “We’ll help you with foster care, we’ll help you with orphanages, we’ll help you with adoption.”25 In other words, if you have little to no income, we cannot help you with money or other supports. But we have no problem “helping” you by taking away your child. Archer added, “If you lose your welfare benefits and if the children cannot be supported by you, they have to be put into foster homes.” Luckily this child-snatching policy did not get put into place, but it was one of the underlying intents behind the PRWORA.
Sometimes those surveillance systems harness the power of the police. Consider, for instance, Jazmine Headley. In 2019, twenty-three-year-old Headley brought her eighteen-month-old son to a county assistance office in New York City. She had to take off a day from work to address a problem she was having with her childcare voucher. Headley needed public assistance to pay for childcare so she could work. According to her attorney, the welfare office had cut off her funding without warning.
Most state systems, including New York’s, do not allow a parent to go online to check the status of their coverage, send an email, or make a phone call that will get answered. Instead, Headley had to wait with her toddler for several hours to talk to someone in person.
As all parents know, no one can stand up and hold a squirming toddler for long. Young children are curious and filled with energy. Because there was no open chair in the waiting area, Headley sat on the floor with her child. Asked by the office security guard to stand up, Headley, with all rational motherly thoughts about her, refused. The armed security guards called in multiple New York City police officers. When she refused to stand up, the cops grabbed her son and tried to pull him out of her arms.
Like you and I, she would not dare let go.
Headley and several police officers had a literal tug-of-war with her screaming child that was caught on camera by horrified onlookers. Despite outrage and pleas from onlookers, the officers succeeded in pulling away her child as he screamed in terror. One officer even pointed a stun gun at the other adults and children in the county assistance office who were witnessing this.26
Headley was sent to Rikers Island jail for several days without bail. The charges? “Resisting arrest, acting in a manner injurious to a child, obstructing governmental administration, and trespassing.”
She joined others at Rikers who had not yet been convicted of a crime. Rikers has a reputation for guard-induced violence, assaults, and abuse.27
What happened to Headley and witnesses present at the county assistance office is reflective of the punitive design of public assistance.28
1. This should alert you to how unfair and discriminatory the restaurant industry is. To learn more, see Saru Jayaraman, Forked: A New Standard for American Dining (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
2. This should give a hint as to how most philanthropy works. To learn more, see INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Edgar Villanueva, Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2018).
3. Ann Schimke, “Free Summer Meals for Kids, but What about Hungry Parents?,” Chalkbeat Colorado (blog), June 30, 2014, https://
4. Ann Collins et al., “Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer for Children (SEBTC) Demonstration: Summary Report” (Abt Associates and Mathematica Policy Research, May 2016), https://
5. Deborah A. Frank et al., “Heat or Eat: The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and Nutritional and Health Risks among Children Less than 3 Years of Age,” Pediatrics 118, no. 5 (2006): e1293–e1302.
6. Rebecca M. Blank, “Why the United States Needs an Improved Measure of Poverty,” Brookings (blog), July 17, 2008, https://
7. Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service, exp. ed. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2010).
8. “Brian Roberts Net Worth,” wallmine.com, accessed October 20, 2022, https://
9. Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014, H.R. 3547, 113th Cong. (2013–2014), https://
10. National Commission on Hunger, Freedom from Hunger: An Achievable Goal for the United States of America: Recommendations of the National Commission on Hunger to Congress and the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC: National Commission on Hunger, 2015), https://
11. Matthew Cortland, “Opinion: Trump’s Plan to Cage Kids Indefinitely While Denying Them Vaccines Is Ethnic Cleansing in Plain Sight,” Independent, August 22, 2019, https://
12. Amy Davidson Sorkin, “The Case of the Missing Immigrant Children,” New Yorker, May 29, 2018, https://
13. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, rep. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015).
14. Laura Sullivan and Amy Walters, “Incentives and Cultural Bias Fuel Foster System,” NPR, October 25, 2011, NPR News Investigations, https://
15. Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, rep. ed. (New York: Civitas Books, 2002).
16. Kathryn Joyce, “The Crime of Parenting While Poor,” New Republic, February 25, 2019, https://
17. “Reviews about Philadelphia County Assistance Office Delancey District,” Nicelocal, accessed April 8, 2022, https://
18. I changed her name.
19. Felicia Ann Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink, Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 123.
20. Alfred Lubrano, “Pa. Uses Federal and State Money to Fight Abortions, Sparking Outrage,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 25, 2021, https://
21. Frank et al., “Heat or Eat.”
22. Diana Romero et al., “State Welfare Reform Policies and Maternal and Child Health Services: A National Study,” Maternal and Child Health Journal 5, no. 3 (September 2001): 199–206, https://
23. Ashley Southall and Nikita Stewart, “They Grabbed Her Baby and Arrested Her. Now Jazmine Headley Is Speaking Out,” New York Times, December 16, 2018, New York, https://
24. Sandra Naylor Goodwin, Daniel Chandler, and Joan Meisel, “Violence against Women: The Role of Welfare Reform” (California Institute for Mental Health and National Institute of Justice, April 11, 2003), https://
25. Robert Scheer, “Returning to Bad Old Days of Orphanages: Is a Family Valid Only If It Can Survive in the Free Market?,” Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1994, https://
26. Southall and Stewart, “They Grabbed Her Baby and Arrested Her.”
27. Jan Ransom and William K. Rashbaum, “How Brutal Beatings on Rikers Island Were Hidden from Public View,” New York Times, March 2, 2022, New York, https://
28. Mariana Chilton, “Jazmine Headley’s Arrest Exposes the Punitive Design of Public Assistance,” Nation, December 14, 2018, https://