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“It feels like we’re putting families into an activity to meet a rate, not necessarily to help the family,” she said. “There has to be some other way that we measure the effectiveness of this program, outside of just, are they participating 30 hours a week.”

Compared to other major anti-poverty programs, TANF serves relatively few people. In fiscal year 2023, nearly two million people received TANF benefits, including 1.5 million children. To put this in perspective, SNAP serves around 41 million people, and WIC has roughly six million participants—including nearly 40 percent of all infants in the country. When the pandemic-era expanded child tax credit was implemented between July and December 2021, it reached nearly 62 million children and lifted 3.7 million children out of poverty. That version of the child tax credit boosted the size of the benefit, disbursed it in monthly payments, and made it fully available to the lowest-income families in the country.

“What we saw in 2021 provides pretty indisputable evidence that a federally administered child benefit that provides unconditional cash support to nearly all families with children by far is superior to what we get from the TANF program,” said Zachary Parolin, an assistant professor of social policy at Bocconi University in Milan, and a senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. TANF cut child poverty by around 2.9 percent in 2020, while the expanded child tax credit slashed the child poverty rate by roughly 44 percent the following year.

In February, the House passed a bipartisan tax bill including an expansion of the child tax credit that, while less generous than what was seen in 2021, would by one estimate lift 400,000 children above the poverty line and make another three million children less poor.