On June 3, 2023, the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 was signed into law, a legislative package previously agreed upon by the White House and House Speaker to suspend the national debt ceiling limit through January 1, 2025 in exchange for a package of spending cuts and policy changes, including changes to work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and TANF. The American Public Human Services Association has developed a summary of relevant human services provisions and the corresponding effective dates.

This testimony from an Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute was presented to the Subcommittee on Human Resources within the Committee on Ways and Means in the U.S. House of Representatives. The author critiques TANF for not sufficiently reaching children in poverty, spending limited funds outside the original policy goals, and failing to offer training and education for good jobs, among other issues. She recommends TANF improvements such as setting spending floors for core benefits, furthering 21st century skills and education training, and writing in an explicit child poverty reduction goal. These changes, she argues, will help children in poverty and increase parental socioeconomic mobility as TANF originally intended.

This blog post from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families (ACF) describes how the President’s proposed FY2019 budget request for ACF aims to strengthen the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. High priorities of the Trump Administration are encouraging work, changing the culture of dependence on government assistance, and reducing poverty. The President’s budget hopes to focus on work and support integrated approaches to helping families reach self-sufficiency.

The Urban Institute published the "Low-Income Working Families Fact Sheet" for August 2012. Within this fact sheet, information about what has been learned about the TANF program over the past 16 years has been summarized. Elements of TANF legislation is briefly addressed, along with the notation of the six considerable differences between TANF and the terminated Aid to Dependent Families and Children (AFDC).

New regulations to strengthen welfare reform were published February 5, 2008 in the Federal Register. The changes to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program will help move individuals off of the welfare rolls and into the workplace by giving states the flexibility to design their own effective welfare-to-work initiatives.