House Bill 2441<\/a>, sponsored by Rep. Debra Entenman, D-Kent, passed the House 57-41 on Friday. This bill would ease restrictions on access to TANF and remove a policy that punished children when their parents fell out of compliance with the program, according to a Washington House Democrats news release.<\/p>\nTANF has strict restrictions on its use including a five-year lifetime limit on receiving benefits and strict job training requirements. However, prior to 2008 families could receive extensions to the five-year time limit if they could show a hardship. After the financial crisis in 2008, the ability to gain an extension was severely limited. Families were given a shorter grace period for falling out of compliance, orientation requirements were increased, and the Legislature made it possible to permanently disqualify a family. These changes significantly reduced the number of TANF recipients. African American, Indigenous and Hispanic families were disproportionately disqualified from the program.<\/p>\n
“The bill I introduced allows for more hardship exemptions to the five-year limit and ensures that that if an adult is sanctioned for non-compliance, the children in the family will not lose assistance,” Entenman said in the news release. “This program was designed to provide families with a path to self-sufficiency. Taking away assistance from vulnerable children does nothing to help lift that family out of poverty.”<\/p>\n
HB 2441 gives parents a four-month grace period to come into compliance with the program and reduces a family’s grant by 40% after that. The children’s portion of the TANF grant cannot be terminated because of the parent’s inability to comply.<\/p>\n
This legislation will now go to the Senate for consideration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kent Rep. Entenman sponsored bill <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":44447,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-44446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44446"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44446\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44446"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=44446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}