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Glossary
Child-only families: TANF families in which only the children, and not the adults, are included in the assistance unit.
Commingled funds: Expenditures of state funds that are made within the TANF program and are commingled with federal funds. These expenditures may count toward both the state’s maintenance-of-effort (MOE) and its Contingency Fund MOE. Commingled funds are subject to the federal TANF rules.
Exemption: A circumstance under which a month of assistance does not count toward a family’s time limit.
Extension: A circumstance under which aid may be continued even though a family has reached their time limit.
Federal time limit: A lifetime limit of 60 months of federal TANF assistance.
Lifetime time limit: A time limit that permanently terminates or reduces a family’s grant.
Non-TANF assistance: Assistance that is funded not with federal TANF dollars but with state MOE funds provided through a separate state program. Individuals in such programs are not subject to the federal time limits, child support assignment rules, or work participation requirements.
Periodic time limit: A time limit that terminates or reduces benefits for a fixed period of time, after which regular assistance can again be provided. For example, a state may limit benefits to 24 months in a 60-month period. A periodic time limit is different from a full-family sanction, which terminates benefits to families who fail to comply with program rules.
Reduction time limit: A time limit that results in the reduction of a family’s welfare benefits, usually by removing the adult from the grant calculation.
Replacement time limit: A time limit that results in the replacement of a family’s cash assistance benefits with assistance of another type (for example, vouchers).
Segregated state funds: State funds that are expended within the TANF program and are segregated from (not commingled with) federal funds. Such expenditures count for both TANF MOE and Contingency Fund MOE purposes. They are subject to some TANF requirements, but not the 60-month time limit.
Separate state program: A state program that uses MOE funds without any TANF funds. Expenditures on such separate programs can help states meet the MOE requirement, but the basic TANF requirements — federal time limits, child support assignment rules, and work participation requirements — do not apply.
State MOE funds: Expenditures of state funds that count toward the maintenance-of-effort requirement. Under the basic MOE requirement, a state must spend 80 percent of FY 1994 spending (75 percent if it meets work participation requirements) on qualified state expenditures to eligible families.
State waivers: Waivers received under the former AFDC program that authorized the states to test a variety of welfare reform strategies. To the extent that the TANF time limit is inconsistent with a state’s waiver time limit, the state may be allowed to follow its waiver policy rather than the TANF policy until the expiration of the waiver.
TANF assistance: Cash payments, vouchers, and other forms of benefits that are paid for with TANF funds and are designed to meet a family’s ongoing basic needs (for food, clothing, shelter, utilities, household goods, personal care items, and general incidental expenses), including supportive services such as transportation and child care provided to families who are not employed. Some TANF requirements — the assignment of a recipient’s child support to the state, work participation, and data collection on recipient families — apply when federal TANF or state MOE funds pay for “assistance” provided under the TANF program. Other TANF requirements — including the 60-month time limit and restrictions on teenage parenthood — apply only when federal or commingled funds are used for “assistance.”
TANF nonassistance: Services and benefits that are paid for with TANF funds but do not count as assistance (that is, services and benefits that are not required to be terminated under the time limit). These include work subsidies, nonrecurring short-term benefits lasting no more than four months, supportive services such as child care provided to families who are employed, refundable Earned Income Credits (EICs), contributions to Individual Development Accounts, services that do not provide basic income support (such as case management, job retention, job advancement, and other employment-related services), and certain transportation benefits to individuals not otherwise receiving assistance.
Termination time limit: A time limit that results in the cancellation of a family’s entire welfare grant.
Work requirement time limit: A time limit that triggers a work requirement, rather than the cancellation or reduction of assistance.
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