How the President’s FY 2017 Budget Strengthens Child Support

Vicki TuretskyBy Vicki Turetsky, Commissioner, Office of Child Support Enforcement

I am pleased to describe the child support-related legislative proposals included in the Administration’s FY 2017 Budget. We are renewing a number of prior proposals for efforts to ensure that children benefit when support is paid, promote access and visitation, improve program efficiency, and for dedicated research funding. We’re adding new proposals to further strengthen enforcement. And, this year, we’re proposing a Child Support Technology Fund to promote the replacement of aging child support systems. 

Below are the six areas of legislative proposals related to child support.

• Child Support Technology Fund — to promote the replacement of aging child support systems to increase system security, efficiency, and integrity
• Child Support Research Fund — to spark research, build the child support evidence base, and tailor the appropriate child support enforcement tools for each family
• Strengthening Establishment and Enforcement — to increase collections and program efficiency
• Child Support and Fatherhood Initiative — to encourage noncustodial parents to support their children and play an active role in their lives; to build on the family distribution reforms included in the 1996 and 2006 statutes; to encourage states to pass through child support collections to TANF families so that when parents pay child support, their children benefit; to support safe increased access and visitation services and integrating these services into the core child support program to improve collections and parent-child relationships and outcomes for children
• Medicaid and Child Support Proposals — to allow states to eliminate Medicaid’s requirement to assign the right to cash medical child support to the state as a condition of eligibility to reduce barriers to health care access and increase resources for the poorest families
• NDNH Access Proposals — to allow certain additional programs and agencies authority to access NDNH data for program integrity, implementation, and research purposes

These summaries offer a quick read on the proposals; for more details, see our FY 2017 Budget fact sheet (PDF).