Welfare Money Is Paying for a Lot of Things Besides Welfare

What do a Christian overnight camp, abstinence-only sex education, and pro-marriage advertisements all have in common? They’ve all been funded with money that used to provide cash assistance to low-income families.

In the United States, the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program—often known simply as “welfare”—is administered by the 50 states, which have considerable leeway in how to spend the money. The choices states make are unmistakably correlated with race. The higher the proportion of African Americans in a state, the more likely officials are to try to change the way poor families run their lives, rather than simply help them with basic expenses.

Many know TANF as the nation’s primary cash assistance program for low-income families. But depending on which state you live in, TANF may provide barely any cash assistance at all.