The Sudden Scandal

Twenty-five years ago Tennessee’s governor and legislature enacted the ‘Families First’ program – bringing the management of the old AFDC welfare program from Washington to the state capitol.

It was a bipartisan policy breakthrough encouraged by Congress and the Clinton administration. To this day, Tennessee’s version is still regarded as a bold policy move that brought administration of a vital assistance program closer to home. Even Governor Don Sundquist’s harshest critics on other policy issues will tell you ‘Families First’ was one of his best achievements.

Connected to this program was a targeted funding mechanism called ‘Temporary Assistance to Needy Families’ (TANF).

It’s the TANF fund that is now gripped in controversy. Commendably, the Beacon Institute and The Tennessean have brought to light how the TANF fund now has a surplus hundreds of millions of unspent dollars. All tolled, the surplus is approaching a billion dollars.

These are funds that might have been disbursed to single-parent families needing child care, which has become a crisis of its own in communities across Tennessee.

It appears the climb to that breathtaking level began in the 2014 budget year.

I know many of us get carried away with the boom time in the capitol city, but in six years did nearly a billion dollars worth of Tennessee families in need just vanish? I don’t think so. We don’t have to look too far, either around the state nor down at street level even in Nashville to see real families struggling with real needs.

So this huge surplus is now an urgent question for both Gov. Bill Lee’s administration and leaders in the General Assembly. Last Friday, the speakers of the General Assembly – Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and House Speaker Cameron Sexton – jointly appointed a working group of seven members to get to the bottom of all this. Kudos to them all for take prompt action on this sudden scandal.

Tennessee families in need deserve help, not hoarding, and taxpayers deserve some straight answers to some overdue hard questions.

To my eye, there are seven central questions that need answering now. See my Tennessean column, online this morning at https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/columnists/2019/11/19/tanf-working-group-must-find-out-how-sudden-scandal-happened/4238807002/