Voices on child support
Ron Haskins
Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution; former Majority Staff Director, House Ways and Means Human Resources Subcommittee (1995-2000)
The exact words were found in the primary source linked below (testimony, book page, report or article), at the page given.
"The average state receives about 30 percent of the funds necessary to run its child support program from retained collections in welfare cases and former welfare cases. In the case of current welfare cases, states keep virtually 100 percent of child support collections in exchange for taxpayer-provided welfare benefits."
Source
Testimony of Ron Haskins before the Subcommittee on Human Resources, Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives, Brookings Institution, 2001-06-28, p. 6 (PDF p. 6) (testimony). Checked 2026-10-13.
Context
Written testimony on child support financing. Haskins presented retained welfare-case collections as a shrinking funding source for state child support programs (not as a profit), warning that falling welfare caseloads would push many state programs toward a financing crisis and that state and/or federal governments would need to spend more.
The passage it comes from
By contrast with the growth of non-welfare cases, the drop in welfare cases is an outgrowth of the dramatic success of the 1996 welfare reforms and the strong economy. Although this caseload decline is good for state TANF budgets because there are now less than half as many TANF recipients as there were in 1995 in the average state, the caseload declines threaten to be a disaster for state child support enforcement financing. The average state receives about 30 percent of the funds necessary to run its child support program from retained collections in welfare cases and former welfare cases. In the case of current welfare cases, states keep virtually 100 percent of child support collections in exchange for taxpayer-provided welfare benefits. But because the welfare cases have fallen so dramatically, this source of income for state child support programs has also been falling.
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