Short Term TANF Extension Act

Floor Speech

Mr. DOGGETT. I yield myself 5 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, this is a bipartisan bill, which I fully support, but it is important to understand what this bill does and what it does not do. It is important to understand which provisions we agree upon and which ones we accept as only being better than the alternative of allowing this important law and all those who count on it to expire next week.

Last week, the Census Bureau reported that more Americans were poor in 2010 than at any time on record. Regrettably, my home State of Texas was leading the way with one of the highest poverty rates anywhere in America.

The Texas Center for Public Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan group, recently reported that ``The heart of the American Dream is at risk in Texas.'' For the first time in generations, there are more people falling out of the middle class than joining its ranks. And what a struggle it is for those families trying to hold on.

In a neighborhood near downtown San Antonio, Andrew Ramos and his wife, Nina, are struggling just to keep food on the table for themselves and their 2-year-old daughter. Andrew lost his job, and Nina works at a local pizza parlor where she makes about $200 a week. There are so many families just like the Ramos family--almost one in five in poverty in Bexar County.

As John Turner at the Capital Area Food Bank concludes: Hunger is a result of lack of income and of a livable wage. It affects too many of our neighbors, he says, under the current Texas economic model.

The demands on our food banks, which serve as effective public-private partnerships, are immense. The Capital Area Food Bank, this year, is delivering 50 percent more food to poor people than it did 3 years ago.

But I don't really hear anyone facing up to this harsh reality--not our Governor in Texas, not the President of the United States, and certainly not the leadership here in the House. In fact, the Administration has shown little interest and almost no guidance in reforming this legislation.

Rather than respond to rising deprivation and declining opportunity, this legislation continues for another 3 months, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act. This is a program that today provides direct assistance to only one in every five children living in Poverty in America. That's the lowest level of poor children receiving direct assistance since 1965. And of course in Texas it's much worse, where only one in every 20 poor children receive direct assistance from TANF.

The bill before us also does not address a program agreed to originally when the Welfare Reform Act was enacted--a bill that I voted for to address the particular needs of high poverty States like Texas and many in the South--called TANF Supplemental Grants. Their name is really a misnomer because they're not a supplement; they're essential to the work of States that have higher poverty rates.

Ever since that time of the Welfare Reform Act, Texas and those States have depended on supplemental TANF. It is not included in today's legislation, and that means that Texas will lose about $50 million every year that it relies on to work with child care, with preventing pregnancy, with other issues like school dropouts, programs that rely on these funds today.

Allowing these grants to expire is in sharp contrast to what happened in 2001 when Governor Rick Perry wrote to then-Whip Tom DeLay urging the extension of TANF supplemental grants, saying: ``These grants have played an important role in helping hardworking men and women in Texas achieve independence from public assistance. Congress designed the supplemental grants to address the critical program needs of States.'' Those were words of Governor Rick Perry, who is silent on this matter today about how we enable more Texans to move from welfare to work.

Mr. Speaker, we cannot allow the funding for TANF to expire next week, and so I join wholeheartedly with this renewal legislation. But we also need to move past doing the very least that we can do and start responding to the mounting challenges that families not just in Texas but across our country face. TANF has not been adequately responsive to the increased level of needs during these bad economic times.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 additional minute.

I think also of the words of Claudia Herrington, who works at El Buen Samaritano, dealing largely with Latino families. She writes: ``This is not the American Dream I believe in. This is not the American Dream my father believed in when he emigrated from Cuba here in the 1960s. I know our country is better than that, regardless of political affiliation. And I know that investment in our people and their ability to earn a decent living is a worthwhile policy.''

We need a policy that is more safety net than hole, and I hope eventually we can work together to achieve that.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, I would yield myself 15 seconds to say that under Democratic leadership we extended the supplemental TANF program that Governor Rick Perry was so proud about in 2001. We extended it four times. The only reason that it existed in the spring of this year was because of our extensions. It should be extended once again, and I hope in the process we can do that.

I would now yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel).

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DOGGETT. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, the House should approve this important bipartisan legislation today. To fail to approve this modest extension would cause even more people to suffer with the expiration of these programs next week.

Mr. Speaker, it may not be in vogue to discuss the problems of poor people in America today, but we need to hear more about it in this House. We need to hear more about it in Washington, DC.

Certainly we want to support and encourage the middle class in America--very, very important--but we need to create more opportunity to broaden that middle class. For the many people who struggle and hope that lives will be better for their children and that they will face less obstacles than their parents have faced, we need to provide that temporary assistance to needy families. The current program leaves out too many and forgets too many of those families in their struggle.

The omission of TANF supplemental grants, which we renewed four times in the last two Congresses, is not being renewed here, which means that in Texas and in so many high-poverty States, we will not have the support that Governor Rick Perry once called for. We will have a broadened gap and a lack of services.

Many of the dollars that we've received in that program in Texas have gone into child protective services to protect abused and neglected children. They will no longer have that assistance. I hope in the course of the legislative process of the renewal of this legislation, we might eventually get TANF supplemental grants into the bill.

Today we see so many who are losing the opportunity to share in the American Dream. We have an opportunity to continue at least a minimal level of support to them. We should do that, but we should commit ourselves to doing even more.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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