Pre-pandemic work rules are back this month for NYers who get cash benefits

Starting this month, New Yorkers receiving cash assistance could be at risk of losing their benefits if they don’t show that they are working, enroll in a job search program — or show that they can’t work.

Nearly 600,000 low-income residents rely on these monthly payments — which can range from $183 for a single person to $389 for a family of three — to cover basic needs such as food, rent or hygiene products.

The work requirements were paused for five years due to the pandemic. But the city now says it must bring them back to comply with state and federal rules.

Starting April 28, the city will start asking benefit recipients to do one of three things: submit paperwork to prove they are working, enroll in a city-funded job training program or show they have a mental or physical disability that exempts them from the work rules.

Benefit recipients and their advocates say the work requirement can be onerous for low-income New Yorkers to navigate, and could cut them off when they need help most. About a quarter of New Yorkers live in poverty and will be further squeezed by the Trump administration's agenda to slash funding for other safety net programs and impose tariffs, which could send prices for cheap, imported goods and food soaring.

New York City was the last jurisdiction to reinstitute work requirements after pausing them in March 2020, state officials said. It’s a step that’s four years overdue: The state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, which oversees local service agencies, asked cities to revive work rules in 2021.

“The timing is very challenging because we are in uncharted territory on the economy,” said Julie Jean-François, co-executive director at the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park. “It’s an incredibly necessary program, we have many families who are working long hours and multiple jobs and simply don’t earn enough.”

Here are some answers to questions about the program:

Who can receive cash assistance?

New Yorkers are eligible based on their income, family size, immigration status and other resources, such as how much money they have in savings. Immigrants need legal status or to have applied for asylum or another type of legal status to be eligible.

The benefit is for the lowest-income New Yorkers who have little to no income. A family of three generally needs to earn $789 a month to qualify.

How much do you get in benefits?

The sum, determined by household size and whether you are housed or in shelter, is distributed on an EBT card and rent payments are given directly to the landlord. The money can be distributed in regular payments or larger one-time payments for emergency needs, such as rent.

“You buy food, you buy one piece of clothing and you’re done. It’s not like it’s a huge quantity of money that you have to make decisions on how to use,” said Jean-François. “That amount of money will evaporate in a day, it’s so little money.”

Advocates have been pushing a state bill to double the benefit, which hasn’t been increased since 2012, and make it keep up with inflation. A second proposed bill would increase cash payments for homeless New Yorkers living in shelters who receive significantly less money.

An individual in a shelter receives $45 a month and a family receives $126 a month. An individual not living in a shelter receives $183 a month and a parent and child not in shelter receive $291 a month.

What are the work rules?

Cash assistance recipients have to demonstrate they are working, in school or prove they are exempt because of a physical or medical condition or because they are caring for an incapacitated family member. Those who can’t find work can enroll in an educational training program run by city-contracted vendors to meet the requirement.

Cash assistance recipient Maria Walles, who volunteers with the advocacy group Safety Net Project, said that can often mean going to job training programs every day for several weeks to ensure they get a benefit of just a few hundred dollars a month.

“You stay a majority of the day,” she said. “I feel like these programs don’t actually provide people with jobs.”

Work rules have been in place since welfare reforms passed in 1996. Changes in state law temporarily suspended the requirement between 2015-2019 and the rules were once again put on hold in March 2020 during the pandemic.

The city’s Human Resources Administration first announced it was resuming the process of reinstating work rules last summer but notified providers that it would officially reinstate the rules later this month.

HRA officials said the agency is gradually rolling out the requirements and will reach out to a few thousand recipients a month, meaning recipients won’t be sanctioned or risk losing their benefits until later this summer. They say they’ve also streamlined the process to make it easier for people to show they’re trying to follow the rules or demonstrate why they’re unable to.

The Adams administration has also taken steps to bolster its job training programs, including prioritizing placing New Yorkers on cash assistance in union jobs and connecting them with work in building and construction.

What are the difficulties of meeting work requirements?

Much of the concern from advocates is around the bureaucracy involved in meeting work rules and the weight it places on an already overburdened system.

Missing a meeting with a city worker or failing to properly document work hours could result in a recipient getting kicked off their benefits. The city’s Human Resources Administration has been hit with a record number of applications for cash assistance and in recent years has struggled to process those applications on time amid staffing shortages and high caseloads.

Sixty percent more people were enrolled in cash assistance in February, the last month of available data, than a decade ago.

Attorneys representing cash recipients, who sued over the delays, say wait times have improved but they worry the new rules could disrupt that progress.

“It’s a very complex bureaucracy, it’s lots of paperwork,’" said Kathleen Kelleher, a supervising attorney at The Legal Aid Society. “[Clients] get assignments, they have to go at certain times and if there are any problems during any part of that process they have to work it out with HRA to make sure their benefits are not reduced, their case is not closed. That is going to put a lot of pressure on the system.”

But for families with mixed immigration status, meeting the requirement can be far more complicated, nonprofit groups say. Undocumented immigrants who haven’t applied for asylum or another form of legalization aren’t eligible for cash assistance, though their children could be.

Jean-Francois said a parent having to return to work could mean another family member might have to drop off children at school but could be fearful of doing so given Trump’s promises of mass deportations. Others could also be scared to ask their employer for paperwork to prove their work hours for fear of losing their job.

“Our clients struggle to find living-wage employment, they struggle to find employment that is handled outside of a cash economy, those are significant challenges,” she said.

She said many of the families her organization helps are immigrants, and the IRS’ decision to share tax information on immigrants without legal status with immigrant enforcement is making families scared.