The Home Visiting Coalition, which CWLA belongs to, is circulating a sign-on letter to congressional leaders urging Congress to act quickly to reauthorize the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program for a period of five (5) years with a doubling of funding from $400 million annually to $800 million annually. The Coalition
The Senate gave final approval to an omnibus appropriations bill on Thursday, May 4. The legislation was unveiled Monday and moved quickly through the process. As a result, we are now finished with FY 2017 which ends on September 30, 2017. After the unveiling the fight turned to who won and who lost. The President
The President’s proposed budget for discretionary spending for 2018 landed with a crash as it includes dramatic cuts across agencies and departments as a way to pay for increases to the Pentagon. The proposal was released on Thursday, March16 and applies to the discretionary portion of federal spending with the rest to be published with
A coalition group including CWLA has sent Capitol Hill an updated letter of support of SSBG on Thursday. The letter includes more than 75 national organizations and organizations and agencies from all fifty states. CWLA has created a new resource on the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG). The new resource are state-by-state fact sheets found
The President’s desire to provide a ten percent increase in the Defense Department budget could devastate a number of human services and domestic programs. Unless Congress agrees to fund the increase through deficits, the $54 billion will create enormous pressure on the annual appropriations (discretionary spending) which totals only $1.1 trillion out of a federal
Last week the Center on Budget Policy and Priority released an analysis of federal block grants and their negative consequences. The analysis, Block-Granting Low-Income Programs Leads to Large Funding Declines Over Time, History Shows, examined 13 different block grants including TANF, Child Care, SSBG, Housing as well as some other human service funding sources and
On Tuesday, Congressman Tom Price, the HHS-Designate went before the Senate Finance Committee for his second confirmation hearing and during a question and answer period criticized SSBG. During the hearing Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) was attempting to get a response on whether he would support a block grant of Medicaid (which she was not able
With some proposing that we defund programs that have not been reauthorized, the Congressional Budget Office issues regular annual reports of how many programs have not been reauthorized. Congress frequently fails to meet the window to reauthorize programs. An occurrence that seems more frequent in recent congresses. In January 2016, the CBO released, Unauthorized Appropriations
The Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) is a vital source of support for your state ESPECIALLY for child welfare, domestic violence, elder abuse services, and other human services. Speaker Ryan has offered proposals to eliminate all $1.7 billion in human services funding. See how your state spends its SSBG and who they serve in the
On Thursday, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee had positive words for the home visiting program. [the Human Resources Subcommittee will work on] “solutions to help more families climb the economic ladder and escape poverty. We will continue taking action to ensure the programs under our Committee’s jurisdiction are encouraging and rewarding work