NYC will soon stop cash assistance for residents who fail to meet work requirements

New York City’s social services agency will soon begin slashing safety net benefits to the lowest-income residents if they fail to meet work requirements, according to an email obtained by Gothamist on Monday.

The resumption of so-called welfare-to-work rules for cash assistance recipients will take effect on July 28, the Department of Social Services said in the email sent Monday afternoon to organizations that provide services to homeless and low-income residents. The agency cited state and federal laws for the decision. The city paused the requirement that people need to work, go to school or look for jobs to receive cash assistance benefits four years ago because of the pandemic.

The most recent city statistics show that more than 550,000 New Yorkers received the key cash assistance benefit in May, up from about 400,000 in May 2020.

The cash assistance program provides low-income residents with small sums of money each month to help them meet their most basic needs. In New York City, a single adult can receive $183 a month in cash assistance benefits, while a family of three, including dependent children, can receive $389 monthly. But to maintain the benefit, recipients will now have to participate in employment-related activities , like proving they’re searching for jobs or attending work training.

The decision to cut aid to recipients who do not meet the work requirements comes as the agency failed to process benefit applications and issue money to people in need on time in the vast majority of cases in recent years, according to annual reports on agency performance. In March, the Department of Social Services told Gothamist that it had nearly cleared the backlog of food stamp and cash assistance cases.

Department of Social Services spokesperson Neha Sharma said the agency is providing cash assistance to a “record number of New Yorkers” but had to reintroduce the work requirements to comply with state and federal mandates. The state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance began instructing cities and towns to reinstate work requirements in 2021.

Sharma said the agency “has taken an incredibly careful and considered approach and only recently began this process after requesting more time to avoid reinstating work-requirements in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, recognizing that low-income New Yorkers were still reeling from its devastating economic impact.”

She added that the Department of Social Services is making it easier to appeal penalties and giving public assistance recipients time to show why they may be exempt from employment-related appointments.

But Abby Biberman, associate director of the public benefits unit at the New York Legal Assistance Group, said the new rules will only worsen the ongoing bureaucratic problems at an agency responsible for dispensing vital emergency assistance.

“This is going to lead to people losing their benefits and struggling to get them back, and that will potentially lead to people being evicted and facing other food and housing instability,” Biberman said.

New Yorkers cut off from cash assistance — either because they did not comply with the rules or because of an error — will have to contact the agency to dispute the termination, and prove they were exempt from the work requirement because they are already working, caring for a family member, attending a medical appointment or for other reasons. That will trigger a new waiting period for benefits to be restored, said Adriana Mendoza, benefits supervisor at the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project

“For folks having housing issues, that’s more money not going to the landlord,” said Adriana Mendoza, benefits supervisor at the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project. “It’s putting more burden on a situation people are already having.”

Recipients whose cash benefits get cut off could also lose access to food stamps and even housing subsidies tied to their assistance case if they fail to meet work rules or miss appointments to reinstate the benefits, according to the Monday email from the Department of Social Services.

But the Department of Social Services told nonprofit staff that it was compelled by state and federal regulations. In the email to providers, the agency said it is “required to re-institute [cash assistance] sanctions for non-compliance with work-related appointments and assignments” and cited state and federal rules around aid programs for low-income Americans.

The agency email added that “safeguards” will prevent people from losing benefits if they lack “supportive services like childcare, transportation and reasonable accommodations” and that they will notify recipients about the new rules.

The state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, which oversees local social service agencies, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The city imposed work requirements on cash assistance recipients from 1997 until 2015, when changes to state law temporarily suspended the work rules until January 2019. The city then paused the requirement again in March 2020 during the height of the COVID pandemic.

The Department of Social Services has since blamed the suspension of the work requirement for the mounting number of cash assistance cases since the start of the pandemic. The agency has struggled to keep up with the surge of people in need of aid and managed to process just 14% of cash assistance applications on time between July and October 2023, Gothamist reported .

The city is currently facing a lawsuit from the New York Legal Assistance Group and the Legal Aid Society over what they say are delays and an arduous bureaucratic process for people trying to restore their benefits after getting cut off.

The Department of Social Services says it has dramatically reduced processing times in response to the lawsuit.

Legal Aid Society Supervising Attorney Kathleen Kelleher said benefit recipients already have a hard time reaching an actual person at the Department of Social Services and can wait hours on the phone, only to be disconnected. She said the agency shouldn’t rely on the same system for dealing with recipients cut off from benefits because they do not meet work rules.

“They need to come up with a solution so that clients have a way to contact the agency or our clients are going to suffer from the reduction or termination of their subsistence-level benefits,” Kelleher said. “It’s a completely unforgiving system.”

This story was updated to include remarks from a spokesperson for the Department of Social Services and more recent stats on the number of people who received cash assistance.