(The Center Square) — New York City Mayor Eric Adams is trying to get more low-income people on welfare with a new campaign highlighting the process of qualifying for food stamps and other public assistance.
Adams rolled out his "Money in your Pockets" campaign on Monday, which aims to screen and educate New Yorkers from “underserved” neighborhoods about which state and federal public benefits they may be eligible to receive from the city.
The Democrat said the initiative seeks to help low-income New Yorkers "save money" by assisting them in enrolling in public benefits to "which they may not have previously known they were entitled."
“Government needs to meet the people,” Adams told reporters at a briefing. "The people should not have to meet the government. You may not have a MetroCard to come downtown. So we need to come downtown to see you and communicate with you in the community, and communicate with you in the community."
Under the initiative, more than 300 city employees with the Public Engagement Unit will team up with college students to fan out across 20 underserved neighborhoods to assess whether area residents qualify for one of 70 city, state and federal benefits programs. Those include cash assistance, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as food stamps.
"We do this by knocking on doors, by making phone calls, by sending peer-to-peer text messages, by showing up at your events," PEU Executive Director Adrienne Lever said in a statement. "Everything we possibly can to make sure we are meeting New Yorkers where they are."
The Adams administration has also posted an online guide linked to the city's website with eligibility criteria and applications for more than 40 public benefits and safety net programs.
During Adams’ first two years in office, the city’s total cash-recipient headcount rose by 23%, or 115,029 people, to a December total of 499,552 — the highest level in 22 years, according to the Manhattan Institute.
Most of those recipients — or 142,718 — were receiving benefits from the federally funded Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, which added a net 25,567 recipients in Adams’ first two years. The other 356,748 added to the welfare rolls were covered by Safety Net Assistance, a solely state- and city-funded program aimed mainly at single adults and childless couples, according to the institute.
Meanwhile, the city has seen the number of welfare recipients finding work has stagnated at around 10,000, down from about 50,000 in 2016, the city's latest data shows.
Political observers say welfare reforms that then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani initiated in the mid-1990s have withered away under successive New York City leaders, including Adams and former Mayor Bill De Blasio.
Adams’ welfare caseload surge has also coincided with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants in the city over the past two years following a surge of immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border.
"The nine-figure cost to taxpayers of New York City’s swollen welfare rolls has worsened Adams’s dire budget outlook, though it almost pales in comparison with his projection that the total budgetary impact of the migrant crisis will come to $12 billion," E.J. McMahon, an adjunct fellow at the Institute, wrote in a recent op-ed. "However, a return to anything approaching New York’s pre-reform welfare dependency levels also would have consequences transcending mere dollar and cents."
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