The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant provides states, territories, and Indian tribes with federal grants for benefits and services intended to ameliorate the effects, and address the root causes, of child poverty. TANF funds can be used in any manner a state can reasonably calculate helps it achieve the goals of (1) providing assistance to needy families so that children may be cared for in their own homes or in the homes of relatives; (2) ending the dependence of needy parents on government benefits through work, job preparation, and marriage; (3) preventing and reducing the incidence of out-of-wedlock births; and (4) encouraging the formation and maintenance of two-parent families. Thus, TANF truly is a broad-based block grant with broad discretion for the states to spend funds to meet federal goals. TANF was created in the 1996 welfare reform law and is typically thought of as the federal program that helps states fund their cash assistance programs for needy families with children. Moreover, TANF is also most associated with the 1996 welfare reform policies imposing work requirements and time limits on families receiving assistance. Most of TANF's federal rules and requirements relate to families receiving assistance. TANF's performance is measured on state welfare-to-work efforts, with states assessed based on numerical work participation standards. However, basic assistance—what many call "cash welfare"—accounted for only 27.6% of all TANF funding in FY2013. Additionally, many of the families that received TANF cash assistance in FY2013 represented family types that were not the focus of debate in 1996, and are not subject to TANF work requirements and time limits. These are families with children cared for by adults who are not themselves recipients of TANF: disabled parents receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI); immigrant parents who are ineligible for TANF assistance but have citizen children who are eligible; and nonparent relative caregivers, such as grandparents, aunts, and uncles. In FY2013, 38.1% of families receiving TANF were composed of children in families cared for by adults who themselves were not recipients of TANF or did not come under TANF work rules. This report examines the TANF cash assistance caseload, focusing on how the composition and characteristics of families receiving assistance have changed over time. It first provides a brief history of cash assistance for needy families with children, discussing how policy became focused on moving the predominately single parents who headed these families from welfare to work. It then traces the changes in the caseload composition since the 1996 welfare reform law, from a caseload dominated by unemployed single parents to a diverse caseload that had different routes to the benefit rolls as well as different circumstances on the rolls. It provides detail on caseload characteristics in FY2013, using data that states are required to report to the federal government. The report is intended to complement tabulations of these data already released by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This report does not describe TANF rules or provide current statistics on the TANF caseload or expenditures. For an overview of TANF, see CRS In Focus IF10036, The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Block Grant , by [author name scrubbed]. It also does not describe individuals and families who receive TANF benefits and services other than cash assistance. Federal law does not require states to report on their numbers or characteristics. The modern form of assistance for needy families with children has its origins in the early-1900s "mothers' pension programs," established by state and local governments. These programs provided economic aid to needy families headed by a mother so that children could be cared for in homes rather than in institutions. Federal involvement in funding these programs dates back to the Great Depression, and the creation of the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program as part of the Social Security Act of 1935. ADC provided grants to states to help them aid families with "dependent children," who were deprived of the economic support of one parent because of his death, absence, or incapacitation. The legislative history of the 1935 act explicitly stated that the purpose of ADC payments was to permit mothers to stay at home, rather than work: The very phrases "mothers' aid" and "mothers' pensions" place an emphasis equivalent to misconstruction of the intention of these laws. These are not primarily aids to mothers but defense measures for children. They are designed to release from the wage-earning role the person whose natural function is to give her children the physical and affectionate guardianship necessary not alone to keep them from falling into social misfortune, but more affirmatively to rear them into citizens capable of contributing to society. Over time, a combination of changes in social policy and changes in economic and social circumstances made cash assistance to needy families (often called "welfare") among the most controversial of federal programs. The Social Security Act was amended to provide social insurance protection for families headed by widows (survivors' benefits, added in 1939) and those with disabled members (disability benefits, added in 1956). This left families headed by a single mother with the father alive, but absent, as the primary group aided by ADC, later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The cash assistance caseload also became increasingly nonwhite. States were first given the option to aid two-parent families beginning in 1961, but were not required to extend such aid until the enactment of the Family Support Act in 1988. Even with the extension of aid to two-parent families, this group never became a large part of the caseload, and most adult TANF cash assistance recipients continue to be single mothers. The issue of whether lone mothers should work was also much debated. The intent of ADC to allow single mothers to stay home and raise their children was often met with resistance at the state and local level. It was also contrary to the reality that low-income women, particularly women of color, were sometimes expected to, and often did, work. Further, the increase in women's labor force participation in the second half of the 20 th century—particularly among married white women—eroded support for payments that permitted mothers to remain at home and out of the workforce. Beginning in 1967, federal policy changes were made to encourage, and then require, work among AFDC mothers. In 1974, children surpassed the elderly as the age group with the highest poverty rate. Poverty rates for children in families headed by a single mother were particularly high—and over time an increasing share of children were being raised in such families. In the 1980s, there was increasing attention to "welfare dependency." Research at that time showed that while many mothers were on cash assistance for a short period of time, a substantial minority of mothers remained on the rolls for long periods of time. Additionally, experimentation on "welfare-to-work" initiatives found that requiring participation in work or job preparation activities could effectively move single mothers off the benefit rolls and into jobs. "Welfare reform," aiming to replace AFDC with new programs and policies for needy families with children, was debated over a period of four decades (the 1960s through the 1990s). These debates culminated in a number of changes in providing aid to low-income families with children in the mid-1990s, creating a system of expanded aid to working families (e.g., increases in the Earned Income Tax Credit and funding for child care subsidies) and the creation of TANF, which established time limits and revamped work requirements for the cash assistance programs for needy families with children. Most TANF policy today reflects the history of cash aid to needy families with children headed by a single mother and the policy debates of the 1980s and early- to-mid 1990s. Some things remain the same from that period—children remain the age group most likely to be poor, and children living with single mothers have very high poverty rates. However, some things are very different from the period when TANF was created, including the size and composition of the cash assistance caseload. Figure 1 shows the trend in the average monthly number of families receiving cash assistance from TANF and its predecessor program (AFDC, ADC) from 1959 through 2013. The figure shows two distinct periods of rapid caseload growth. The first occurred from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. The second followed a period of relative stability in the caseload (around 3.5 million families) and occurred from 1989 to 1994. Following 1994, the caseload declined. It declined rapidly in the late 1990s, with continuing declines, albeit at a slower rate, from 2001 to 2008. The caseload increased again from 2008 through 2010 coincident with the economic slump associated with the 2007-2009 recession. That latest period of caseload increase was far less rapid and much smaller than the two earlier periods of caseload growth. The increases in the cash assistance caseload from 1989 to 1994, and its decline thereafter, were also associated with changes in the character of the caseload. Table 1 provides an overview of the characteristics of the family cash assistance caseload for selected years: FY1988, FY1994, FY2001, FY2006, and FY2013. The most dramatic change in caseload characteristics is the growth in the share of families with no adult recipients. In FY2013, 38.1% of TANF assistance families had no adult recipient; in contrast, in FY1988 only 9.8% of all cash assistance families had no adult recipient. These are families with ineligible adults (sometimes parents, sometimes other relatives) but whose children are eligible and receive benefits.