Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

14. Department of Health and Human Services · Minor

Require states to track and audit TANF spending outcomes

Not started

476 14. Department of Health and Human Services

“To increase transparency, HHS should clarify how states, in their quarterly and annual reports, ought to track and audit the outcomes from how they spend TANF funds to meet the TANF program’s four statutory purposes.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    HHS has not clarified how states should track and audit outcomes from TANF spending against the program's four statutory purposes. ACF's in-window TANF regulatory work runs the other way: the final rule of 2026-07-31 removes as obsolete the AFDC-era review and audit provisions at 45 CFR 201.10-201.13, the high performance bonus regulations at 45 CFR part 282 and the illegitimacy-ratio bonus regulations at 45 CFR part 283, telling commenters that federal audit duties now rest on the government-wide rules at 2 CFR part 200 subpart F. No change was made to the quarterly and annual reporting requirements at 45 CFR part 265. On the legislative side, H.R. 8872 (Preventing Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in TANF Act), which would require measurement of improper payments and strengthen expenditure guardrails, was reported 2026-05-29 and debated on the House floor 2026-06-03, where proceedings were postponed with no passage vote - committee action and postponed floor consideration are not rungs under playbook 3b.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Final rule read in full at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-07-31/html/2026-15567.htm (152 KB): “audit” 13 occurrences, all in the AFDC-era removals and the response to a commenter worried about which authority would take over the grant-management functions.
  • H.R. 8872’s actions were read from the congress.gov API.
  • One shared search covered the p. 476 TANF asks, #1317–#1319.
  • HHS regulatory agenda, checked 2026-09-01. Checked against the full HHS agenda on reginfo.gov (183 active RINs in the 2026 Unified Agenda, published 2026-08-14), not the abbreviated version the Federal Register prints. The nearest entry is recorded here. It does not name this ask’s object, so the Status did not change: an agenda entry counts as an attempt only when it names what the ask asks for.
    • 0970-AD31, Improving TANF Program Integrity (Proposed Rule Stage, NPRM 07/2026), does add data elements to the quarterly TANF submissions — but to verify recipients’ citizenship or qualified-alien status, not to track or audit the outcomes of TANF spending against the program’s four statutory purposes.
Action
other
Object
state TANF reporting and audits
ID
1318