Summary: Three of the federal government's main welfare programs--Aid to Families With Dependent Children, Medicaid, and Food Stamps--provided more than $92 billion in benefits in 1990. These programs rely heavily on state-run computer systems to determine participants' eligibility and the amount of assistance they should receive. The federal government estimates that during the 1980s, it gave states close to $1 billion to develop and run these systems. Yet monitoring of states' automation efforts by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have fallen short, allowing millions of dollars to be spent on systems that either do not work or do not meet requirements. In addition, poor coordination between HHS and USDA has sometimes resulted in contradictory directions to states. Despite explicit federal guidance, HHS and USDA have also failed to determine whether installed automated systems are working as intended and are yielding improvements. At this point, the federal government has no idea whether administrative costs and mistakes have been reduced because HHS and USDA have not measured automation's impact on welfare programs.
