Sponsors (3)
The bill offers a potentially powerful way to consolidate and redesign anti‑poverty benefits to boost flexibility, work incentives, and evidence‑based policy, but it restricts participant access to existing programs, limits initial reach to a few States, and creates administrative, fiscal, and equity risks that could slow or deter adoption.
Low-income individuals and families (including parents) in participating States receive a single, flexible per‑person Upward Mobility Grant that consolidates SNAP, TANF, child care, LIHEAP, housing, and other supports, simplifying benefits and increasing cash flexibility.
Participants in approved pilots can get benefit designs that reduce benefit cliffs and lower Marginal Effective Tax Rates, which can increase work incentives, employment, and household earnings.
Pilots require rigorous independent evaluation, producing evidence about which integrated approaches actually improve upward mobility and informing potential wider policy adoption.
People who join a State pilot cannot receive other Federal antipoverty program benefits outside the pilot during the pilot period, which can reduce access to familiar or targeted supports for low‑income individuals and families.
Pilots are limited to at most five States, restricting how many people can access consolidated benefits and delaying broader rollout even if pilots are successful.
Consolidation and waiver authority can create differing eligibility rules and benefit levels across States, producing unequal treatment and administrative complexity for beneficiaries who move between States.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Allows state pilots to consolidate and flexibly use funds from multiple federal antipoverty programs and transfers related agency functions and administrative funds to a designated Administration.
Introduced January 6, 2026 by Jon Husted · Last progress January 6, 2026
Creates a framework for state pilot projects that would let states consolidate and flexibly use funds from multiple federal antipoverty programs. It defines which federal benefit streams count as a "covered amount" (including SNAP, TANF, child care, LIHEAP, certain workforce and community development funds, and HUD housing assistance) and sets rules for transferring program functions, staff, assets, and administrative funding to a newly defined Administration for carrying out the pilots. Requires covered federal agencies to transfer to participating states administrative funds proportional to each state's prior-year share of nonadministrative funding for the covered programs, directs OMB to identify which agency functions transfer to the new Administration, and gives the Secretary authority to delegate, reorganize, and manage transferred functions while preserving limits on the use of transferred unexpended funds.