Page 32 - Nonpartisan News Today

The COVID-19 crisis increased housing instability for millions of renters and further exposed the inadequacy of the country’s housing safety net, particularly for families with children. As...

Cortney Sanders is a Policy Analyst with the Center’s State Fiscal Policy (SFP) division, where she focuses on state fiscal policy through a racial equity lens. Since joining the Center as a...

The newly enacted American Rescue Plan Act extended to Puerto Rico substantial amounts [1] of funding, to aid both the territory’s short-term recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and its long-term recovery from a decade-long recession and recent natural disasters. For instance, the Rescue Plan features more than $4 billion in fiscal relief funding for Puerto Rico and its municipalities to mitigate the fiscal effects stemming from COVID-19, and $3 billion in education assistance to ensure the s...

Image As Senior Director for Housing Policy and Research and Interim Program Area Lead, Fischer focuses on federal low-income housing programs, including Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers and public housing, and on tax policy related to affordable housing. Since coming to the Center in 2002, he has played a role in designing and advancing a number of policy changes to improve and expand federal rental assistance so that it more effectively helps low-income people afford housing. Earlier, he hel...

Image Sonya Acosta is a Policy Analyst with the Housing Policy team. Prior to coming to the Center, she worked on disaster recovery, Native housing, appropriations, and benefits cuts at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. She also worked at several fair housing organizations in the Chicago area and completed two terms of AmeriCorps service. Acosta holds a B.A in history and international studies from the University of New Mexico and a Master of Science in Public Policy and Management fro...

The IRS is funded almost entirely by annual discretionary appropriations. [21] For fiscal year 2021, the IRS received appropriated funding totaling $11.9 billion: $5.2 billion for enforcement, $3.9 billion for operations support, $2.6 billion for taxpayer services, and $0.2 billion for business systems modernization. Annual appropriations should remain the foundation of the IRS budget and a key part of any plan to rebuild and modernize the agency. Funding through appropriations is not only nece...

What Is the Housing Voucher Program? Individuals and families with low incomes use vouchers to help pay for privately owned housing. The program is federally funded and run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and a network of about 2,170 state and local public housing agencies (PHAs). More than 5 million people in 2.3 million low-income families use vouchers. Who Is Eligible for Vouchers? Federal rules ensure that vouchers are targeted to the families who need them most. Se...

  The American Rescue Plan Act includes $1 billion in funding for nutrition assistance for Puerto Rico and other territories that receive block grants for nutrition assistance instead of SNAP (formerly known as food stamps). This funding, along with other temporary nutrition assistance enacted in the last year, will help Puerto Rico meet its residents’ food needs in the coming months as it recovers from the COVID-19 crisis. Over the longer term, policymakers should address the inequity betwe...

As state lawmakers continue to focus on recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and recession, they should also commit to ensuring a more racially just future by making changes to their tax codes to...

Share The Agriculture Department (USDA) has announced a new policy that will provide $1 billion a month in additional SNAP benefits to 25 million of the lowest-income SNAP participants, who have been partly or entirely left out of these emergency benefits over the past year due to a Trump Administration policy. Beginning this month, all SNAP households will receive at least $95 a month in emergency allotments. (It may take a few weeks for states to implement the change.) About 40 percent of the...