A new report examines child support “pass-through,” a policy that determines whether child support collected from a noncustodial parent actually reaches a family receiving TANF. 

Federal law generally requires custodial parents receiving TANF to cooperate with the child support program and assign certain rights to those funds to the state. The state can then retain collections (sharing a portion with the federal government) to recover the cost of public assistance. The technical term is “cost recovery.”

The language sounds almost clinical. Cooperation. Assignment. Distribution. Cost recovery. Pass-through. But underneath those words is a fairly simple question: When a parent pays money intended to support a child, who should get it?

By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated

For more than two decades of working with fathers, I’ve heard several variations of the same question from men who are navigating the child support system: “If the money came out of my check, why does the mother of my child say she didn’t get it?”

There are many possible answers. Sometimes there are arrears. Sometimes there are multiple obligations. Sometimes there are administrative complications a father doesn’t understand. But another answer gets far less public attention: In some families who receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the government may have received the child support payment and kept some or all of it.

That’s what makes a newly released report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) consequential. The CBPP report examines child support “pass-through,” a policy that determines whether child support collected from a noncustodial parent actually reaches a family receiving TANF. 

Federal law generally requires custodial parents receiving TANF to cooperate with the child support program and assign certain rights to those funds to the state. The state can then retain collections (sharing a portion with the federal government) to recover the cost of public assistance. The technical term is “cost recovery.”

The language sounds almost clinical. Cooperation. Assignment. Distribution. Cost recovery. Pass-through. But underneath those words is a fairly simple question: When a parent pays money intended to support a child, who should get it?

The September CBPP report shows how inconsistent and complex the answer remains:

• Twenty-one states still provide no pass-through for current TANF families. 
• Others provide $50, $75, $100, or $200, use a “fill-the-gap” formula, or enact more generous policies.(Illinois, for example, now sends all support and arrears to current and former TANF families.) 
• Other states have begun moving toward broader pass-through policies, although some changes won’t be implemented for years. (Georgia, where I live and where Fathers Incorporated works directly with families, still relies on a fill-the-gap approach rather than a full pass-through.)

There has been progress, and we should acknowledge it. Nationally, the amount passed through to families more than doubled from $99.6 million in 2022 to more than $219 million in 2025. But the other side of that number deserves at least as much attention. In 2025, state and federal governments retained 77% of assigned child support collections connected to current and former TANF participants. States kept about $320 million and sent another $406 million to the federal government.

These reports can feel strangely familiar to those of us who’ve been watching this issue for years.

Several years ago, a Fatherhood Research and Practice Network-supported state-by-state examination* of policies affecting fathers devoted an entire section to pass-through. Using the policies in effect at the time, researchers Jessica Pearson and Rachel Wildfeuer found that 24 states kept all child support collected for families receiving TANF rather than passing any of it to those families. 

We’ve moved from 24 states retaining everything to 21 states providing no current-assistance pass-through. Several additional states have strengthened their policies, and more have legislation pending.

That’s movement, but it isn’t transformation.

To understand why, we have to go back further than TANF. The federal-state child support program under Title IV-D of the Social Security Act was established in 1975. One of its central original purposes was cost recovery: locate noncustodial parents, establish obligations, collect support, and use some of those collections to reimburse the government for cash assistance it provided to families. Over the following five decades, the child support program expanded well beyond that original purpose and today serves millions of families who’ve never received cash assistance. (Congressional Research Service testimony presented earlier this year describes that evolution clearly.)

We share that history because systems can outlive the circumstances that created them.

The defense of cost recovery isn’t difficult to understand. The government provided financial assistance when a family needed it. A noncustodial parent had a financial obligation. If the government later collects that obligation, taxpayers should be reimbursed for some of what they provided. There’s a logic to that argument.

But there’s another question that should carry even greater weight: What produces the greatest benefit for the child right now?

If the family is poor enough to qualify for TANF, and a father or other noncustodial parent has paid support, taking those dollars away from the household to reimburse the government may satisfy an accounting principle while frustrating the underlying purpose of child support. Rent doesn’t become less expensive because the government wants reimbursement. Groceries don’t cost less. School clothes, transportation, diapers, and electricity still have to be paid for.

And there’s an important piece of evidence here that should disrupt the usual assumptions about fathers: When Colorado began passing through all current support and disregarding those payments in calculating TANF benefits, state administrative data showed a 76% increase in current collections for TANF families during the first year. 

In addition, research continues to find that parents are more likely to pay, and may pay more, when they know the money reaches their children. Think about what that suggests: Sometimes the policy designed to enforce responsibility may actually work better when parents can see responsibility producing a direct benefit for their children.

That brings me to the part of this conversation that worries me most as someone who has spent most of my professional life in responsible fatherhood.

Reporting on child support pass-through policies shouldn’t be an indictment of fathers. In fact, the CBPP explicitly argues that pass-through policies recognize the contributions noncustodial parents make. But once reports like this enter the broader public conversation, nuance disappears quickly. “Child support” becomes synonymous with “deadbeat dad.” A household headed by a mother becomes evidence that the father has disappeared. A child receiving public assistance becomes evidence that a man refused his responsibility.

This particular data is especially revealing because the money under discussion has already been collected. This isn’t fundamentally about unpaid child support. It’s about paid child support — and who gets to keep it.

In my forthcoming paper, Deconstructing “Fatherless,” I’m examining this distinction. Systems have a way of turning administrative classifications into narratives about human behavior:

• “Nonresident” becomes “absent.” 
• “Unmarried” becomes “uninvolved.” 
• “Child support case” becomes “irresponsible fathers.” 
• “TANF recipient” becomes “unsupported mother.”

Those things may overlap in individual families, but they aren’t synonyms. And we shouldn’t allow them to stand in for one another in any of our narratives about fathers and families. 

None of this absolves fathers of financial responsibility. A father who has the means to support his child and deliberately refuses to do so should be held accountable. The responsible fatherhood field has never argued otherwise. Mothers raising children deserve support. Children deserve support. Fathers have obligations that don’t disappear when relationships end, parents live apart, or adults disagree.

But accountability requires us to distinguish unwillingness from inability, just as fairness requires us to distinguish payment from nonpayment.

An earlier fatherhood policy report documented the economic circumstances of more than 10,000 disadvantaged noncustodial parents in a federal demonstration. Nearly half hadn’t worked in the previous 30 days. Among those working, average monthly earnings were about $765, while average child support orders were about $401. Fifty-eight percent of participants with earnings owed at least half of those earnings in child support.

Those figures don’t describe men free of responsibility. They describe men for whom responsibility and economic capacity sometimes collide.

The distinction is consequential to the Title IV-D policy and to the responsible fatherhood movement.

We’ve spent years teaching fathers how to navigate child support: 

• Pay what you can. 
• Show up for court. 
• Request modifications when income changes. 
• Keep records. 
• Communicate with the agency. 
• Don’t ignore notices. 
• Find employment. 
• Meet your obligations.

All of that remains necessary, but I increasingly believe our field must become just as knowledgeable about the machinery surrounding the father as we expect the father to become about his responsibilities inside it.

Title IV-D should be as familiar to responsible fatherhood leaders as TANF is to anti-poverty advocates.

We should understand assignment rules, distribution priorities, tax refund intercepts, state-owed arrears, federal reimbursement, performance incentives, and pass-through policy. We should know that the federal government generally reimburses states for 66% of allowable child support program expenditures and that the federal incentive system continues to measure states on paternity establishment, establishment of support orders, current collections, arrears collections, and cost-effectiveness.

Look closely at what these measures reward. They tell us a great deal about whether the child support machine is functioning. They tell us much less about whether the family is functioning better because of it.

There are no comparable core federal incentive measures asking:

• Did the father-child relationship improve?
• Did parental conflict decrease? 
• Did parenting time become more consistent?
• Did parents become better economic partners around their child? 
• Did the child experience greater overall well-being?

What gets measured has a remarkable way of becoming what institutions learn to protect.

This doesn’t mean there’s some secret conspiracy inside child support agencies. Thousands of people inside those agencies are deeply committed to families and have advocated for reform themselves. (The National Child Support Enforcement Association has supported expanding pass-through policies and family-centered approaches.)

But large systems develop institutional gravity. They have budgets. They have performance measures. They have revenue arrangements. They have contractors. They have decades of regulation. They have computer systems built around old rules.

The current pass-through reporting offers small but revealing examples. Washington enacted a broader pass-through but delayed full implementation until 2029. The District of Columbia plans an additional arrears pass-through in 2027, pending reprogramming of its computer systems.

In systems this large, budgets, software systems, and performance metrics can create institutional inertia.

That’s precisely why this moment is critical for fathers and families. Congress held a hearing in January on modernizing the child support program, which turned 50 last year. This September, the House Ways and Means Work and Welfare Subcommittee held another hearing marking 30 years since welfare reforms created TANF in 1996. 

Washington is reconsidering both child support and TANF, but it shouldn’t do so in separate rooms.

Congress should seriously consider ending TANF cost recovery and making full family-first distribution the national standard. 

Short of that, Congress can: 

• Remove the federal $100/$200 pass-through limitation
• Help states replace lost revenue
• Pay for the technology required to change their systems
• Make family-first distribution of tax-intercepted arrears the rule 

States don’t have to wait for Washington. They can expand pass-through and disregard policies now.

The responsible fatherhood field should have a seat in these state and federal conversations, not because we want less child support collected, but because we want child support to accomplish more of what its name promises:

• Support the child.
• Support the custodial parent who carries the daily expense of raising that child.
• Help the noncustodial parent become economically capable of contributing consistently.
• Build policy that recognizes financial responsibility as one part of a larger parental relationship rather than treating collection as the entire definition of responsible fatherhood.

Better data should lead to better support.

So the next time another child support pass-through report appears, perhaps we should resist the familiar question about what fathers are failing to do.

A harder question sits right in front of us: When a parent has paid money for his child, why are we still debating whether the child should receive it?

*The report also reviewed research indicating that noncustodial parents were more likely to pay child support (and to pay more of it) when their payments actually reached their children.