Under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), welfare beneficiaries seeking cash assistance must cooperate in establishing paternity and child support orders against noncustodial parents, assigning any resulting payments directly to the state. In practice, these cooperation mandates force recipients—nearly all of whom are single mothers—to submit to invasive state scrutiny, divulge detailed sexual histories, and provide extensive identifying information about noncustodial fathers. Instead of alleviating poverty or recovering meaningful state costs, cooperation rules operate as administrative barriers that cause widespread “bureaucratic disentitlement,” disproportionately sanction Black families, and condition essential public aid on women’s forced participation in a simulated marital economy.
While outright abolition of child support cooperation mandates requires federal action, this Comment argues that states already possess the statutory authority under PRWORA to mitigate these harms by broadly expanding “good cause” exceptions. In transforming cash assistance into the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant, Congress granted states broad latitude to define good cause, constrained only by the requirement to take into account the “best interests of the child”. This Comment contends that states should expand good cause to protect at least two common categories of noncooperation: when a mother seeks to avoid contact with the father to protect her well-being or preserve sole parental custody, and when she seeks to preserve an active father–child relationship that would be jeopardized by carceral or financial state enforcement against an indigent noncustodial parent.