> In practice, however, several of the programs that seem to offer the most generous benefits are severely underfunded, so relatively few families are actually able to obtain them. For example, according to congressional testimony from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 68 percent of poor families with children received Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996. By 2015, after the welfare reforms of the Clinton era, benefits from TANF, which replaced AFDC, reached just 23 percent of poor families with children, according to the same source. Similarly, just 8 to 12 percent of eligible families receive child care benefits from the CCDF, and just 24 percent of those eligible receive Section 8 housing vouchers.

This is complete insanity.

This doesn't surprise me at all. On top of lack of funding, you have:

1. Benefits don't come into effect fast enough to matter for emergencies. Even with expedited processing you can have to wait a week for food.

2. The bureaucratic requirements aren't obvious if you're new to the system. How many people know that "expedited" processing exists? How many people know that they qualify?

3. The bureaucratic requirements aren't exactly painless. It's been awhile, but I remember one was as simple as "show up at our office for <xyz> reason." That's easy if you have a car or money or friends or whatever, but a 10-mile hike each way in -20F weather is never fun, and I've gotten in trouble more than once when hyper-local weather patterns (e.g., too close to a body of water with a long straight stretch) made the situation much more dangerous than I was equipped for.

And so on. The system is (supposedly) easy to use if you know its ins and outs, but if you're struggling and never anticipated being in that situation then you're mostly just fucked.

> and just 24 percent of those eligible receive Section 8 housing vouchers

There are definitely problems with the distribution of these programs, but it’s also a mistake to think that everyone eligible for every program wants to collect every benefit. The housing vouchers are a good example of something that isn’t applicable to a lot of people who, for example, are living with relatives. I have some people in my extended family who fit this description right now. They have housing in a beneficial family situation, so any housing benefits they qualify for aren’t relevant to their current situation.

Not to minimize the problems, but the number of people who should be or want to be receiving every benefit isn’t 100% minus the number of people currently receiving it