Supporting Better Government Lab research on benefit takeup

PolicyEngine is supporting the Better Government Lab and Eric Giannella of Georgetown University in research on benefit program takeup among American households.

Understanding benefit takeup—who enrolls in programs they're eligible for—is essential for evidence-based policymaking. Program rules for SNAP, TANF, SSI, and state tax credits vary significantly across states and have changed over time, making comprehensive analysis challenging without specialized modeling tools.

Our team is consulting on how to model historical program rules for tax years 2018 and 2023, helping the Lab analyze how safety net programs have evolved over time. We're also assisting with integration of PolicyEngine code into their analysis pipeline and training research assistants on policy parameter updates.

The research focuses on programs where state-level policy choices substantially affect household eligibility and benefit amounts—including SNAP, TANF, SSI, and state tax credits.

All code written under this engagement will be published to our public GitHub repository under the AGPL-3.0 license. Every improvement we make for this project benefits the broader research community.

Researchers can use our web calculator to explore how these programs affect hypothetical households, or download the Python package to run custom analyses.

We're proud to support research that helps policymakers understand how government programs work in practice.