The White House declined to make Ricchetti available for comment, sending me instead to two other officials, neither of whom had spoken with Romney or any member of his staff. They voiced doubts that Romney’s allowance was sufficient to meet a family’s needs. And they singled out for criticism a feature that Romney sees as a selling point. Unlike the Biden child-tax-credit extension, which would expire in four years, Romney’s plan would be permanent. He has offered a series of spending cuts to offset the $254 billion cost. One would do away with a $16.5 billion program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) that sends block grants for states to disburse. Another would save $25 billion by eliminating a state-and-local-tax deduction that is especially popular in high-tax blue states. From the White House’s perspective, Romney is giving with one hand, taking with another. “We don’t want it to be a zero-sum game, and [Romney’s] proposal would be a zero-sum game for many low-income families because of the offsets that he’s chosen to pay for his program,” one of the Biden administration officials told me, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk more freely. The White House’s policy critique sounds dubious. Romney’s plan would slash child poverty by one-third, according to Rank, who co-authored the book Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty. What’s more, plenty of problems plague the TANF program. The $16.5 billion funding level hasn’t budged in 25 years, meaning the money hasn’t kept up with inflation. Nor has the cash always reached people who need it most. A report last year by the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts’s Stateline found that “some states are spending big chunks of TANF money on programs used by families who aren’t in poverty, such as on preschool and college scholarships for middle-class students.” As for the state-and-local-tax deduction, the benefits flow mostly to the wealthiest families anyway. Prominent Republicans are even cooler toward Romney’s idea. A few have come out with family-assistance plans of their own—more tax credits tied to work requirements. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who has embraced one such plan, told me, “I don’t know how many Republican votes there would be for just a direct-payment program, which in my mind is not the direction we want to go.”