That states have so much leeway in how they administer benefits is one of the legacies of a massive overhaul of welfare programs in 1996. In those reforms, spearheaded by then-president Bill Clinton, the government changed cash assistance to a program called TANF, which was administered through what are known as “block grants” to states. States could decide what they did with TANF funds, and could set their own limits for how much cash families could receive and who could receive it. A new Urban Institute analysis finds that allowing states to decide how to spend TANF dollars has led to even more racial discrepancies in who receives benefits. The Urban Institute analyzed a federal database that tracks state policy decisions about TANF and found that the states whose populations are more heavily African American are now less generous, more restrictive, and provide TANF for a shorter period of time than whiter states.

This has big implications in today’s political climate, as Republicans talk about consolidating federal anti-poverty programs such as Medicaid and food stamps and sending them to states through block grants. Block-granting other programs could cause similar racial disparities in who receives them. “TANF is a cautionary tale about what block grants can mean,” said Heather Hahn, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and one of the authors of the study. “When states have flexibility to set policies, the state philosophies will prevail in determining what those policies are.”

One way to track the generosity of state benefits is something called the TANF-to-poverty ratio. It measures how many families are receiving benefits for every 100 families living in poverty. The Urban Institute, using data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, found that the whitest states have the highest TANF-to-poverty ratio. They include Vermont, which gives TANF to 78 families for every 100 families in poverty, and Oregon, which gives TANF to 46 families for every 100 families living in poverty. States that have the lowest TANF-to-poverty ratio are those with high shares of African Americans, including Louisiana, which gives benefits to four families for every 100 living in poverty, and Arkansas, which gives benefits to seven families for every 100 living in poverty. (For more on Arkansas’ changes to welfare, read my story from 2016.) About 56 percent of the country’s African Americans live in the 25 states that rank lowest on the TANF-to-poverty ratio, the Urban Institute found, as opposed to 46 percent of white people.

A similar correlation was observed in measurements of the benefits’ generosity, according to the Urban Institute. A five-percentage-point increase in the African American share of the population was associated with an average decrease of $25 a month in the maximum monthly benefit available to families—$413 a month compared to $440 for the median state. States with higher shares of African Americans also have higher penalties when people don’t comply with a program’s rules, a policy known as “initial sanctions,” Hahn said. “When we look at some of these individual policies, we can see how having a higher share of African Americans in the population translate to a lower maximum benefit level, and harsher initial sanctions,” Hahn said. “When we put them all together and look across the board, we see this consistent pattern.”