Single moms are beginning to feel pinch of Montana welfare reductions

HELENA - More than 1,000 Montana families have stopped receiving money from a cash assistance program since lawmakers reduced it eight months ago, and state officials are launching a study to try to determine what happened to those people.

Some public officials and advocates for the poor say they're expecting the worst.

''My interpretation of that drop-off is just people are at that hopeless stage,'' said Mary Caferro, a lobbyist with the low-income group Working for Equality and Economic Liberation.

The Department of Public Health and Human Services showed 5,350 families in the Temporary Assi...