In 2021, NPR and its reporting partners exposed two routine, pernicious practices involving child welfare systems and money that should have stayed with children and/or their families. Neither practice was new. Many groups, including my own, had been working to call attention to both of these injustices for years, after first learning about them thanks to the pioneering scholarship of Prof. Daniel Hatcher at the University of Baltimore School of Law.
But NPR’s superb reporting lit a fire under government officials and others. As a result, there’s been real progress on curbing one of these awful practices — but not nearly as much on the other.
The difference in response cuts to the heart of what’s wrong with the approach we’ve taken to “child welfare” for decades. Because one is about taking money directly from kids, and the other is about taking money from them indirectly by further impoverishing the often-poor parents trying to get them back.
The first NPR story, co-reported with The Marshall Project, exposed the practice of family police agencies, a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies, scarfing up Social Security disability and survivor benefits and using them to fund the system that tore these children from their homes in the first place.
Early efforts to end this practice were opposed by, among others, the Child Welfare League of America, a trade association with many members paid for each day they hold a child in foster care. I can find nothing online concerning their current position. Linda Spears, CEO of CWLA, did not respond to two emails asking about that.
But once the injustice of a practice we called worse than stealing candy from a baby back in 2010 became widely known, public outrage put pressure on states to change it. The movement to end part of the practice, the part about taking survivor benefits, was kicked into high gear when Alex Adams, the federal government’s highest-ranking child welfare official, got behind it by issuing a letter demanding it stop, and by giving it a great name: “the orphan tax.”
It’s not clear if Adams really cares or just sees a chance to score political points. He went running to Breitbart News to slam Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for the fact that his state still levies an orphan tax and has done almost nothing to curb it. But Iowa, Texas and Tennessee have done even less — yet I have found no similar attacks launched against their governors. Nor have I seen him criticize the Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin who killed a proposal from Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, to end the tax.
Whatever the motivation, at least there’s real progress. It’s been the subject of story after story, with Amy Harfeld of the Children’s Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego quoted denouncing the orphan tax in almost all of them. CAI even has a handy tracker following where orphan tax reform stands in every state.
And it’s worked. In one story, Harfeld gushed about how “the attention has been truly overwhelming. It’s like a tsunami.”
The other injustice
Eight months after exposing the orphan tax, NPR exposed another equally pernicious, and possibly more widespread practice: child welfare agencies taking away children, throwing them into foster care and then forcing their parents to pay part of the cost. States and localities call it “child support.” But here, too, there’s a better term. When someone takes away a child and forces the parents to pay money to get the child back, the proper term for that payment is “ransom.”
If anything, what child welfare agencies do may be worse than what we typically regard as ransom. When a kidnapper demands it, it’s a one-time payment and, one hopes, the child is promptly returned.
When child welfare demands payment from parents, it involves monthly payments and no guarantee the child ever will come home. Even when they do, the parents might be looking at an amount of debt that leaves them again vulnerable to being entangled with the system.
NPR found the practice was common in every state. As they reported: “When parents get billed, children spend added time in foster care and the extra debt follows families for years, making it hard for them to climb out of poverty.”
And here’s the kicker: This ransom scheme doesn’t even work for the governments doing it. Cost-benefit analyses from five states show that the states spent more to bring in the child support than they actually got, according to research by Professor Jill Duerr Berrick at the University of California, Berkeley.
In response to NPR’s reporting, the federal government clarified that states do not, in fact, have to force parents to pay ransom — but they remain free to do so.
In fact, in a followup story in 2023, NPR found that in 12 states, failure to pay ransom can, in and of itself, be grounds to terminate parental rights. And while it didn’t happen often, NPR found 12 such cases in North Carolina alone. Since then, several states, including North Carolina, have modified or prohibited this practice.
But instead of a tsunami, attention to the problem of ransom has been more like a trickle. There’s been far less news coverage and far less legislative activity.
There has not been a word about this from Alex Adams. Neither the Child Welfare League of America nor the Children’s Advocacy Institute has a handy tracker so we can see how many jurisdictions have stopped collecting ransom. (Fortunately, Berrick has created one). And there is no concerted campaign by CAI or any other mainstream “child welfare” group to call attention to the issue and demand change.
A search of CAI’s website using the terms “Social Security” and “foster care” turns up 50 results related to the orphan tax. Try it with “child support” and “foster care,” and you get, at most, three related to ransom.
It’s not hard to figure out why. Anyone who hears about stealing money from foster children knows immediately, on a gut level, that it’s horrendous. And any lawmaker, including those genuinely outraged by the practice, also must know that introducing a bill to stop it will make a great press release.
Making foster children’s parents pay ransom does at least as much harm to children as stealing the Social Security money owed to some of them.
But anyone who hears about ransom may well think, on a gut level: “That’s a great idea! After all, only vicious child abusers have their kids taken, so make ‘em pay, right?”
It’s supporting ransom, not opposing it, that makes a great press release. And groups like CAI aren’t disabusing anyone of that notion. It’s a tougher fight, and the child welfare establishment is, at best, AWOL.
Correction: This column originally stated that Louisiana had done nothing to stop the so-called “orphan tax.” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry did in fact issue an executive order on this issue in February.
