Listen closely. That giant sucking sound you hear is the foster care-industrial complex grasping for every dollar it can swipe from every possible “funding stream.”
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| George Orwell gave us the concept of doublethink. Foster care advocates perfected it. |
In child welfare, for
example, we have been told for decades that child welfare systems don’t take
away children because their families are poor. Elizabeth Bartholet, for
example, in her book, Nobody’s Children, derides
the notion that cases of neglect are “mere poverty” cases.
Sean Hughes sneered at
the notion when he wrote that “if you look at the data, it’s hard
to see any evidence of there being a pattern of foster care entry due solely to
material deprivations of poverty.” (For the record, such data are, in fact, abundant.)
But now we also are told, in an opinion column by Hughes and Angie Schwartz that every single
federal program designed to ease poverty – including housing assistance, food
stamps, even the Supplemental Security Income program for the aged, blind and
disabled – is a foster care prevention program, and every dime from every one of
them should be counted as child welfare spending.
In
other words, great gobs of money are going to prevent something – removal of
children from their parents because they are poor – that child welfare agencies
say they don’t do anyway.
Hughes
and Schwartz use this doublethink to stand reality on its head, leaving both a
written and visual impression of vast sums of money for prevention dwarfing a
tiny amount for foster care. But by this same logic, the entire Social Security
and Medicare budgets should be counted as foster care spending, because some of
that money helps grandparents providing kinship foster care to grandchildren.
In fact, as advocates of
taking away children themselves love to point out, a majority of poor families
are never subject to a child abuse or neglect allegation. Well, at least if they’re white. So if torturing logic
were a war crime, counting this spending as preventing foster care would be
Exhibit A at an international tribunal.
Where the Money Really Goes
But even if you accept
Hughes and Schwartz’s premise, the graphics accompanying the article
misrepresent reality. They portray the amount available under the Social
Services Block Grant (SSBG) as equal to the amount available under the portion
of the giant open-ended entitlement known as Title IV-E reserved exclusively
for foster care. In fact, even if every
dime allocated to the SSBG were spent exclusively on child
welfare, it still wouldn’t equal the amount spent on IV-E foster care.
Even
more egregious, the amount available under the one program that really is
targeted, in part, at preventing needless foster care, Title IV-B, is presented
as about half as much as the IV-E foster care entitlement.
In fact, total IV-B funding is less than
one-fifth what is spent on IV-E foster care, and the portion of IV-B funds
actually spent on family preservation and reunification is roughly one-eighth the
amount spent on IV-E foster care. So if the graphic were accurate, you’d barely
be able to see the box showing efforts targeted to keeping families together.
When
Hughes and Schwartz finally get almost real – in a pie chart – we find that
even counting all those other categories of spending, and even if we pretend
all the money from all those other categories spent on child welfare goes to
keeping families together, child welfare still spends more on foster care and
adoption than on everything else combined.
But
even that doesn’t tell the full story.
§ Hughes
and Schwartz portray Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) as part of
the cornucopia of funding available for prevention. But the real TANF scandal
is how it’s been turned into a child welfare slush fund, with states siphoning
off millions for adoption, foster care, child abuse investigations and even the
worst form of “care” of all, institutionalizing children.
§ More
than $750 million in SSBG funds similarly has
been diverted to foster care and child protective services.
§ As for
SSI payments: there, too, there’s a real scandal: Child welfare agencies
snatching away money that rightfully belongs to individual foster children in
order to fund their bureaucracies.
Aid for the Vulnerable is Always Vulnerable
As
I’ve noted before, this happens because of whom these different programs serve.
Programs such as TANF serve poor people who are widely despised, so they’re
easy targets for raids by a foster-care industrial complex that can pressure
government to get what it wants. Foster care, on the other hand, separates the
good children from the “bad” parents – making it far more popular. Because it
is a middle-class constituency and because a whole industry has grown up around
it – complete with high-powered lobbyists – it is far less
vulnerable to cuts.
That’s
why it’s so important that any reform to child welfare finance make foster care
funding available for prevention and family preservation while protecting family
preservation and general aid to poor people from being raided for foster care.
There’s another crucial
difference between funding, say, food stamps and funding foster care. Food
stamps don’t do harm. Often, foster
care does. That’s why incentives should be geared to preventing the
misuse and overuse of foster care.
As for
the claim that child advocates won’t argue for more money, let’s put it to the
test. Send out one of those ubiquitous “sign-on” letters with a call for simply
spending more money on everything in child welfare and see what happens.
Shall we take bets?
No,
what Hughes and Schwartz really are saying is that advocates should oppose
anything that compromises the sacred status of foster care funding by allowing
that money to be used for better alternatives.
That’s
why the only way to promote their agenda is with doublethink.
