Shame on U.S. – Report Recommends Withholding Federal Funds

by Tom Rose

The Shame on U.S.report has recently recommended that Congress withhold all federal child welfare funds in order to compel states to comply with child welfare laws and standards that the authors say are being violated in every state. The Children's Advocacy Institute of the San Diego School of Law in conjunction with First Star, a non-profit child abuse prevention advocacy group presented an extensive report to congress in January 2015. The report is entitled Shame on U.S.: Failings by All Three Branches of our Federal Government Leave Abused and Neglected Children Vulnerable to Further Harm.

The Shame on U.S. report carefully articulates the duties, responsibilities and failures of all three branches of governance: legislative, judicial and executive in regard to child welfare. According to the report, all three branches have profoundly failed to safeguard the safety and wellbeing of vulnerable children.

I began this series with an introduction to the Shame on U.S.report and an additional piece explaining how Wyoming measures up to the rest of the country according to these report findings. With this piece we will explore which federally funded child welfare programs are in jeopardy and how these funds work.

It is easy to dismiss the possible impact of withheld funds when most of us are unaware of where and how these funds impact real people and critical programs. It is important for citizens of Wyoming to protect the rights of the most vulnerable people who generally cannot advocate for themselves. In this instance the targeted population is at-risk children and families.

"During 2012, at least 686,000 American children were the victims of abuse or neglect. A conservative estimate of the number of those children who were killed that year by abuse or neglect is 1,640 — meaning that abuse or neglect leads to the death of at least 4–5 children every day in the U.S. "

There are dozens of federal child welfare laws designed to protect children from abuse and neglect and to provide services to the children affected. Several of these federal laws give money to states in order to enact specific programs and provide specific services. The laws are enacted by the legislative branch of government and oversight and compliance is supposed to be provided by the executive branch through law enforcement and social services. Non-compliant states are not supposed to continue to receive federal funds but the Shame on U.S. report found that although few states were compliant with minimum federal guidelines, fewer states ever had funds withheld.

Three of the largest statutory programs with state and federal level funding are: The Social Security Act's Foster Care program (Title IV-E); Child Welfare Services Program (Title IV-B); and the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA).

Title IV-E and Title IV-B are both programs administered under the Social Security Administration, the funds associated are considered Social Security Income or SSI. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reviews state welfare systems to assess state conformity with federal requirements. Programs and services affected (and funded) under these two laws include:

• Child protection services
• Foster care
• Adoption
• Family Preservation
• Family Support
• Independent Living Services

Federal law directs HHS to withhold federal matching funds if a state's program fails to substantially conform to federal law and the approved state plan. However, HHS must first afford the state an opportunity to adopt and implement a "corrective action plan" (PIP)

As a reality check for Wyoming, our state has been failing to meet federal standards and operating under a Program Improvement Plan (PIP) since about 2002. If the recommendations of the Shame on U.S. report are followed, all Title IV-E and Title IV-B funds may be withheld until Wyoming achieves compliance with federal standards.

Title IV-E funds are specifically associated with children in foster care. Many of us are not directly impacted by foster care and the authors of the Shame on U.S. report remind us that: "…foster kids are all our kids. We, through our democracy, have taken custody of them. They are ours at perhaps a level no other grouping can claim. This is one area where partisanship cannot rationally be at issue. As a nation, there can be no better test of "family values" than how we treat these abused and neglected children."

If you are reading along and thinking to yourself that all of the programs listed so far are programs run and paid for by the Department of Family Services you should definitely take time to read the full report. According to the authors:

SSA is supposed to use its payee preference list as an aid to identify and develop potential payees who would best serve the interests of the child; And most of those agencies routinely and automatically divert foster children's SSA proceeds to pay for the cost of foster care —without first determining the best use of the funds for each particular beneficiary (as a representative payee is legally obligated to do). It is difficult to understand how it is in a child's best interests to use that child's own money to reimburse the state for services that the child is under no obligation to pay for in the first place.

So let's translate that: Title IV-E funds are supposed to be allocated to the person or persons who "…best serve the interests of the child…" as in, the child's family, parent or guardian. These funds were not designed to be paid to states' Departments of Family Services even though most of these funds have been diverted from their original intentions. If states designated DFS to oversee these programs their obligation was to pass these federal funds through to the children and families affected. According to the Shame on U.S. report there were very few states measured at anywhere near compliance in regard to Title IV-E funds and Wyoming was not one of them.

Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) is another source of funding and theoretical oversight and its funding depends on regular and consistent reporting on several matrices of child welfare performance. According to the report, exceptions to the reporting requirements have become the norm and false pleas for confidentiality have resulted in hundreds of thousands of cases with no transparency and no accountability.

Families and child advocacy groups are rarely granted the court standing necessary to hold the program administrators (generally Departments of Family Services) accountable for their actions even in cases of egregious failure and abuse. This blocking of what should be the legal recourse of any affected individual or family is accomplished through bogus claims of privacy protection and regularly granted immunity from prosecution for social workers and even members of law enforcement.

What all of this really comes down to is that there are several well-funded child welfare and protection laws enacted at a federal level. These funded mandates were intended to be bi-directional in that they were to be used to genuinely address the needs of the children and families affected according to the needs and capabilities of the children and families as well as the recommendations of case workers and other appointed experts. These laws were not intended to provide endless sources of income for social workers. Somehow out of convenience or sheer laziness states have given the responsibility for monitoring accountability of these programs to the very same organization (DFS) which financially benefits from NOT passing these funds through to the intended children and their families. Do you see the problems inherent in this practice?

Because the Shame on U.S. report is currently under discussion at a national level, it is critical to understand the issues rather than being numbed by important sounding acronyms. Although the three specific funding programs discussed here are by no means the only federal funds under attack the basic premise is the same for all. If we continue to fail to substantially comply with federal law we may have millions of dollars in funding withheld from Wyoming very soon.

"The executive branch has the effective hammer to compel compliance — the withholding of federal funds. In the area of child abuse and neglect, where billions of federal dollars are involved, HHS is responsible for assuring state compliance with federal child welfare laws."