Child Protective Services (CPS) and the family court often gets accused of profiting off of children and families and Title IV of the Social Security Act is commonly used to explain how…but is it true?
CPS and the courts vehemently deny this, but the real answer is…there is some truth to it. It’s complicated. Let’s go through exactly how it works:
Title IV of the Social Security Act governs funding for a series of federal programs administered by the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) divided into four parts: Part A governs the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) welfare benefit program; Part B covers funding for child welfare services including prevention services, adoption and general child and family services. Part C has since been repealed. Part D covers child support and paternity. Finally, Part E covers child maltreatment prevention, foster care, and permanency placement. The program was enacted in 1935 as part of the Social Security Act and is currently the single largest federal financial support for in America for the systems it supports.
CPS is funded using a combination of municipal, state and federal taxpayer funds. Specific services, such as foster care, kinship care, adoption, and prevention services are funded using Part E- with additional provisions included in Part B. First, CPS either removes a child and places them in foster or kinship care or approves a family to receive prevention services. Prevention services are a wide range of in-home supportive services such as psychotherapy, domestic violence counseling, vocational counseling, parenting skills training, case management and more provided by CPS-contracted non-profit agencies as outlined in the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA). Less commonly, CPS may provide these services directly. Then, paperwork is filed and submitted to HHS, who, after approving the application for funding, reimburses CPS. Reimbursement varies based on the age of the child(ren) and the state in which they reside.
In foster care, Title IV subsidies help pay for CPS-contracted foster care case management agencies to manage the foster case cases (less commonly, CPS may provide these services directly, as well) and subsidies may be paid to foster or kinship care families for the purposes of covering the monetary expenses for the foster child(ren). Whether the subsidies are actually used to pay for such expenses is not always clear. In the case of prevention services, the money is used to pay for CPS-contracted prevention services agencies to provide their services to families (or, if CPS provides those services directly, it is use to pay for the costs of providing those services).
Child support enforcement is another matter. Many single parents (most commonly mothers) receive public welfare benefits like Medicaid, SSI (Social Security Income), and/or WIC (Food Stamps for Women/Infants/Children) authorized under Part A and the government will often go after fathers to recoup those costs funded through Part B in the form of child support if not already. Part D provides funding and a framework for states to track down, identify, collect, distribute, and enforce child support from non-custodial parents, as well as the provision of additional government benefits and visitation.
It sounds legitimate, but the ulterior motives are hidden in the details. CPS agencies are each housed in the executive branch of the state or municipality they serve. As government agencies, they are inherently political. The foster care case management and prevention services, whether provided by CPS-contracted agencies or by CPS directly, are paid for with taxpayer funds. For CPS employees, the cost is typically negotiated with a public sector union and for contractors, it is negotiated with between the government and the private agency contractors. Often, there is lobbying and favoritism involved in these lucrative contracts, which can make them particularly expensive- even when compared to B2B (Business to Business) contracts, rather than B2G (Business to Government). If the contracts get more expensive and exceed CPS’ budget each year, more funding is needed to pay the employees or agencies. This is how Title IV-E reimbursement rates increase. The way abuse and neglect are defined is so broad and inconsistent across states that a quota is not needed to have the funding to fulfill these contracts. While CPS employees and contractor employees are not directly paid per child they remove or per family they put into services, CPS does get money to pay for subsidies and services, so there is an interest.
Child support enforcement is a mess, too. A non-custodial parent might not even be related to the child- it could be an error on the birth certificate or that the father dated the mother for a time, or he might not even know his child exists- but he can still be held responsible. Part D doesn’t hide this. If the mother is the breadwinner and the father is the custodial parent, she could be compelled, too. Money can be withheld from tax refunds, professional licenses can be suspended and one can even be thrown in jail for failing to pay child support. All of the personnel and programs in the family court and beyond designed to hunt down and recoup financial payment from non-custodial parents have to be funded somehow- and Title IV of the Social Security Act is one of the main ways it’s done.
In addition to providing funding for foster care and prevention services, Part E also provides adoption assistance to families who are seeking to adopt. Adoption assistance programs provide financial assistance to families to help them cover the costs associated with adopting a child and can be available both pre- and post-adoption. These funds may be used to cover legal fees, court costs, and adoption-related counseling or therapy. The interest CPS has here is in complying with the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997, which requires CPS to file a Termination of Parental Rights (TPR) petition if a child has been in foster care for 15 of the past 22 months. This is intended to limit the time a child is in foster care. With high caseloads and overwhelmed courts, the process of reunification can be extremely slow- making it easy for foster care cases to miss the ASFA deadline and require a TPR petition to be filed.
Title IV of the Social Security Act began like most laws: with good intentions. Today, how the money is spent and the political motivations behind its growth are extremely concerning. Title IV shows just how easy it is for a well-intended law to be used in ways that may not be in the best interests of those it was intended to serve. When activists argue CPS is getting paid to traffic children, CPS argues it is just paying for services. The same goes for parental rights advocates who call out the unfair and often convoluted logic of the child support enforcement system, too. However, the devil is in the details: while doesn’t directly get paid per child when it comes to child support or foster care, for example, there are government officials and institutions that do stand to benefit on a per-capita basis. Increased surveillance, punitive actions, and expensive contracts at taxpayer expense do not favor families- they favor CPS, the family and juvenile courts, and the contractors working for them.