Dump and Lump Child Welfare Funding

  

Restructuring of Child Welfare Funding

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Issue: Restructuring of Child Welfare Funding

Impact:

Currently, the federal funding streams received by the state child welfare agencies are categorical in nature and emphasize out of home placement...to maximize its revenue.

Position:

No formal position because elections are around the corner and the child welfare lobbying organizations are rallying up their clients to make political campaign donations.  A position would jeopardize a political career.

Summary:

The Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care reviewed the current funding structure and recommended the following in their May 2004 report:

• Preserve federal foster care maintenance and adoption assistance as an entitlement and expand it to all children, regardless of their birth families' income and including Indian children and children in the U.S. territories; This will never work because wealthier families can afford attorneys who would bring civil legal proceedings against child placing agencies, eventually taking a chunk out of the profit margins for these non-profits.

• Provide federal guardianship assistance to all children who leave foster care to live with a permanent legal guardian when a court has explicitly determined that neither reunification nor adoption are feasible permanence options; Guardianship, in these situations, is with the State. Instead of creating another revenue-maximization scheme, qualify all children who have been placed in foster care for Social Supplemental Income  (SSI), with special provisions of placing the money in a trust fund for the child.  Upon the age of 18 or emancipation, the child is granted the trust and continues to receive payments under current eligibility rules.

• Help states build a range of services from prevention, to treatment, to post-permanence by (1) creating a flexible, indexed grant from what is included in Title IV-B and the administration and training components of Title IV-E; and (2) allowing states to "reinvest" federal and state foster care dollars into other child welfare services if they safely reduce their use of foster care; and  

Dump and Lump: 

(1)  Transfer all Title IV-B and Title IV-E programming to Targeted Case Management of Medicaid;

(2)  Get rid of the Medicaid Moritoria;

(3)  Mandate States Medicaid Fraud Control Units to aggressively go after Medicaid Fraud in child welfare with increased recovery percentages and financial disincentives;

(4)  Expand access to the courts through increased indigent funding for legal representation, funded with Medicaid fraud recoveries; 

(5)  Create a public awareness campaign to report child welfare fraud to a newly established national child welfare complaint registry; and, 

(6)  Establish financial disincentives through reductions in the FFP for States to contractually debar, prosecute, recover and report to the HHS OIG exclusionary database.

• Encourage innovation by expanding and simplifying the federal waiver process and providing incentives to states that (1) make and maintain improvements in their child welfare workforce and (2) increase all forms of safe permanence. I promote expanding and simplifying the federal waiver process to include projects to stop Medicaid fraud in child welfare.

These Pew Commission recommendations have met with some resistance, but there continues to be an on-going dialogue in the child welfare community.  These Pew Commission recommendations were made by a bunch of folks who held financial interests in the adoption of these policies.  Michigan Supreme Court Justice, Maura Corrigan was the brain child to the conflict of interests of judicial advocacy in child welfare.  Not only would she encourage judges across the country to sit on advisory boards of these child placing agencies, but she would also promote adoption and extended lengths of stay in foster care by ruling for the case in favor of the child placing agency whose board you sit.  

Justice Corrigan was so good with benefiting from judicial advocacy, she even had her campaign to have her colleagues vote as Chief Justice funded and promoted through child welfare.

Status:  No one knows what the hell to do and that is why everyone keeps coming to my sites.

Child welfare advocates have been working to develop a proposal to reform federal financing of child welfare. This collaboration, Partnership to Protect Children and Strengthen Families, proposes to allow states to direct the unused portion of their annual allotment of Title IV-E foster care and adoption subsidy dollars to support a range of child abuse and neglect prevention services, ensure federal support to all children in foster care by eliminating the current income eligibility criteria, extend federal support to Native American children, and enhance accountability by requiring annual state reports on expenditures.

Representative Jim McDermott (D-WA) introduced the Invest in KIDS Act (HR 5466) on 2/8/08. The legislation would give states the option to include a prevention component in their foster care and adoption assistance state plan and eliminate the federal income and asset eligibility requirement.