Don’t believe the hype. The Family First Act is a step backwards for child welfare finance reform

Perhaps you’ve heard. Tacked onto the bill that averted another government shutdown is a child welfare finance “reform” measure called the Family First Prevention Services Act.

The bill was thought to be dead. It was killed last year by what one reformer who transformed his own institution years ago called the group home industry – the collection of private agencies typically paid for every day they hold foster children in the worst form of care, group homes and institutions -- and their public sector allies.

But it came back to life as part of the process of keeping the government open.  Now it’s law.

One might expect advocates of family preservation to celebrate, and some almost certainly will. The bill allows some federal money once restricted to funding foster care to be used for better alternatives.  And, in theory, it curbs federal funding for group homes and institutions.

Some very good child welfare reformers favor the bill. The best case for it was made by one of those reformers, Jeremy Kohomban. He transformed what was once one of the nation’s most regressive residential treatment centers, Children’s Village, in New York, into a leader in emphasizing trying to help children in their own homes or foster homes. Here’s his case for the bill.

Setting up prevention to fail

But I disagree.  In 2016, I wrote that the range of prevention services that could be funded under Family Frist was tiny, and there were absurd restrictions on which programs within that range could get federal aid. And instead of limiting group homes and institutions, I argued that the bill was so weak that it actually strengthened them, creating a whole category of institution that would be, in effect, sanctified in federal law.

So it’s no wonder that in 2016, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that only $130 million in additional federal funds would go to prevention each year – a drop in the bucket compared to the billions spent on foster care. CBO also estimated that the proportion of foster children in group homes and institutions would barely change – declining from 14 percent to 11 percent – over ten years.

So what the bill really does is set prevention up to fail.  When these minor changes don’t do much to curb needless foster care, those wedded to a take-the-child-and-run approach will say See? Changing financial incentives didn’t work, all those children must really need to be in foster care.  In fact, all those kids will still be in foster care because there was almost no real change in financial incentives.

A “presents for pimps” loophole

Nevertheless, the group home industry insisted that even the slightest restriction on their ability to warehouse children in the very worst form of “care” was more than they could handle.

Desperate to get something passed, supporters caved on issue after issue:

● They weakened a provision requiring institutions that supposedly engage in residential treatment to have actual clinical staff on site.

● They added a  “presents for pimps” loophole – creating a whole new category of institution exempt from restrictions on federal funding.

That was in 2016.

The new law

In one respect, the version that just became law may be a little better: although the types of prevention that can be funded are as limited as ever, the standards for specific programs don’t seem to be as onerous.

But in at least one key respect, possibly two, the version that just became law is even worse.

● There’s a provision (Section 2661) allowing funds from a much smaller existing “family support services” program to be diverted to “supporting and retaining foster families for children.” (I’m not sure if this is new, or if I’d simply overlooked it in previous versions.)

● States can delay the minor restrictions on funds for group homes and institutions for two years (though if they did that, they’d also have to forego the limited new prevention funding).  In fact, this is closer to a four-year delay.  The bill’s provisions concerning group homes don’t take effect until October 1, 2019 – states opting to delay would not be affected until October 1, 2021.

This gives the group home industry lots and lots of time to weaken the law still further.

Goldilocks is wrong

And finally, as I wrote last year: Please, spare us all the Goldilocks defense; the one that goes, if some people think the law is too tough and other people think it’s not tough enough, it must be juuuuuuuuust right.

No. The fact that some in the group home industry have the gall to claim this law is too tough just shows how spoiled they’ve gotten after all those years getting to eat all the porridge.

You can’t fix child welfare spending with distorted data and doublethink

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.”

George Orwell gave us the concept of  doublethink.
Foster care advocates perfected it.

 In 1984, George Orwell defined “doublethink” as holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting them both.

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.

Family First Act institutionalizes institutions, sets up prevention to fail

Now that there finally is a bill, it is clear who has the greatest reason to oppose the so-called Family First Prevention Services Act: environmentalists.

That’s because of how many forests will be destroyed to provide the paper for all the new plans, reports and assorted other documents that the bill mandates as a substitute for real change.

In some respects, discussed below, the bill is an improvement over previous versions, and I’m sure those who worked so hard to craft this legislation meant well. But mostly, the Family First Act proposes to solve the problems of child welfare by throwing paperwork at them.

Provide a plan for this, a certification for that, and a report on something else, and America’s foster-care-industrial complex can keep doing what it’s been doing for more than a century: failing vulnerable children.

The bill also enshrines in law the double standard that pervades American child welfare: services to keep families together must meet tests that are almost impossibly high before being deemed “evidence-based.” But to keep right on using the worst form of care, group homes and institutions, no evidence is required; just more paperwork.

So it’s no wonder most of the foster-care-industrial complex favors the bill, and those who don’t want to make it even weaker.

One major supporter of the bill is the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, a group that has little to do with either one. Rather, it is a trade association made up largely of private agencies that oversee foster homes and run group homes and institutions. These agencies typically are paid for each day they hold a child in foster care. They know a good deal when they see one.

Institutionalizing Institutionalization

In the earliest stages of developing what would become the Families First Act, there was an idea for dealing with the misuse and overuse of institutions that was simple and smart: Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) suggested simply refusing to fund such placements for any child under age 13. Other smart proposals over the years have included reducing federal aid for institutionalization month by month – the longer the placement the fewer the dollars.

But once the foster-care-industrial complex got through with it, what emerged was a muddled mess.

If the bill becomes law, the federal government would stop reimbursing states for part of the cost of group home and institutional placement after two weeks. But it creates a giant loophole: funding would continue for something called a “Qualified Residential Treatment Program.”

What does it take to become a QRTP?  Very little:

§  Write lots and lots of plans filled with appropriate buzzwords. (Drop the word “trauma-informed” into every third paragraph and you should be fine.)

§  Hire nurses during working hours and have them on call the rest of the time.

§  Get a rubber-stamp seal-of-approval from an accrediting agency. I say rubber-stamp because one of the groups a QRTP can choose is the so-called “Council on Accreditation.” COA is a creation of another agency trade association, the Child Welfare League of America. Its “site visits” are announced well in advance and “accreditors” interview people who can be hand-picked by the agency under examination. Everything else is based on the agency’s paperwork. COA doesn’t accredit agencies, it accredits file cabinets.

Perhaps that’s why, in the 1990s, COA accredited a private agency in Ohio in which, the Dayton Daily News found, children lived in squalid group homes and the agency director had a conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. More recently, COA accredited this agency.

Take these simple steps and voila! That cruddy old group home is now a “Qualified Residential Treatment Program”!

Similarly, the Family First Act goes on for paragraphs about how an independent “qualified individual” will determine if a child needs to be institutionalized; unless, that is, the public child welfare agency gives its solemn word that someone associated with the institution itself can do the evaluation and still be objective. Then, the independence requirement can be “waived” by the Department of Health and Human Services.

In short, the Family First Act institutionalizes the process of institutionalization.

Perhaps that’s why the Congressional Budget Office estimates that, were it to become law, the Family First Act would barely reduce the proportion of institutionalized foster children on any given day. It would decline from the current 14 percent to 11 percent, over ten years.

Yet even these minimal requirements apparently are too onerous for some providers of institutional care and their acolytes in government.

Whatever Happened to “Evidence-Based”?

What is missing in these requirements for becoming a “Qualified Residential Treatment Program” is anything forcing the “providers” to prove that what they provide actually helps children.

There’s a reason for that, namely

§  A review of the scholarly literature by the office of the U.S. Surgeon General found only “weak evidence” for the success of residential treatment.

§  A second review, by the University of North Carolina, found “when community-based services are available, they provide outcomes that are equivalent, at least [to residential treatment].”

§  Still another study, of children institutionalized for mental health problems, found that seven years after discharge from residential treatment, 75 percent of the children were back in the only settings they could understand: institutions. They were in psychiatric centers or jails.

§  Even former CWLA President Shay Bilchik admitted there is a lack of “good research” showing residential treatment’s effectiveness and “we find it hard to demonstrate success…” (though he claimed this was only because foundations don’t want to fund the research and children aren’t institutionalized soon enough.)

Some of those who think even the minimal restrictions in the Family First Act go too far don’t even pretend that institutionalization is good for children. Rather, they claim there’s no alternative because they can’t recruit enough foster homes.

But, as I’ve noted before, the real problem is not too few foster parents, it’s too many foster children. For example, Los Angeles seems to be the epicenter of the whining about the congregate care restrictions. But Los Angeles takes away children at triple the rate of Chicago, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. Yet it’s Illinois where independent court-appointed monitors have found that reforms emphasizing family preservation improved child safety.

No Real Help for Prevention

That brings me to the second set of failings in the bill: the increased support for prevention is minimal and largely misdirected.

For starters, while residential treatment programs need provide no evidence at all of effectiveness to be funded, 50 percent of all new prevention spending under the bill would have to go to programs that meet a standard, created for clinical trials in medicine, so high that almost nothing qualifies. (This is an improvement from previous drafts, where it was 100 percent.)

Lisbeth Schorr, senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Policy, has several excellent articles on why this is an unwise approach in human services. And in child welfare, there is the additional problem of a profound bias among many of the “scholars.”

Even worse, the kinds of programs that can be funded are limited to three categories, two of which, mental health and parenting skills, are precisely the “public health approach” that has failed for more than a century. So after the reams of new paperwork required under this section are filed and it turns out that this failed approach failed again, it will become an excuse for the advocates of traumatizing children with needless foster care to run back to Congress and demand even more money to warehouse even more children in foster care. This bill doesn’t aid alternatives; it sets them up to fail.

In contrast, even though study after study finds that 30 percent of America’s foster children could be home right now if their families simply had decent housing, housing aid was eliminated from the bill early on. There is not even funding for the kinds of simple, sensible and very inexpensive approaches advocated by Joanne Samuel Goldblum in the Chroniclelast month.

So again, it’s no wonder the CBO thinks the new spending on prevention will be a drop in the bucket – an average of $130 million per year. Even with that new funding, the federal government still would spend vastly more on tearing families apart than on trying to keep them together.

What’s Good About the Bill

There is one thing the bill gets right: the third category of funds for which states could get reimbursement under the Families First Act is drug treatment. That almost certainly got into the bill, and probably has appeal to most members of Congress, because the latest “drug plague” – opioid addiction – has a whiter, more affluent face than the drug plagues that preceded it.

The other argument for the bill is that it’s better than nothing, and a floor on which one can build in the future.

But it’s not better than the waivers available to states now, which allow them to spend a lot more money on a much wider variety of alternatives to foster care. The waiver process, which is set to expire in 2019, also includes a vital incentive that Family First Act lacks: it caps the giant open-ended entitlement to foster-care funding.

This bill is more likely to be a ceiling than a floor. Once the bill becomes law, all the pressure for real reform would go away, and the ceiling will only get lower. Because from here, the bill can only get worse. Having come so far, the members of Congress behind this bill are likely to appease those who want to make the congregate-care restrictions even weaker, rather than see the whole thing fall apart.

Better Alternatives

I’ve written elsewhere about the best long-term alternative: end the foster-care entitlementand turn it into grants indexed to inflation that states can use for foster care and for better alternatives.

Short term, Congress should

§  Salvage the one part of the Family First Act everyone seems to agree on and provide $130 million per year in additional funding for drug treatment – targeted toward families at risk of losing their children to foster care.

§  Restore the federal government’s authority to grant child welfare waivers, which has expired, with current waivers scheduled to end in 2019.

As for whether we ever can really get major reform, there is one hope: the lookback. That’s the clumsy, bureaucratic detail that has the effect of reducing the number of children eligible for federal foster-care assistance by a tiny amount each year. If nothing at all is done, the federal government will be out of the foster-care funding business in about half a century or so.

The longer this persists, the greater the pressure on the foster-care-industrial complex to accept real reform, not a pale imitation like the Family First Act.

The IV-E “lookback” is a bureaucratic nightmare. Here’s why we should keep it.

Suppose for a moment you’re on a runaway train. It’s out of control, the speed keeps increasing and there’s a sharp bend in the tracks ahead. But the only brake on the train is a clumsy, complicated contraption that only Rube Goldberg could love.

You’d probably try to use the brake anyway.

As I’ve argued in my previous two columns about child welfare finance for this project, there are profound personal, political and financial incentives to needlessly tear apart families and consign the children to the chaos of foster care. There are brave people who push back against these incentives, and sometimes they succeed.

But there are only two real brakes on this runaway train. One option is a waiver, allowing funds from Title IV-E, the giant open-ended entitlement program for foster care, to be spent on better alternatives as well.

Nationally, there’s something called “the look back.” Before a state can be reimbursed for much of the cost of a given placement under Title IV-E, the state has to “look back” and determine whether the birth parents from whom the child was taken would have qualified for Aid to Families with Dependent Children – based on income limits in effect when that program was abolished in 1996. Because eligibility is linked to this standard, getting rid of this approach is called “delinking.”

The look back is a clumsy, cumbersome, bureaucratic brake.

But it’s the only national brake we’ve got on a structure filled with incentives for foster care. And in recent years, it’s begun proving its value.

Just ask Sean Hughes. In one of his columns for this project, he wrote that “for the first time ever, proposals to create child welfare block grants are originating from within the advocacy community itself.”

That’s not because the foster-care industrial complex – full of private agencies living off of endless per diem payments for holding children in foster care, and their army of trade associations, high-powered lobbyists and consultants – suddenly saw the light.

No, to the extent that anyone in mainstream child welfare is showing any flexibility on this issue, it’s thanks to the look back. Because thanks to the look back, if nothing at all changes, the federal government will be out of the funding-for-foster-care business in about half a century or so.

“I Suspect” Is Not An Evidence-Based Practice

The look back is part of the reason states lost out on $5 billion between 2005 and 2010, when Congress refused to consider letting states volunteer to take their IV-E money as a flat grant. The other reason, of course, was that states succeeded in reducing the number of children in foster care.

Hughes argues that can’t possibly continue. He writes:

I suspect that we’ve pushed foster care caseloads as low as we can without compromising child safety, especially since there is no data suggesting that maltreatment rates themselves have decreased.

“I suspect” is not an evidence-based practice, suitable for decision-making. And there are several problems with Hughes’ “suspicion.”

First, there are data showing that maltreatment rates have declined. As I noted in my previous column, the federal government’s annual “child maltreatment” reports show that rates of known child abuse peaked in 1993, they’ve declined in most years since, and never returned to that level.

And it’s known child abuse that is relevant here, since a state can’t take away an allegedly maltreated child it doesn’t know about. In addition, the federal government’s most recent National Incidence Study shows that child abuse not reported to authorities also is declining.

Iowa: Cesspool of Depravity?

Furthermore, while many factors contribute to increases and decreases in the number of children taken from their homes, actual child abuse ranks low on the list.

I know of no evidence that people in one state are vastly more prone to abusing children than people in another. Yet rates of child removal vary enormously, and that’s true even when you factor in rates of child poverty.

For example, Iowa tears apart families at a rate four times higher than Illinois. But it’s Illinois where independent, court-appointed monitors found that rebuilding the system to emphasize family preservation improved child safety.

So either Iowa is a cesspool of depravity with four times as much child abuse as Illinois, or Iowa is taking away too many children.

There are similar wide differences among counties within a state and among big cities. Phoenix takes away children at four times the rate of New York City. Does anybody seriously believe children in Phoenix are four times safer from abuse than children in New York?

Not only do rates of removal vary from place to place, they can skyrocket for reasons unrelated to actual child abuse. There is no evidence that actual child abuse in Florida shot up 50 percent between 1998 and 1999, yet 50 percent more children were torn from their homes in that time. Because that’s how child welfare systems often respond when horror story cases make headlines.

A high rate of removal almost always indicates a bad child welfare system. But a low rate of removal doesn’t necessarily indicate a good one. One has to achieve it the right way, as in Illinois and Alabama, another state where independent monitors found that a family preservation approach improved child safety. (The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law brought the lawsuit that led to the Alabama reforms. The center's legal director is a member of NCCPR's volunteer Board of Directors.)

If every state took away children at the same rate as Alabama, instead of taking away 264,000 children in a single year, we would take fewer than 169,000. If every place in America took away children at the rate of Chicago, fewer than 79,000 children would be taken away nationwide.

So there is, in fact, plenty of room to do more, by following the lead of places that already have done it while improving child safety. But it is extremely difficult to change child welfare without changing financial incentives. And “de-linking” would move the incentives the wrong way.

If the look back simply ended, funding for the foster-care entitlement would more than double. No matter how many children a state took away, a large part of the expense would be covered for every single child. And while foster care costs more in total dollars, that kind of reimbursement can make it cheaper for a state or county than safe, proven alternatives for which the state must pick up the entire tab.

Add that to the existing personal and political incentives, and the foster care population would skyrocket.

Another option, presented as cost-neutral, is to end the look back but reduce the reimbursement rate per case. But that’s not really cost-neutral. With the one brake on removing more and more children gone, more and more children would be removed. So the cost to the federal government will go up.

Either way, de-linking equals unlimited feeding time for a foster care-industrial complex led by private agencies whose very survival depends on getting paid for taking in more children and holding them in care longer.

Right now, our largest single commitment of federal funds to our most vulnerable children comes only after we tear them from everyone they know and love. That’s not something to be proud of. That’s an obscenity.

Eliminating the look back would, at a minimum, perpetuate that obscenity.

This analysis originally appeared as part of a series in the Chronicle of Social Change series entitled: “Dollars and Priorities: The Financing of Child Welfare” where it can still be found - for the moment. Since the Chronicle, the Fox News of child welfare, has taken to suddenly moving much of my work behind a paywall, I'm reprinting it here, with some changes to the links.

Don’t be afraid of the Block Grant Bogeyman

In my previous column on child welfare finance reform, I wrote about the incentives that push governments toward needlessly tearing apart families. Those incentives exist for everyone from the frontline caseworker to the child welfare agency chief.

There are political incentives linked to the popularity that comes with “cracking down on child abuse” versus the price to be paid for trying to help families in which the parents have been demonized. And, of course, the financial incentives: the huge, open-ended entitlement under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act that allows states to be reimbursed for a large share of the cost of foster care for every eligible child.

With all the incentives, it’s no wonder that poverty is so often confused with neglect and so many children are needlessly consigned to the chaos of foster care.

Yes, sometimes child welfare systems will swim against that tide. Once in a while, a child welfare leader, and the governor who appointed that leader, will demonstrate amazing courage. Occasionally – well, twice, actually – class-action lawsuits lead to exceptionally enlightened settlements.

But all it takes is for the governor to change and more cowardly leadership to cave in to demagogic news coverage, and it’s back to business as usual.

So it’s no wonder that when Prof. Leroy Pelton, former director of the School of Social Work at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, traced the rise and fall of foster care rates through most of the 20^th century in his 1991 book, For Reasons of Poverty, he found that the single biggest factor was financial incentive. More recently, the rate of known child abuse in this country peaked in 1993. Yet entries into foster care did not start to decline until 2006, and now entries are increasing again.

Something is needed to push back.

Opening up the current IV-E entitlement to “preventive services,” as is proposed under the “Family First Act,” won’t do it. For starters, from what little is known so far, it seems the bill will reimburse a very limited range of services (mostly those geared to making the helpers feel good rather than the concrete services most families need) and for a very limited time. And the knives are already out for another part of the bill that would curb the use of group homes and institutions.

But even if that bill were more generous, there is no way that overwhelmingly poor families who are disproportionately people of color and who are viewed by the general public as the worst of the worst can compete for the same pot of money against more affluent, more-likely-to-be-white foster parents, group homes, institutions and the foster care industrial complex that stands behind them.

Waivers help a little – Sean Hughes agreed in 2013, but now he’s against them – but there needs to be a much more powerful brake on the profound incentives to take the child and run. That means there must come a point where governors and mayors are told in effect: If you want to take away more and more children needlessly, destroying the lives of many of those children, then you’re going to have to pick up the tab yourselves.

But whenever anyone tries to change the way the federal government pays for child welfare services, the response is the same scary refrain: If you change our sacred “entitlement” to foster care money, you’ll be creating a block grant – and we all know what that means!

It’s especially useful for trying to scare big government tax-and-spend liberals like me. But it’s about as real as the bogeyman a child may think is under his bed.

Consider the two most recent proposals that opponents labeled “block grants,” both of them more than a decade old.

One, championed by former California Congressman Wally Herger (R), would have given states all the foster care funding they then were receiving under the IV-E entitlement, plus annual increases for inflation.

But states no longer would get more money for taking away more children. The plan would have applied only to IV-E, and would not have folded in any other funding streams. Any savings from reducing foster care would have to be plowed back into child welfare.

The foster care industrial complex was apoplectic.

Too bad. Because the Congressional Research Service later estimated that had this become law, states would have gotten $5 billion more in funding between 2005 and 2010 than they actually got by clinging to the “entitlement.”

The George W. Bush administration proposed a variation: a voluntary program in which states that wanted the option could negotiate a flat amount with the federal government. There would be annual increases for inflation. Both sides would be locked into the deal for five years. But any state that didn’t like the terms could keep the entitlement – and lose out on its share of what turned out to be a $5 billion bonanza.

The foster care industrial complex was still apoplectic, which raises the question: What part of “voluntary” don’t they understand?

Unfortunately, those who conjure up the Block Grant Bogeyman did not learn from their $5 billion blunder. So let’s look more closely at those so-called “block grant” proposals.

For starters, they weren’t block grants.

Back when the modern era of block grants began, in the Nixon administration, large numbers of different funding streams were thrown together, and then the total dollar amount was cut.  In contrast, the flexibility plans dealt with just one funding stream, Title IV-E, allowing those funds to be spent not only on foster care, but also on better alternatives. And there was no cut in funding.

To which the Block Grant Bogeyman replies: What about the future? After all, look what happened to the Social Services Block Grant and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. Block grants are easier to cut! Beware! Beware!

But entitlements are just as easy to cut; you simply change the percentage of costs to which the state is “entitled.” It requires no constitutional amendment or super majority. In contrast, the Bush administration plan would have locked in the federal government to five-year contracts with every state that volunteered. For those five years, those funds really couldn’t be cut.

Whether or not programs are cut has nothing to do with the funding mechanism; it has to do with whom they serve. SSBG and TANF serve poor people who are widely despised – many of the same people served by prevention and family preservation programs – so they get starved.

Foster care 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.

But having been scared off by the Block Grant Bogeyman, states lost out on an opportunity to gain $5 billion more in child welfare funding.

To which the Block Grant Bogeyman would reply: Yes, but what if the number of kids in foster care goes up?

But foster care is not a force of nature. It’s the result of decisions made by human beings. Were IV-E funding not an entitlement, states would have an incentive to invest in things like comprehensive drug treatment programs. That way, they wouldn’t have to rip apart more families every time a new “drug plague” sweeps across the nation – something that happens every few years, always accompanied by hysterical news accounts declaring it to be the Worst Drug Plague Ever.

If IV-E were not an entitlement, states would have an incentive to invest in rent subsidies, to help the 30 percent of foster children who could be home right now if their families just had decent housing.  They would have an incentive to invest in child care so thousands of children wouldn’t be taken every year because of “lack of supervision” charges.

But foster care is an industry, consisting of worthless residential treatment centers and all those group homes and all those providers. Some know better, and others have persuaded themselves that all those children really, truly must be in foster care. When there’s so much at stake, rationalization is powerful.

So they conjure up the Block Grant Bogeyman to scare us back to the status quo: a take-the-child-and-run system of child welfare that, as one study found, churns out walking wounded four times out of five.

Now that’s something to be scared of.

This analysis originally appeared as part of a series in the Chronicle of Social Change entitled: “Dollars and Priorities: The Financing of Child Welfare” where it can still be found - for the moment. Since the Chronicle, the Fox News of child welfare, has taken to suddenly moving much of my work behind a paywall, I'm reprinting it here, with some updates and changes to the links.