James Wood’s mother struggled with addiction, and he often found himself adrift, not knowing what day or month it was. “I didn’t understand how time worked,” he said.
When James was 14, his mother died of pneumonia, and he entered California’s foster care system. As a minor with a deceased parent and a disability, James was entitled to federal benefits, totaling $780 a month, some of which his mother had accrued during the years that she worked as a nurse.
But James never received the benefits. The government got the money instead, according to James and his adoptive father, Wayne Stidham.
It’s a long-standing practice for many states or counties to apply for the federal benefits of foster children, often without their knowledge, and then use the money to cover some of the costs of their care, according to legal advocates for children and congressional researchers.
Each year, roughly 27,000 foster children are entitled to these benefits because they have either lost a parent or have a disability. There are currently about 390,000 children in foster care in the United States.
“It’s wrong,” said James, who is now 16 and lives in Grass Valley, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. “Foster kids could make plans for that money.”
The benefits, the advocates say, should be set aside to provide additional resources for the child like summer camp or art classes. And when the child leaves foster care, they say, the money could be used to pay for college or for a security deposit to rent an apartment.
Some state and county officials say the federal funds are used to benefit the children and that if money is left over, the child receives the funds upon aging out of foster care.
A spokesperson for the health and human services department of Placer County, California, which oversaw James’ foster care, declined to comment on his situation, but said the county is required by the state to apply for the federal funds and use them for the “benefit of that individual child, which includes food, shelter, clothing, medical care and personal comfort items.”
But this practice, which has been previously brought to light by advocates at Children’s Advocacy Institute and journalists at The Marshall Project and NPR, is increasingly being questioned in courts, in Congress and by officials in the Biden administration. Many states have also been changing their laws to ensure that at least some of the children’s money is conserved.
“We see state agencies trying to fund themselves off the backs of the very children they are supposed to serve,” said Amy Harfeld, national policy director of the Children’s Advocacy Institute, which works to improve quality of life and protections for foster care youth. “It is outrageous.”
In a statement, the Social Security Administration said last week that a child’s federal benefits must be spent on their “current needs and maintenance” and that if there was money left over, the state “must conserve the remaining funds for the child’s future use.”
The agency added that it had recently issued a letter reminding state foster systems “how to use and conserve SSA benefits and to offer them assistance in complying with our requirements.”
Harfeld, who started pushing to change these practices 15 years ago, said that in many cases, the money never gets conserved by states.
She added that children whose federal benefits are collected by the state receive the same foster care services as those who do not receive the benefit.
“There is no such thing as foster care plus,” Harfeld said. “The only distinction is that some children are being charged for their care while all the other kids are having their care paid for by the state.”
Across the country, the tide is shifting.
More than a dozen states, counties and cities have established new rules or approved legislation requiring that at least some of the benefits be conserved for the children. There are also bills that have been introduced in more than a dozen other states that would mandate conserving the money or require children to be notified about their benefits.
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