The American government has been weaponized against America’s families and children through state and county government and court systems. Federal lawmakers are ultimately responsible for overseeing the foster care system and its funding. The agency that conducts the operations and distributes federal monies is The Department of Human Services (DHS). DHS has two branches involved in child protection and custody, called Child Protective Services (CPS) and Child Support Enforcement (CSE). At the state level their operations are overseen by the Office of Economic Security, in each state, which distributes massive amounts of money from taxpayers through the Social Security Act and other federal programs and court-ordered child support from parents. State Departments of Human Services then distribute funds to local county Departments of Human Services. Most people in the United States do not give much thought to the efficacy of Child Protective Services and Child Support Enforcement. They assume that government agencies actually put the children’s best interests in these cases as top priority. The facts tell a much different, very troubling, version that DHS put the interests of the State over those of their wards.
For the purpose of this discussion, family court powers must also be included. Family courts wield incredibly broad powers over the most proprietary decisions for children, including custody, medical and educational decision making, and day-to-day decisions, even including cell phone usage, sports participation, and other picayune details of private lives. The intrusion of the government in the juvenile court cases called Dependency & Neglect (D & N) cases in foster care, and in “family court” cases, a division of probate court, is more than government overreach; this intrusion is a violation of sacred bonds, conducted without meaningful recourse or consideration. Juvenile and probate courts are administrative courts. The legal battles over who gets the children in both family and juvenile courts are designed to generate money for the courts and the states, and these two courts do not provide the same protections against the accused as criminal courts are required to do to protect alleged criminals.
Foster care is intended to provide a temporary safe place for children who may be suffering from alleged abuse, neglect, or abandonment by their biological families. The State is usually the Plaintiff, bringing the case, and the mother and father are usually on trial as Defendants. Title IV-E of the Social Security Act funds the foster care program, with services managed locally — in 50 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and Native-American tribes with approved title IV-E plans.
The Funding
In addition to direct funding for children in foster care from Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, states also IV-E administrative costs, training costs, and adoption assistance. States receive per student education funds and Medicaid health care expenditures from the federal government for foster children. But the greatest windfalls to the States are the entitlements the children themselves qualify for, including disabilities, (SSI), survivor benefits (OASDI), and Veteran’s Assistance. State agencies also penetrate funds from Medicaid for health and administrative costs associated with educational, medical, transportation, therapeutic services, pharmaceutical costs, and other related needs. Various other grants are also applied to bolster the cost of child welfare, including Prison to Parenting funding, Fatherhood Initiative, TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families),and thousands of non-profit and quasi-governmental rehabilitation and family support organizations that pass money through third- and fourth-party coffers. Just a note…Title IV-B which funds Kindred Care, a program that is designed to keep children with related family, receives a tiny portion of funding compared to IV-E. When was the last time you heard about these expenditures in the news? Only the insiders know the actual costs of the foster care empire.
Parents in D&N cases must also pay child support to the State while their children are in state custody. Imagine paying to have your own children removed from you. While most people think the money is used to pay foster parents, in fact, less than 6% is paid to foster parents. Over 94% of the Title IV-E funding is used to run the DHS investigations, court cases against parents, and privately-owned maximization companies. The state puts a million-dollar life insurance policy on each child it takes into foster care. Foster care funding generated by Congress is the domestic backbone of economic security of the government at every level. And it is a boon to private contractors profit as well!
Daniel L. Hatcher explains how pervasively the use of federal dollars is shuffled into states and then to county governments in his 2016 book, The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Children. He writes,
Further, federal IV-E funds are considered income to eligible foster children. For example, if a state claims Title IV-E funds for a foster child who is disabled and also eligible to receive Social Security SSI benefits, the Title IV-E funds are considered income to the child and thus reduce the child’s right to receive the SSI funds. Therefore, when the Title IV-E funds are claimed by a state but then redirected from the provision of foster care services to state general revenue or private profits, the state is not only undermining the purpose of federal aid but is taking income belonging to the children—causing additional possible legal and constitutional claims. Citing POMS, “SI Section 00830.410 Foster Care Payments,” Social Security Adminisration. Page 59, New York University Press.
Such siphoning of money from disabled and poor children is in opposition to mandates that require States to provide for its disabled, poor, and foster children.
Hatcher then explains how foster care money, including that taken from the children’s entitlements, is used to pay private businesses including, Maximus, Deloite, WellCare, Lockheed Martin, and Grummond, among hundreds more. These businesses develop revenue maximization programs which enlist them to perform “inherently governmental functions,” including oversight of governmental programs themselves. These massive opportunistic private businesses the coffers administer, oversee, and compete for contracts among themselves. Their duties include developing algorithms and conduct data analytics to target specific children for foster care at maximum levels. They also lobby legislatures, conduct audits for state governments of overpayments and underpayments. Among the thousands of private businesses their duties include DNA testing, drug testing , establishing paternity, running child-support collection, drug testing and much more. These companies are even paid to investigate themselves! They also make campaign contributions. These businesses are so massive that investigations, lawsuits, and fines for criminal conduct against them do not deter their growth.
In Chapter 3, “Mining Foster Children For Revenue,” Hatcher quotes Blake/ Public Consulting Group, from its SSI Eligibility Determination, Kentucky Department for Community Based Services letter accompanying proposal dated May 26, 2010 as follows :
All likely foster care candidates are scored and triaged for SSI application. We then track the results of these applications (who did/didn’t receive SSI) and incorporate this information back into our system to modify our analyses and better target potentially eligible children, (Hatcher, page 86).
What is even more shocking about the federal and state governments spending money to mine children to generate the greatest amount of federal dollars, is the premise that financial potential of children is more important than the behavior of their parents! It doesn’t matter to them that the parents are innocent of abuse or neglect! This reprehensible revenue strategy defies any facade that the removal of their children is an act of protection, or of integrity, responsibility, or compassion. When the State hires firms to maximize revenue in order to feed the State’s general funds, to target specific profiles of children, and to destroy the parent-child bond possibly forever, it is committing fraud with life-or-death consequences.
The power and discretion that judges exercise in hearings and trials is fearsome. The interface between foster care and the law is in utter turmoil. Colorado courts, for examples, use the terms “legal parent” and “natural parent” interchangeably, and the definitions are broad and vague. In the Children’s Code, Title 19, all a mother needs to do is to say that she intended to marry another person who can then be considered a parent, even if the marriage is at the time or in the future determined to be invalid.
Look at how Colorado Statute 19-1-105, the Children’s Code, removes the word MOTHER from the law:
“(1) A person is presumed to be the natural parent of a child if:
- The person and the parent who gave birth to the child are or have been married to each other or are in a civil union pursuant to article 15 of title 14.”
Colorado uses the terms “legal parent” and “natural parent” inter-changeably, and the definitions are broad and vague. In the Children’s Code, Title 19, all a mother needs to do is to “say that she intended to marry another person who can then be considered a parent, even if the marriage is at the time or in the future determined to be invalid.”
In another example, even the definition of a “parent” in the law, while laid out in tedious language and innuendo, revolves solely on who the judge decides is a parent, and thus, is a “party to the case.” Colorado Statute 19-1-105 also determines who a “natural parent” is. This term is in addition to “legal parent.” One such enigmatic definition at 19-1-105(III)(d) is
A person is presumed to be the natural parent of a child if: (d) While the child is under the age of majority, the person receives the child into the person’s home and openly holds out the child as the person’s natural child;
This presumption is so potentially dangerous that it is difficult to imagine any biological parent losing a child under the shadow cast by this law! Furthermore, if you or I let our neighbor’s child move in with us because the child needs space from her parents, we would be cited for parental interference and harboring a minor. So the judge and CPS can cherry pick who is considered a parent
To add more confusion, Title 14, the family code, provides an additional category of who can be named as parent. In Colorado Revised Statutes Section 14-10-23(c), yet another term is introduced:
a “psychological parent” is defined (c) By a person other than a parent who has had the physical care of a child for a period of one hundred eighty-two days or more, if such action is commenced within one hundred eighty-two days after the termination of such physical care.
That’s it! There are not minimal qualifications in these laws which safety, financial stability, or psychological health requirements that a judge must consider. . In many cases, judges give children to non-related persons who have outrageous backgrounds. Naming non-related persons as parents allows the state to expand the potential pool of who would be responsible for child support. However, it also provides the judge the discretion to give children to unsavory individuals.
It is clear that the parameters for who can be made a parent are muddy and obtuse. However, what is less apparent is the role that revenue maximization businesses play in lobbying legislators to make the legal terms loose, arbitrary, and open to nefarious interpretation by judges and DHS personnel. One definite effect
In fact, many of the laws that govern states are being created by “group think” in organizations such as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which develop templates for states to use throughout the nation. The “model bills” are not only used by global corporations, but by revenue maximization companies through their lobbyists in state legislatures as well. The language cited above, removing the term “mother,” was developed by groups of lawyers who then provided the language to any state that wanted to adopt it. The Center for Media and Democracy reports the following:
Through the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, global corporations and state politicians vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state laws that govern your rights. These so-called “model bills” reach into almost every area of American life and often directly benefit huge corporations. https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed
Finally, in an ultimate act of infamy, the Department of Human Services in at least 37 states uses the Colorado Memorandum of Procedures (MOP) by Dan Hall and Melinda Taylor, a document commissioned by the Colorado Supreme Court in 2003. It can be found on-line by including the author’s names. This document is the operating manual for Dependency and Neglect cases as it provides the guidelines for foster care case management. It also includes policy, the most disturbing of which can be found on page 7, Under Risks for Reunification. It states that a possible risk of returning the child back to the parent is “prior cases with similar issues.” This risk means that if any member of the child or child’s family has EVER had a case opened against them, including siblings, aunts, uncles, grand-parents, stepparents, in-laws, etc., the children in the current case, may not be returned. I call this foster class warfare. A second risk cited in the MOP is very controversial. “A parent with a history of sexual abuse against a child if the parent is in denial” will not be given his/her child back. The meaning of this section is that the state allows the child to be returned to a parent who has sexually assaulted the child as long as the parent admits it!
Applying the flexibility the judge has to determine who is defined as a “parent,” the Memorandum of Procedures policy is not referring simply to biological parents who physically and/or sexually assault their children. The expanded and arbitrary definitions of “parent” used in state courts provide for many other individuals, including relatives and non-biologically related candidates to be reunified with “their” children even if they assault them! Under the foster care and family court systems, the judge determines who is a psychological parent, a natural parent or a legal parent. In an obscene application of the confusion surrounding parenting, and the stated intentions of reunification, a psychological parent or a foster parent or anyone wanting custody of the child who meets these minimal or non-existent requirements can be given a child back as long as the individual has admitted to sexually assaulting the child. And that is exactly what happens. It appears that the child in these cases ends up with the most dangerous living situation available.
Another inane situation unfolds when a parent or grandparent has to adopt their own child back in a case where a case from Dependency court terminated the son or daughter’s parental rights, but the placement into foster care or adoption, fails.