The Trump Administration has told states to stop the long-standing practice of taking Social Security benefit checks from some children and youth in foster care.
In a letter to governors, sent in early December, Alex Adams, an assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told states to end what he calls "the orphan tax."
Adams, who oversees federal child welfare policy, told states to quit taking Social Security survivor benefits from children in foster care. The monthly benefit is paid to a child whose mother or father has died but had worked and paid Social Security taxes.
States routinely take these checks from children and youth who are in foster care as reimbursement for the cost of a child's care — although, by law, states are required to provide foster care to all children who need it.
"There is no moral justification for why orphans should have to pay their own way," Adams told NPR. "They are not in foster care by any fault of their own. And they certainly should not be asked to pay their own bill."
An NPR investigation with The Marshall Project in 2021 exposed the issue of states taking survivor benefit checks from children in foster care.
Since then, Democratic and Republican leaders in several states and cities have moved to end the practice.
The average monthly survivor benefit check is around $1,100.
For a child who has lost a parent, that money can help stabilize a family. When the child is in foster care, the money can be set aside for when they leave care and don't have a parent to help them pay for college or rent or a car to get to a job.
Those Social Security benefits, Adams says, "might be the last resources that your deceased parents could leave behind for their children. To have those taken from that child and applied to state agency costs — that's why I call it an orphan tax. It's morally shocking to me and it's morally corrupt."
He adds: "Charles Dickens couldn't have conceived of a plot this cynical."
Justin Kasieta knows this. He told his story to Adams: That he was 13 when his father died from cancer, and the survivor benefit kept his family together for a while. But when his mother struggled with health issues, Kasieta and his four siblings went into foster care.
Kasieta says the state of Michigan cashed $18,000 of his checks over three years.
Almost every child who goes into foster care is impoverished and almost all leave foster care broke. Kasieta, now 25, got scholarships to college and has a job at a corporate investment bank in Atlanta.
"I like to make it clear that I'm really the exception to the rule," Kasieta says. "Unfortunately, the rule is that most kids will become homeless. They won't go to college. They will be unemployed. "
"I really think if we want to make stories like mine the rule instead of the exception, we have to support kids as they're coming out of foster care," he says. "You can't take their money."
Adams changed the policy in Idaho when he served as director of the state's Department of Health and Welfare. When he took the job, a colleague sent him an article about the practice of cashing survivor benefits.
"Frankly, my first reaction in Idaho was there's no way this is actually happening," he says. When he gathered his staff, they told him it was true. He moved earlier this year to end the practice.
In his new job, running the Administration for Children & Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Adams quickly sent the notification to governors of 39 remaining states to change their policies.
His boss, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., endorsed the move. "At HHS, our guiding principle is simple: every child deserves a home and a fair chance to thrive. But when state agencies stack the deck against children, we step in," Kennedy said in a statement and in a video with Adams.
At ACF, Adams oversees federal funding of child care and Head Start. Late last month, ACF halted payments for child care programs in Minnesota.
Action to guarantee foster kids their benefit checks has won support across political parties.
The Biden Administration took some steps, too. Officials at HHS and the Social Security Administration sent letters suggesting states reconsider taking survivor benefits, but left the states with leeway to act.
Now there's new momentum as conservatives — in the Trump Administration and in states — pick up the issue.
Amy Harfeld, at the Children's Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law, has long pushed for reform. She says conservatives are joining because they see the question as "government overreach into kids' private assets. Because it wasn't the state's money to take and they took it anyway."
Some state officials have argued this is a budgetary issue. They need the money.
But Adams rejects that. He was also once Idaho's budget director, where he cut programs.
"I was kind of seen as Ebenezer Scrooge when I was our state budget director. At no point would I have looked to balance our budget on the backs of orphans."
Adams says states don't need to because those Social Security survivor benefits don't add up to much. He estimates they total about $34 million nationwide.
"That's a fraction of one percent of the total child welfare bill that's paid by the federal and state and local governments," he says.
There's a similar but harder issue to resolve. In addition to survivor benefit checks, states also cash the disability checks of kids in foster care.
Unlike with survivor benefits, there's a limit on how much anyone can keep in Supplemental Security Income, or SSI benefits. As a result, state child welfare agencies would need to take extra steps to return those checks to children in foster care.
Adams says he wanted to take it on if he'd stayed in Idaho. He doesn't commit to addressing it in Washington.
A fix to return those disability checks to foster youth would likely require action by Congress and other federal agencies.
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