Alex Adams, head of the federal government’s Administration for Children and Families, has spent the last year on a mission to get states to stop imposing an “orphan tax” on kids who end up in foster families.
The vast majority of states confiscated those children’s Social Security survivor benefit payments, figuring it would help offset the money the state paid for their foster care.
Mr. Adams found that unconscionable.
“They were literally picking the pocket of orphans that were supposedly in their care,” he said in an interview on The Washington Times podcast “The Sitdown with Alex Swoyer,” where he also defended changes to Head Start and called for stricter standards for cash welfare payments.
He brings experience from Idaho state government, where he worked for about a decade on regulatory and budget issues.
When Mr. Adams took office in November, 39 states were taking foster care orphans’ Social Security benefits. He mounted a pressure campaign, and now 25 of those states have reversed themselves and leave the money with the kids.
The average payment runs to about $1,100 a month, which over a few years can be life-changing, adding up to being able to buy a car or getting a chance at college. But for a state, it’s inconsequential “budget dust,” Mr. Adams said.
He said states such as Nebraska and Louisiana, both Republican-run, were particularly responsive to the calls to ditch the tax.
But some of the 14 holdouts were surprising. Mr. Adams specifically named Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who while a Democratic candidate for vice president in 2024 talked about his own family relying on survivor benefits when his father died, saying it allowed them to “live with dignity.”
“Tim Walz is robbing that dignity from foster youth in his custody in Minnesota,” Mr. Adams said.
Mr. Walz’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The 13 other states that still take their foster orphans’ money span the political divide: Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
The Administration for Children and Families, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, oversees roughly five dozen programs ranging from caring for unaccompanied migrant kids to administering Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — cash welfare payments.
One of Mr. Adams’ recent quests has been to revive the Head Start program, the pre-kindergarten education program for the poor that has seen enrollment slip from 1 million kids a decade ago to less than 700,000 now.
He said changes during the Obama administration piled new regulations onto Head Start service providers, making it more expensive to operate and cutting into funding to deliver services to kids.
By the time the Obama administration was through, the program dictated ratios of teachers to children, the composition of advisory committees and even the number of minutes a program had to wait before contacting a delinquent student.
“Like many administrative programs, regulation gets added. Form gets added on top of form, reporting requirement gets added on top of reporting requirement, it drove up the cost of doing business,” Mr. Adams said.
He said his changes would cut the regulatory burden, free states to implement their own rules and save $2.2 billion, which would be pumped into the program and open 236,000 new slots for children from impoverished families.
The proposal has been met with resistance — particularly a requirement that Head Start programs be based on English.
Some Head Start providers say that could be rough on children who speak only another language and need instruction in their own language to bridge the gap.
Mr. Adams’ agency said waivers from the English language rule are available, but the goal of Head Start is to have children ready to learn when they enter the regular classroom — and that means English proficiency.
Disability advocates said they worry that the slimmed-down rules for Head Start will remove the pressure to deliver individualized accommodations for disabled students.
“Without those requirements, programs may still have the same legal obligations, but families could have less certainty about how those rights will actually be carried out for their child,” said the Arc, a disability advocacy group.
In his podcast interview, Mr. Adams praised Florida’s efforts restrict spending by recipients of cash welfare, formally known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, after reports that subsidies were being spent on everything from fortune tellers to adult entertainment.
The assistant secretary said cash welfare is supposed to be a stopgap for desperate families.
“We are going to make sure this is a short-term bridge and most importantly a bridge to work, not a taxpayer-subsidized tanning bed subsidy or tattoo subsidy or any of those other things,” Mr. Adams said.
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