“Foster children are the state’s children,” Diana Boyer told the Times of San Diego. “We all collectively need to be doing more to support them and ensure that they have homes and families to go to.”
Boyer, the managing director of research and policy at the County Welfare Directors Association of California, was pleading with the state’s political leaders, trying to garner more support for foster kids. These kids are having even more trouble than usual finding homes, thanks to the state’s ongoing insurance crisis, a crisis created by California politicians. As in so many other areas of public policy, the state is prioritizing the past over the future.
In 2019, California passed a law lifting the statute of limitations on sexual abuse lawsuits. The results have been a nightmare. Los Angeles last year reached a $4 billion settlement with people who claim they were victims of abuse at the county’s juvenile detention center, which closed in 2001. No doubt there were terrible things that occurred, legitimate cases of horrific abuse. But in January the Los Angeles District Attorney paused the payouts in that settlement because there was so much fraud already uncovered in the claims and they needed to do a thorough investigation.
Once states open the door to such claims, particularly eliminating the statute of limitations on them, the floodgates open. In short order, it became all but impossible to find anyone to insure child-serving agencies. In the past two years, more than two dozen nonprofits that recruit, train and support foster parents have closed, according to the California Department of Social Services.
The Nonprofits Insurance Alliance of California stopped renewing insurance policies in the state after one particularly large settlement. The state passed a temporary measure to subsidize agencies’ insurance payments, but now the money has run out and the agencies are back to square one.
Maryland is going through a similar process now, having lifted its statute of limitations in 2023. The state is now facing billions of dollars in suits against juvenile detention facilities, state-run psychiatric facilities and foster-care agencies. One state delegate explained, “There is going to be that coming-to-Jesus moment where they are going to have to draw a line.” He suggested forming some kind of fund from which to take these payments. But asked about where that money might come from, he said, “That’s a wonderful question.”
This problem was completely foreseeable, but in the rush of politicians to right past wrongs (and appease the lobby of plaintiffs’ lawyers), they didn’t give two seconds of thought to what would happen in the future. It’s not only that agencies that serve our most vulnerable children are closing down. It’s also that the money the state should be spending to help these kids is instead being spent to compensate people for wrongs committed against them decades ago.
Legislators, of course, take this approach to budgeting generally. Congress doesn’t want to tackle the problem of entitlement spending today, which is going to make it much harder for our children and grandchildren to be able to afford to raise their own families. School budgets in many states are particularly problematic. While spending on teacher salaries is not increasing very much, the amount of money devoted to pensions for retirees is skyrocketing.
According to a Reason Foundation analysis, “Inflation-adjusted K-12 education spending on employee benefits — which includes teacher pensions, health insurance, and other expenses — increased by 81.1% between 2002 and 2023, rising from $2,221 per student to $4,022 per student.”
It is not that we shouldn’t be taking care of older people. But increasingly this country is doing so at the expense of its youth. When your school system can’t afford to hire new teachers or do building repairs because all the money is tied up in retirement benefits, something has gone seriously wrong.
In part this is a problem of politics. Adults will always have the loudest voices. The people standing before us with concrete demands — including ones that require compensation for real harms — are always going to get more of our attention than the problems of some future generation. But the chickens are coming home to roost. Our leaders have bowed to public pressure and made terrible financial decisions, kicking the can down the road.
How will we find homes for foster kids when agencies that license them can’t get insurance? How will schools educate our kids when their budgets are swallowed by retirement benefits? How will our children be able to make a life for themselves when all their money is going to pay Social Security for older generations? To borrow a phrase, these are wonderful questions.