They're Stealing Survivor Benefits From ORPHANS in 29 States — Alex Adams Just Exposed It

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Alex, welcome to the program, the Assistant Secretary for Family Support from HHS, Alex Adams.

[00:00:06]Alex, excited to have you on. As I said a minute ago, I have so many friends that have grown up and co-workers that grew up in foster families that were just from hell. Uh and I'm sure there good ones out there. I know there are. But how what are we doing to make sure that we increase the number of people that want to take children in for foster care and also catch the bad guys?

[00:00:34]>> For sure. Well, thanks for having me, Glenn. Last November, President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump signed an executive order called Fostering the Future. It was a whole-of-government approach to improve child welfare across the board. Many agencies have a role.

[00:00:48]My agency, the Administration for Children and Families, has a specific role. We launched a campaign called A Home for Every Child, where we're trying to increase the ratio of foster homes relative to the number of foster kids.

[00:01:01]Right now, we have a national shortage.

[00:01:03]If 100 foster kids come into the system, we only have 57 homes to care for them.

[00:01:08]And what happens to the remainder is they get placed in bad situations. Many of them get placed in Airbnbs, short-term rentals, government office spaces, places that are not conducive to a safe, stable, loving family environment that many of us were fortunate to grow up in.

[00:01:25]So, we're trying to get states to commit to increasing the ratio of homes to kids. And there are certainly two ways to do that. First is to recruit and retain better, higher-quality foster families. The most important way to do so is to shrink the number of kids coming into foster care in the first place. As President Trump said, the best foster care system is one that is not needed. Yet, we're looking to ensure that foster care is used as a tool of last resort when it is in the best interest of the child, when it is necessary to protect them, but the the first and foremost goal is to preserve families, keep families together when it is safe to do so.

[00:02:05]>> Okay, so so how do you make that judgment? Because I mean, you get into foster care how? Because either all your your you have no you have no relatives left and your your parents either abandon you or died or most likely it's because the Department of Children and Families comes in and says, we got to get these kids out of here. This is a dangerous situation, right?

[00:02:28]>> Yeah, well, most states define neglect and abuse and in cases of abuse, if a court makes a finding, the child can be removed from the family and enter into foster care. I used to run a state child welfare system from Idaho as well, so we're neighbors, Glenn. And we One of the things that we started doing is we started building predictive analytics into hot into the hotline. So usually the first step in a child welfare case is a medical professional or a school personnel calls a hotline alleging neglect or abuse of a child and that sends off an entire cascade of events. That cascade of events can change the entire trajectory of a child's life and the family's life and it was very interesting to me how subjective that whole process felt.

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[00:04:22]>> So, a couple counties had experimented with predictive analytics where it brings additional data into the decision-making. It helps triage and it helps right-size the response from the agency. Idaho was the first state to go live using predictive analytics and based on that experience and others, my agency, the Administration for Children and Families, just announced competitive grants to allow up to 10 states to experiment with predictive analytics as well.

[00:04:49]We think that will right-size responses and allow agencies to to focus on the most egregious cases where safety is truly at risk. So, So, this predictive analytics, it's not to uh widen the scope, it's possibly to narrow the scope cuz I know people who have, you know, their baby fell off of the bed, which my son did, broke his collarbone.

[00:05:19]Uh I know I have a friend who same thing happened in a different state and man, they were all over the and they're good parents and they were brokenhearted. I mean, you know, um and the state was all over them for months and months and months and there was nothing going on. So, is this to try to weed those kinds of things out and get to the most serious?

[00:05:39]>> Certainly the goal. The goal is to right-size the agency's response to the cases where there is uh true situations going on where a child's safety is at risk, where foster care may be appropriate. So, that's that's one of the things. I mean, certainly, you know, we talked about preventing entry into foster care, but recruiting and retaining good high-quality foster homes is another. And too many states have littered up foster care licensing with red tape. Certainly, things are necessary. Let's do criminal background checks. Let's do child abuse and neglect registry checks and all of those things. But, too many states have littered up foster care licensing with just superfluous things like requirements for pet vaccines and other things where, when I was a former state child welfare agency director, when my choice was having a child stay in the Red Roof Inn or putting them at the family's home who was a good high-quality family, but we don't know the vaccine status of their pet rabbits, that's a very easy >> [laughter] >> Yeah.

[00:06:44]>> I think it would be.

[00:06:45]>> And now, we we had a lot of red tape like we required foster homes to have 4-ft fences around every body of water. I bet no farm in Weston has 4-ft fences along all of the irrigation canal.

[00:06:59]Let's Let's roll out the red carpet and let's make it easier to get good high-quality foster families into the system.

[00:07:06]>> Okay, so So, tell me about the orphan tax.

[00:07:10]>> Yeah, it's another thing we've been focused on and I always say this is something straight out of a Charles Dickens Dickens Dickens novel where essentially a child's parents died, that child's parents had worked, so they were entitled to some social security through earned benefits through work.

[00:07:32]Traditionally, the child would be eligible for the survivor's benefit.

[00:07:37]But, in 29 states, when that child entered foster care, the state was saying, "We are now the parent of that child. We're going to take that survivor's benefit from them." And they're essentially taxing at 100% and using it to offset permanent costs. These states were essentially stealing from orphans and using it to cover government bureaucratic overhead.

[00:08:03]So, we sent a letter to 29 states asking them to end that practice, which I find morally objectionable. And luckily, 10 states changed their laws this year.

[00:08:13]Governor Pillen in Nebraska, Governor Landry in Louisiana, Governor Braun in Indiana right away signed executive orders saying, "We are going to end this." But other states um took legislative action. In Kentucky, the Republican legislature ran a bill that Governor Beshear vetoed. Uh but luckily, the legislature in an overwhelming bipartisan fashion absolutely steamrolled Governor Beshear.

[00:08:37]And I think the house vote was 91 to 3.

[00:08:40]So, uh his scheme to tax orphans has been effectively ended in that state.

[00:08:44]But we still have um a number of states to go. Uh probably the most pernicious one is Minnesota.

[00:08:51]During the campaign, uh Governor Walz talked about how he was a recipient of survivor's benefits and how it gave him {quote} "dignity." But he is removing that dignity uh from his own orphans in his foster care system, presumably to give it to Somali pirates or whatever.

[00:09:09]So, uh we still have a long way to go and uh we're going to continue pushing on states to try to end the orphan tax nation.

[00:09:16]>> I mean, we have a Congress that's doing nothing. We have an administration that's doing everything, it seems. Um but all of this stuff can be undone um you know, with a flick of somebody else's pen. I'm really concerned about that. Um The the to me, the thing to do is to encourage um our houses of worship to get more involved to you know one of my big phrases that I use at my charity is if we want the government to do less then we have to do more.

[00:09:51]If we want our government to not be involved on all of these levels cuz they usually will screw things up, we need to have our churches do more. Do you have anything that is involving our our houses of worship and our our faiths to get involved and encouraging them to get involved in this more.

[00:10:11]>> Well, first and foremost I agree with you wholeheartedly. The message that we send to the faith-based community will make or break our success in child welfare long-term. And families of faith are the most likely to raise their hands and volunteer and run toward the foster care system, get licensed as foster families, provide preventive services that will prevent kids from entering into foster care in the first place. So, the message we send to the faith community is really critical.

[00:10:37]We've been working with the White House faith office, the HHS faith office to signal that we are open for business.

[00:10:44]I've sent letters to 13 states alleging that they have policies in place that preventing people from stepping forward that have sincerely held religious beliefs and moral convictions. And two states have committed to change their policies as a result both Vermont and Massachusetts. We're going to keep chipping away at those 11 other states.

[00:11:05]So, um as I said at the beginning, we have too few foster families nationwide. I've got 57 homes for every 100 kids. We need to be rolling out the red carpet for the faith community and the message that we send to them is so important. I'll say just as an example in my home state of Idaho, in Southeast Idaho I had 150 families for every 100 kids. There's a heavy faith influence from the church.

[00:11:32]It had It made placement much easier, relatively speaking. I had place I could I customize placement based on the needs of the child and the demonstrable capabilities of the families because in Southeast Idaho, we had a strong faith commitment and I had more homes than kids. I had homes waiting on kids, not kids waiting on homes. And we're trying to get that going nationwide.

[00:11:55]That's why I live in this community.

[00:11:56]It's a great community. Alex, thank you so much. Uh really appreciate it. Thanks for all your hard work and best of luck to you. I mean, there is there's nothing more heartbreaking than um orphans and uh child care for orphans when it goes bad. And I know a lot of people that just are great people in spite of how they were, you know, um abused in the foster care system. And I'm I'm glad to see that you're working on that. Appreciate it.

[00:12:27]Thank you for thinking for yourself [music] and being part of a movement because that's really what all of this is. If you want the full story, you want to go deeper, go to blaze.tv.com/glenn.

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