Children in foster care often face serious challenges when they return to their families or turn 18 and age out of the system. One of them is a nefarious practice by the very government agencies that are supposed to attend to their welfare.

Some kids entering foster care are eligible for the Social Security death benefit after a parent has died, and others are eligible for Social Security Supplemental Income benefits. Somewhere between 10% and 20% of all foster children are eligible, according to the Social Security Administration, about 27,000 children.

But many of them never receive the benefits. Even though federal regulations for the program hold that government child-welfare agencies are dead last on the list of entities eligible to receive the benefits in behalf of minors, those agencies often claim the funds to offset their placement and maintenance costs.

In effect, the practice results in foster children paying for their own foster care, even though that care is the government’s responsibility by definition.

Philadelphia’s child welfare agency, for example, collected about $5 million a year in foster children’s Social Security money until city council outlawed it in 2022.

After National Public Radio and the Marshall Project revealed in 2021 that 49 states engaged in the practice, 15 states and many other local governments halted the practice.

Congress should make that universal by legislating specifically that all Social Security benefits designated for foster children should go to their individual protected accounts until they reach 18.

— Tribune News Service