Former public safety secretary ‘shocked’ by reports that DCF puts foster youth’s funds into state coffers

Andrea Cabral, Massachusetts’ former secretary of public safety, says she was “shocked” by the recent reports that Massachusetts government has long diverted funds for children in foster care to the state’s coffers.

The Department of Children and Families puts the majority of the money from those children who receive social security benefits into the state’s general fund. These funds, intended for children with disabilities or those who have experienced the loss of a parent, have exceeded $15 million in the past three years, the Boston Globe found.

“I sort of think of myself who’s not easily shocked. This actually shocked me,” Cabral said on Boston Public Radio Wednesday. “While it’s shocking, in some ways it’s not surprising. Unfortunately, when you’re in government, the notion of what the general fund is entitled to is read very, very, very expansively.”

Federal funds taken out of the children’s hands could be put toward education or housing once they age out of the foster care system. Many struggle to find stable housing or become homeless in the years after leaving foster homes. One study estimated that roughly one-third of foster youth were homeless at least once by the time they turned 26.

“I always thought DCF always came under the gun, was routinely underfunded and expected its people to jump faster and leap higher with a fraction of the money,” Cabral said, saying that she has often defended the agency. “But in this particular case, DCF knows the challenges that kids who age out of foster care face — particularly the financial ones. Inability to continue education, homelessness, drug addiction — all of those things.”

Cabral says the state could have set up bank accounts for the children in its care, like savings accounts designed for future education expenses or people with disabilities.

“DCF put it into the general fund, which means that the money that was designed to go to these kids went for other legislative priorities — having absolutely nothing to do with them,” she said.

DCF spokesperson Andrea Grossman has defended the agency’s actions, writing in a statement to the Globe that the agency “complies with all current federal laws regarding the use of Social Security benefits for children in foster care.”

Cabral says she assumes there will be a lawsuit on its way.

“I actually think that all of these kids are entitled to those benefits that they didn’t receive, no matter how old they are now,” she said. “It’s almost a difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law in terms of how the Social Security Administration intended for these benefits to go to these kids.”

Reporting from NPR and the Marshall Project in 2021 showed that the majority of states take a similar approach to the benefits. Since then, the Globe reports, a few states have pushed forward legislation that would ban the practice.

In Massachusetts, lawmakers introduced a bill earlier this year that would mandate increased documentation and reporting procedures around the benefits granted to children under state custody.

Cabral underscored that, per Globe reporting, the DCF policy of putting money in the general fund has been a longstanding practice.

“After a while, you know, a short while, it becomes a habit — and it becomes something that the general fund both expects and relies on,” she said. “And as long as no one says anything, it would continue.”