Guest Commentary written by

Richard Wexler

Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform

California’s private foster care agencies are running back to Sacramento, demanding another taxpayer bailout to cover rising insurance costs. Cal Matters reported recently that the state’s foster family agencies want another $30 million, on top of the $31.5 million they got last year.

One of the many reasons these agencies should not get a bailout — or any other help — can be found in the very reason they’re in trouble: Insurance costs are rising because so many children who were abused on their watch finally are able to get compensation. That fact alone should be enough to call into question foster family agency claims about the wonders they supposedly perform and the catastrophe that supposedly would befall children if they went out of business.

Other reasons to ignore the fearmongering can be found in the CalMatters story: More than 24 of these agencies have already closed. All the horrors the story describes are hypothetical. There is not a single case where they all came to pass. The worst example in the story involved a pair of foster parents who were inconvenienced.

That should be no surprise. The demands for another bailout, and other remedies that would be even worse, are based on the idea that if foster family agencies disappeared there would be a sort of insurance-induced rapture: all their employees, all their buildings and all the foster parents they license suddenly would vanish.

In reality, as the story documents, governments are perfectly capable of hiring the same employees and licensing the same foster parents. They already do it for 86% of California’s foster children. Do they do the job better than the foster family agencies? Probably not. But there’s no evidence they do any worse.

Consider findings on the rare occasions other news organizations and grand juries dug deeper:In 2013, the Los Angeles Times reported the foster family agency system “has become more expensive and more dangerous than the government-run homes it has largely replaced.” In 2016, an Orange County grand jury found that foster family agency homes were no better than county-run homes. They were just more expensive.

And last month, a foster family agency agreed to pay $11.25 million to six siblings from a single family, to compensate them for horrific abuse they endured in a home in Riverside County the agency oversaw.

Surely, at a minimum, foster family agencies should have to prove they have cleaned up their acts before California taxpayers divert more funds that could be used to actually serve vulnerable children and families.

If these agencies get their way, they’ll likely get away with similar negligence in the future, because the agencies want more than another bailout. What some are calling “reforms” are actually proposals to give foster family agencies near-total immunity from lawsuits by their alleged victims.

So it’s no wonder the Children’s Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law wrote that these so-called reforms would have inflicted “unprecedented conditions on the ability of foster children to obtain compensation.” The institute argued that children who happened to be overseen by foster family agencies would be denied the right to seek the same compensation afforded to every other abused child or adult.

What makes this so tragic is that what these agencies call a crisis actually is an opportunity. It’s a chance to reconsider the extent to which a knee-jerk, take-the-child-and-run response has harmed children it was intended to help.

Most children torn from their families are nothing like the stereotypes that come to mind when we hear the words “child abuse.” In 2024, in 85% of cases in which California children were forced into foster care, there wasn’t an accusation of physical or sexual abuse. In 87%, there was not so much as an accusation of drug abuse.

Overwhelmingly, children were taken due to “neglect,” which often means the family is poor.

That means the so-called insurance crisis can be a chance to rethink decades of stale assumptions. Each time a family foster agency closes, counties should take a second look at each child and ask: Does this child really need to be in foster care at all?

Foster family agencies are not “critical infrastructure;” they are barriers to making all of California’s vulnerable children safer. California’s children and taxpayers would be better off without them.