In Washington, millions of dollars in child support payments are intercepted by the state from custodial parents who receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a federal assistance program that includes cash benefits. Lawmakers are considering a bill with bipartisan support that would redirect a portion of future child support payments back to families. Brandon Block is an investigative reporter at Cascade PBS. He has reported on the bill and joins us with details.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In Washington state, parents are paying millions of dollars in child support that is never getting to their former partners or kids. Instead, it’s being intercepted by the state and some of it is being sent to the federal government. This happens when people who receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), once known as welfare, also get child support payments. It’s been going on for nearly 50 years all across the country. But some Washington lawmakers are trying to end the practice. Brandon Block is an investigative reporter at Cascade PBS in Seattle, a nonprofit news website. He wrote about this recently and he joins us now with more details. It’s great to have you on the show.
Brandon Block: Glad to be here.
Miller: Can you start just by telling us a story of a woman you talked to named Amy Roark?
Block: Amy Roark is a 45 year old single mother who lives in Vancouver, Washington, just across the river from Portland. She has two teenagers who she’s raising right now. And her primary income source is from child support. And what happened to Amy was, in 2017, she applied for TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and then she stopped receiving her child support payments. Even though her exes were continuing to pay, that money was getting siphoned off by the state.
Miller: How much money is taken by the state of Washington in any given year? I mean, how common is this in Washington?
Block: It’s very common and it goes back a really long time. In 2022, Washington withheld more than $40 million from families in poverty. And we’re talking about 80% of payments that are intended for families who are currently on TANF. The current policy is that parents are allowed to receive just $50, or $100 if they have more than two kids. But the state keeps the rest.
Miller: I should say that in Oregon it’s the same. People on TANF can get $50 per child per month in child support that’s recovered from the non-custodial parents. Although it seems like the max is higher. It goes up to $200. So for four kids times $50 each, as opposed to maybe the hundreds of dollars per month that the non-custodial parent might be paying. How common is this nationwide?
Block: It’s extremely common. Almost every state in the country is taking some amount of child support payments from families on welfare. States, I should say, are sort of slowly moving away from this practice. More than half of states have now enacted what are called “pass through” laws, which means they pass through some amount of that support to the family. Colorado was the first state to implement a “full” pass through, which means the entire monthly payment goes to the family. So there’s been some reform but overall, this is still quite a prevalent practice.
Miller: What’s the justification for the state holding on to this money?
Block: You know, it’s interesting, I don’t know that anyone has actually been asked to answer for this policy. It’s been going on for a really, really long time. And I’d say in the simplest terms, it’s a revenue source for states. The federal government gives them this ability and, in fact, actually requires states to collect child support on behalf of families when they sign up for TANF. States have choices within that of what they do with the money. But the basic idea here is that the government is reimbursing itself for the cost of providing poverty aid benefits. In federal government jargon, they refer to this as “cost recovery.”
Miller: Is this basically a version of means testing? I mean, is the idea that because a parent is getting money from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, formerly known, or popularly known, as welfare, then those people don’t need the money that a judge has said they should be getting in child support?
Block: I wouldn’t call it means testing. Means testing, I think of as identifying a certain income threshold of families who are being determined to not need this. Really we’re talking about a population of people who the only thing they have in common is being poor enough to qualify for TANF. And child support orders can vary widely. You might get $500 a month. You might get $50 a month. So I don’t think that’s the right way to think about it.
I think maybe a better way of understanding what’s going on here is that the government is basically charging you for your own welfare benefits. The state is taking an obligation that is supposed to be the government’s obligation, public assistance for people in need, and they’re shifting that obligation onto, in this case, the non-custodial parent who’s paying these child support payments.
Miller: Are those non-custodial parents told, while they’re still paying this money, that it’s not actually going to their former spouse or former partner, that it is not going to the people who are taking care of their kids?
Block: No, the short answer is they are not. I asked the state agency in Washington, the Department of Social and Health Services, which implements both of these programs, and they said there is no official communication about this fact. And I’d say, in general, it’s not well known. It hasn’t been written about a lot, at least in Washington, it certainly has been written about other states. And furthermore, the agency official who I interviewed told me he pretty regularly hears from families that don’t know this is happening.
Miller: What does the state do with this money? Tens of million dollars a year?
Block: It gets split with the federal government. That ratio varies state to state. In Washington it’s about 50%. And the money that the state retains goes into the general fund, where it can be used to fund social services like TANF or other benefit programs.
Miller: There has been, as you noted briefly, an effort in Olympia to change this, an effort that’s gone back a few years now. Where does it stand right now?
Block: There was a bill introduced in the previous legislative session that has now actually passed the state House twice, by a pretty wide margin. So it has bipartisan support. It’s currently sitting in a Senate committee, where it has a little less than about a month to pass out of the Senate, if it’s to become law this year. We’re in a short legislative session this year in Washington.
And basically what this bill would do, I think is important to point out, [is it] wouldn’t necessarily end this practice. It would reform it partially. So the bill calls for all monthly payments to be passed through to the families. What that importantly excludes is all of the child support payments that are applied toward debt. There’s a lot of debt in the child support system. Every month that a non- custodial parent doesn’t pay the full amount in their order, that accumulates debt and that debt accrues interest. And that interest can be claimed by the state. So if the state designates that interest as interest to the state, it can continue siphoning that off, even under this new policy.
So it’s unclear if that bill is going to get through the Senate this year. Like I said, it only had three votes against it in the House. So it certainly has a lot of support. But it’s a really short legislative session and they’ve got a lot of other stuff to consider. So we’ll see if it makes its way through this year.
Miller: I mean, that vote is kind of numerical evidence of one thing that your article made clear, which is that there actually is bipartisan support in Washington for this effort. What has the agency most involved here, the Department of Social and Health Services, said about this effort?
Block: They haven’t taken a formal position on it at any of the hearings on the bill.
Like I said, I interviewed them and they told me that they like this. They think this is a good policy, and they support it but, because it was not funded in the Governor’s budget, they didn’t take a formal position on it.
But the other thing that they’ve done is a little bit of pushback. They’ve asked for the effective date of the bill to be delayed by about a year and a half. So the original proposal was to have this policy kick in over the summer. And they wrote to the bill sponsor and asked to delay it until 2026. The reason for this is that they said they need time to upgrade their IT systems in order to make this change.
So now there has been an amendment introduced by the Chair of the Senate committee where the bill currently sits, to push that start date back. And that would, if the bill passes, be a significant change. We’re talking about, like I said, $40 million in 2022. So another two years of this happening, it’s fair to say, is likely another $80 million that’s withheld from low income families because of that change.
Miller: We have just about a minute left. But I want to go back to where we started. Amy Roark whose ex paid almost $5,000 in child support while she was getting TANF benefits. And she got $100 of that $5,000. How is she doing today?
Block: Amy is still really struggling, I have to say. She expressed to me that this money really could have made a major difference for her and her children. And I think it’s worth revisiting one of the things that the co-sponsor, Travis Couture, who’s a Republican from the Olympic Peninsula [said]. He’s described this as a tax, basically, that is targeting our state’s neediest families.
We’re talking about people who, by definition, are in poverty because they qualify for TANF. And they’re having this money extracted from them precisely because they have asked for help. And you know, TANF, as many people see, is meant to be a hand up out of poverty. This policy is sort of punishing them for utilizing that resource. So it’s a really counterproductive policy, in the words of the legislators. And I think most legislators would argue it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Miller: Brandon, thanks very much.
Block: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Brandon Block is an investigative reporter at Cascade PBS.
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