Title IV-E Is An Entitlement Program. But An Entitlement to What?
BY LAURA RADEL, MPP, CHILD WELFARE WONK SENIOR CONTRIBUTOR
Entitlement To What?
“Save the entitlement” has long been a rallying cry for those concerned with the future of the Title IV-E funding stream.
But entitlement for whom and to what?
This piece breaks down how Title IV-E is and is not a traditional entitlement, and why that matters for its future.
ENTITLEMENTS IN GENERAL
An entitlement program gives benefits to all who meet its eligibility requirements. They are automatically funded – “mandatory spending” in federal budget-speak – and do not require annual appropriations.
The point is stability and responsiveness: if need rises, the budget adjusts without waiting on Congress.
For instance, if the economy deteriorates and people lose jobs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly Food Stamps) budget rises automatically to cover the increase of eligible people
But the Title IV-E programs don't fully work that way, and the difference matters.
THE TITLE IV-E ENTITLEMENT, CLOSE UP
ADOPTION AND GUARDIANSHIP ASSISTANCE
The Title IV-E Adoption and Guardianship Assistance programs work mostly like traditional entitlements.
If additional eligible children are adopted from foster care or exit to guardianships, the federal government reimburses states for its share of the additional costs of payments to which children are eligible.
One wrinkle is that adoption assistance benefits may be individually negotiated with families, rather than being a set amount equal among all those eligible.
FOSTER CARE
In the Title IV-E Foster Care Program, the entitlement label gets murky. Placement in foster care isn’t experienced as a “benefit” by families, and funds don’t go directly to them.
Some of the funding goes to the foster family to pay room and board costs for the child. But an ever-larger share goes to states’ administrative costs; not just “overhead” but things like staff training and case management.
This is unlike any other entitlement program. What it pays for is important, but it’s not a clear direct throughline from federal funding to a specific benefit to the individual eligible child.
By 2023, foster care maintenance payments represented more than half of total IV-E foster care claims in only three states (Figure 1).
In more than half of states foster care payments made up less than one-third of claims.
Data from ACF. Visualization by Child Welfare Wonk.
SO WHO IS ENTITLED TO EXACTLY WHAT?
If an entitlement is supposed to allow a program’s budget to adjust automatically to reflect beneficiaries’ needs, who is the beneficiary and what need is being reflected?
In IV-E foster care, it’s the state that’s entitled to reimbursement for a portion of allowable costs.
Children and their families are entitled to nothing specific. And because most program costs are no longer linked to the number of children in care, “need” is no longer a measure of children’s need for the protection of foster care.
Instead, it’s but a reflection of the state’s ability to document administrative expenses, including for things like licensing foster homes, training caseworkers, determining eligibility, and developing information systems.
Important work, but not something tangible for a child or family to experience.
THE ADMINISTRATIVE TILT
The primary advantage of an entitlement is its automatic adjustment over time – ostensibly growing in times of need, then shrinking as needs abate.
Congress retained IV-E’s structure as an entitlement in 1996 in the face of proposals to change it to a block grant, fearing welfare reform might spike foster care need.
Keeping the entitlement, Congress believed, would ensure that states would have the financial resources to meet that need.
Between 2000 and 2023:
● The number of children in title IV-E supported foster care dropped by 57%.
● The number of children in foster care overall dropped by 37%.
● Federal spending on foster care maintenance payments dropped by 58% (after accounting for inflation), tracking closely the decrease in eligible children.
However, spending on foster care administrative costs decreased only by an inflation-adjusted 13% over the same period.
States learned to maximize their funding through the administrative claims system to maintain funding for their child welfare infrastructure costs.
That’s a rational response to the structural change that led to less federal funding for foster care. But that shift also further strains the entitlement nature of the program.
SUSTAINABILITY– AND THE CRITICAL CHOICES AHEAD
It can be argued that states are doing what they need to do to maintain operations in the face of potential loss of funds.
Yet spending an ever-larger portion of the program’s budget on infrastructure costs in a program designed to be an entitlement to serve children and families is not sustainable.
Eventually, policymakers and the field faces a choice:
● Redesign federal child welfare funding to match specific goals and measures of need tied to children and families, or
● Let the federal role continue to shrink and focus on supporting administrative infrastructure.
WHY IT MATTERS
The value of an entitlement is twofold;
● Its automatic adjustment over time — up when demand spikes, down when it eases; and
● Its direct focus on providing something to which beneficiaries are entitled.
For Title IV-E, that promise has drifted. Funding is disconnected from specific needs, even as the program structure still remains open-ended.
Conversations on child welfare financing reform often revert to a false choice between a block grant or “saving the entitlement.” Asking which structure to choose is the wrong question, and focusing only there leads discussions astray.
The data show us a clear shift that prompts a much deeper question: entitlement to what and for whom? Answering that first offers new possibilities for future deliberation.
Laura Radel is a Child Welfare Wonk Senior Contributor.
Before retiring, she spent 35 years analyzing child welfare issues for the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation(ASPE).