Deborah Prim has been in and out of foster care most of her life. About a year ago, the 18-year-old made a surprising discovery: She had paid for the state’s services.
That’s because Prim is entitled to federal benefits, by dint of her disability and her mother’s death in 2024. But until recently, the Vermont Department for Children and Families intercepted some of that cash, and used it to reimburse itself for her care.
She has no memory of the state ever telling her it was doing this, nor does she have an accounting of how much the state took. Prim said she found out when a caseworker at the Defender General’s Office alerted her.
“Not telling me, it's just breaking my trust,” Prim told Vermont Public.
Prim’s experience is not an outlier. An estimated 5% of foster youth in the U.S. are eligible for federal benefits either because of their disability or because a parent has died. It is standard practice in Vermont, as well as a handful of other states, for foster care agencies to apply for this money on behalf of these children, and to then use that cash to pay themselves for the services they provide. The youth in question don’t have to be told, and often are not.
Lauren Higbee, the deputy advocate at the Vermont Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate, says this means some children are “essentially subsidizing their time in foster care.” OCYFA, alongside other child welfare advocates, have pushed Vermont for years to end the practice — and this year, the state Legislature listened.
Lawmakers sent a bill to Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s desk Wednesday that would, starting in 2028, prohibit the state from using these federal benefits to pay itself for a child’s foster care. The state would instead have to make sure the youth in its custody have access to the funds.
For Rep. Dan Noyes, a Wolcott Democrat who pushed for the change, the matter is simple: “This is not the state's money. This is the money of those children,” he said.
DCF officials say they’re in favor of discontinuing the practice. But they’ve also repeatedly asked for delays in implementing a change, citing budgetary constraints. About 80 children in foster care in Vermont are currently Social Security beneficiaries, and officials say their benefits offset the department’s budget to the tune of about $800,000 a year.
OCYFA, which acts as an ombudsman to Vermont’s foster care agency, helped Prim claim her federal benefits. Higbee, who worked on Prim’s case, said it’s still unclear how much the state claimed on Prim’s behalf, but that the total likely adds up to thousands of dollars. Prim was entitled to over $700 a month in disability benefits alone for years while in DCF care.
Prim, who often relied on hotels for shelter growing up, said that money might have helped her family secure more stable housing, or at least transportation.
“I feel like DCF taking money — especially Social Security — from kids like that is stopping them from being able to have the future that DCF says they want them to have,” Prim said.
But rather than dwelling on the money the state took from her, Prim said she wants to see the practice end for those who are still in the state’s custody.
“I just don’t want other kids growing up feeling failed by the system. Because the system failed me,” she said.
Until quite recently, basically every state in the country allowed its child welfare agencies to intercept foster youth’s benefits. But a 2021 investigation by NPR and the Marshall Project drew attention to the practice, prompting reform efforts.
The Trump administration has also joined the chorus calling for change. Late last year, its top child welfare official, Alex Adams, wrote to 39 governors — including Scott — to urge them to stop intercepting children’s survivor benefits.
To date, 33 states and jurisdictions have enacted either complete or partial reforms to redirect the federal money to foster youth, according to the Children’s Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego.
Scott’s press secretary, Amanda Wheeler, said that while the bill made “important changes to support some of Vermont’s most vulnerable youth,” the governor hadn’t made a final decision about whether to sign it.
