Massachusetts DCF: Using Children as a Cash Machine
I grew up inside the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families. I lived the reality of a system that claims to protect children but in truth has built itself on exploiting them. From my own experience and from what I have seen, DCF is not motivated by compassion, justice, or the welfare of the children in its custody. It is motivated by money. The more children it can seize and control, the more funding it draws in. Massachusetts leads the nation in reported child abuse rates, drains Social Security benefits meant for children, and runs on a federal funding formula that rewards removals rather than preservation. The evidence is overwhelming, and it points to one conclusion: the agency has transformed children into revenue streams.
The way federal foster care funding works is a clear example of how the system has been twisted. Under Title IV-E, the government reimburses states for the costs of foster care. The reimbursement does not come when a family is kept together or when support is offered to prevent removal. It comes only after the child is pulled from the home. Each additional removal becomes another claim, another stream of money flowing back into the agency. This structure has been in place for decades, and Massachusetts built its child welfare system around it. The agency has one of the highest removal rates in the nation, not because children here are uniquely endangered, but because DCF has been financially rewarded every time it decides to sever a family. Poverty, lack of housing, untreated mental health needs, and other struggles that should have brought support are instead defined as neglect. Children are then counted, filed, and converted into reimbursements. Families collapse while the agency thrives.
This financial exploitation does not stop at federal reimbursements. DCF has also been caught stealing from the very children it claims to protect. Thousands of children in Massachusetts foster care qualify for survivor benefits when a parent has died or for disability benefits through Supplemental Security Income. Those payments are supposed to exist for the child’s stability, dignity, and security. Instead, DCF applied to be the “representative payee” for those children, seized control of their accounts, and kept up to ninety percent of the money. On paper the justification was that the state was already paying for the child’s care, so the child should pay it back out of their own benefits. In practice, what this meant was that Massachusetts took an average of 5.5 million dollars every year from children and swept it into the state’s general fund. The money did not build savings for the youth’s future, it did not provide extra support, and it did not help them transition into adulthood. It was simply drained away. Advocates called this exploitative, and they were right. A Disability Law Center report documented how the funds meant to be a safety net were siphoned off and spent elsewhere. Only in January of 2024, after public outrage and pressure, did DCF stop this practice. By then, millions had already been stolen.
Massachusetts also tops the nation in child abuse and neglect reports. In 2014, the state recorded 22.9 victims per 1,000 children, far above the national average. That was not just a statistical blip. It was 43 percent higher than the state in third place and more than double the national rate. In 2022, Massachusetts again led the country at 16.5 victims per 1,000 children, compared to the national rate of 7.7. Officials try to explain this by claiming the numbers show vigilance or better reporting. But the reality is that such inflated numbers allow DCF to justify larger caseloads, more staff, and bigger budgets. When poverty is defined as neglect and almost every struggling family is treated as suspect, the figures swell. Those numbers then become evidence that DCF needs more funding to deal with its workload. It is a vicious cycle. The more broadly DCF defines neglect, the more cases it can generate, and the more money it can demand.
I know from my own experience that DCF does not care about the children behind these numbers. When I was 17, still a disabled minor in their custody, the agency abandoned me in the middle of a school day. I was left with nowhere to go. There was no plan, no support, and no concern for what would happen next. That betrayal made it clear to me that I was never more than a case file and a line item. If I was inconvenient, I was discarded. If I had been another child to remove, another placement to fund, perhaps I would have been useful. But when my situation no longer served their purposes, I was left behind. My story is not unique. Countless children age out of DCF custody without stability, housing, or savings, because the agency’s priority has never been preparing children for life. Its priority is sustaining itself.
The pattern is consistent. More removals mean more federal reimbursement. More case findings mean bigger budgets. More entitlement benefits seized mean millions flowing into the state’s accounts. Every part of the system has been engineered to treat children as financial assets rather than as human beings. The public rarely sees this clearly because officials hide behind claims of legality and good intentions. But legality is not morality. An agency can comply with technical rules while still destroying lives. The fact that DCF could legally strip children of their own Social Security checks for years does not make it acceptable. The fact that it can legally count poverty as neglect and use that to justify removals does not mean it is protecting children.
DCF has built a culture of exploitation. Children are shuffled from placement to placement because consistency is not profitable. Families are shattered because prevention is not reimbursable. Entitlement benefits are taken because vulnerable children have no power to resist. Massachusetts leads the nation in abuse reports because inflating the crisis makes it easier to demand money. And behind it all are young people like me who were abandoned when the agency decided we no longer served its financial interests.
Taken together, the facts are damning. This is not a system designed to nurture or heal. It is a system that uses children as a cash machine. I was abandoned by DCF, and that taught me the truth. They do not care about children. They care about funding. Until the incentives are dismantled and the money stops flowing for removals and benefit seizures, DCF will continue to operate this way. It will continue to treat the suffering of children as a revenue stream. It will continue to harm those it claims to protect.
Children are not commodities. They are not assets to be counted, budgets to be balanced, or benefits to be seized. Massachusetts DCF has proven by its own actions that it values money above all else. Until that changes, children in this state will remain in danger, not only from neglect and abuse at home, but from the very agency that is supposed to defend them.
