Child Protective Services (CPS) and its various counterparts—such as the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF), the Department of Family Services (DFS), the Department of Children and Families (DCF), and other similarly named agencies—operate under the guise of protecting children. In reality, these agencies have become an industry unto themselves, profiting off the removal of children and the destruction of families. Every child taken from their home represents a payday for the state, foster care agencies, court-mandated service providers, and an entire network of professionals whose financial survival depends on keeping the system running.
Most people don’t realize that removing children from their homes is not just an act of state intervention—it’s a multi-billion-dollar industry. Under the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, states receive federal Title IV-E funding for every child placed in foster care. The more children removed, the more money the state gets. States even receive bonus payments for finalized adoptions, creating an incentive to permanently sever parental rights rather than reunite families.
CPS doesn’t operate alone in this racket. The moment a child is taken, a network of court-mandated services kicks into gear, forcing parents to pay exorbitant fees for programs they are required to complete before they can even hope to regain custody of their child.
These include parenting classes, which families are forced to attend and which are expensive, often ineffective courses, regardless of whether parenting skills were ever an issue. Also included are anger management programs. Even if there’s no history of violence or abuse, parents are often ordered into these classes, which they must pay for out of pocket. Supervised visitation centers where parents who want to see their own children are frequently required to do so under supervision at a private facility that charges by the hour. And court-ordered therapy, where parents are forced into therapy, often with state-approved providers who have financial incentives to keep cases open. All of which gets very expensive very quickly.
Judges, attorneys, social workers, therapists, and foster care agencies all make money off keeping children in the system. The longer a case drags on, the more everyone profits—except the families being destroyed in the process.
In the United States, the number of children entering foster care annually has been steadily on the rise over the past several decades. By the end of 1987, an estimated 285,000 children were in foster care, increasing to approximately 323,000 by the end of 1988. Numbers increased in the 1990s, from 400,000 in 1990 to 568,000 in 1999. In recent years, it’s only gotten worse as approximately 606,031 children passed through the U.S. foster care system over the course of the year.
This trend does not indicate a rise in child abuse but rather an increase in government overreach.
Let’s be crystal clear: CPS and family courts are not in the business of protecting children. They are in the business of taking children—because that’s where the money is.
Mandatory reporters, acting under fear of liability, flood CPS with baseless reports, ensnaring innocent families in a system designed to keep them trapped. Once CPS gets involved, they are not incentivized to clear you. They are incentivized to keep you in their grasp.
Because every child they remove from a home is money in the bank.
Parents thrown into this corrupt machine have no real due process. CPS operates under civil law, which means there is no jury trial. There is no presumption of innocence. The “preponderance of evidence” standard (a mere 51% certainty) is used to rip children from their homes. Judges rubber-stamp whatever CPS recommends. Lawyers refuse to challenge unconstitutional statutes, telling parents to “just comply.”
Once a child is placed into foster care, the financial exploitation doesn’t stop. Foster parents receive government stipends per child, but many of the real profits go to private foster care agencies that receive thousands of dollars per child per month. Group homes and residential treatment centers make even more, often billing the government at insane rates while providing substandard care.
On top of that, children in state custody are frequently overmedicated, as psychiatric drugs become the go-to solution for “behavioral problems”—problems that, in many cases, stem from the trauma of being forcibly removed from their families. Pharmaceutical companies also benefit from this cycle, making millions by turning wards of the state into lifelong patients.
It’s past time to ask, who really benefits from all this? Follow the money, and you’ll see that CPS is not about protecting children—it’s about funding a vast, government-backed business. Family courts operate in secrecy, shielded from public scrutiny, while the professionals inside them profit from prolonged legal battles, forced compliance programs, and state-sanctioned child trafficking under the name of “protection.”
It’s time to end the financial incentives behind family separation and expose CPS for what it is—a predatory industry disguised as child welfare.
This isn’t justice. It’s a racket.
And it’s state-sanctioned child trafficking.
This has to stop.
CPS and family courts have turned into an industry of destruction, feeding off the lives of parents and children for profit. This isn’t about protecting kids—it’s about keeping the money flowing.
And it has to end.
The American Made Foundation and the United Law Coalition are preparing to go after these agencies, these judges, and the corrupt lawyers.
The message is clear: “You are not above the law. You will not continue to violate families’ rights without consequence. You will be exposed and held accountable.”
Justice is coming.
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Maureen Steele is co-founder of the American Made Foundation, an organization that connects influential leaders and grassroots movements to drive real change.
Growing up in the household of a high-functioning alcoholic with a very heavy-handed approach to parenting, I did everything in my power to keep myself and my younger sister out of the system and I paid a fairly high price for that endeavor. Most days, I 'm okay with those choices and she & I both managed, against fairly high statistical odds, to go on to be “successful” adults – able to sustain both stable work histories & stable marriages. A little later in life, being an observer to just how badly family courts serve family issues causes me to abandon the pursuit of a law degree.
Given that history, I am not unbiased about children’s services agencies. I agree with the author that, far too often, what is truly best for the child gets buried under a deluge of competing interests; “experts” placing adherence to whatever tenets of the dominant school of thought when they were trained over real-world efficacy do a great deal of damage to those remanded to their care. The recent trends in blue states towards gender dysmorphia is a perfect example.
A thorough review of the entire child welfare system is long overdue. There are incidents when gross abuse and/or neglect warrant intervention but there has to be a better way of going about it than what we are doing now. Because our current system is permanently breaking more kids than it is saving
The real solution, although I wish I did not have to say this, is a non-government solution. I am a pragmatist when it comes to government at any level. We need some of it and even at the smallest level it too often tends to go unsupervised which fertilizes and cultivates corruption.
The article provokes human interest. It is a story that has two sides – the human interest part (kids) and the corruption side. Most people will be attracted to the former part. Don’t miss the elephant… the non human interest side. Government fraud has no filters or boundaries when money is to be made. If anything only rich people such as Musk or Trump should run such departments because they are too rich to be corrupted. However, there are not enough of them. Furthermore, it can only be done on a state and local level. In my opinion it should be done on a charitable basis.
The federal government was designed to be as small as possible. From a constitutional perspective most of the federal government is illegal. If the states and local governments grew too dramatically the population would move away. That scenario represents a political evolution of sorts.
I don’t disagree with you but privatizing child welfare services also has a long, storied history of abuse and corruption. I don’t have an answer here, task; this is a conundrum I have been pondering for decades and I still don’t see a solution that, people being who & what they are, isn’t open to misuse. I will absolutely agree that it is not a function of society that is best solved by government involvement.
Actually I never meant privatizing. In fact that is very dangerous and, oftentimes, worse. Yes, some things, such as TSA, could be privatized but in blue states social welfare services are anything but compassionate. Welfare is a very big business, raging from nursing homes to drug treatment centers. In NYC it even subsidies the hotel businesses. Private companies doing business with subsidies, except under dire circumstances, such as wool subsidies, during WW II, often remain ad infinitum. Some of those subsidies do not disappear. Look at the subsidies associated with communications. Some of it laughable because everyone knows but nothing is ever done about it.
Regan’s policies were all about government and doing things inefficiently. Reagan’s view of government and the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
I think I expressed my self poorly. Private charity has not necessarily been more efficient or less prone to corruption than government intervention, was the point I was trying to get at. If you look at those efforts from as far back as the Middle Ages, you see the same patterns of exploitation and misappropriation for the gain of people in charge that you see with government agencies. About the best outcome is a sort of benign neglect.