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September 15, 2009To the Honorable Members of the Ways and Means Committee:Greetings and SalutationsMy name is Beverly Tran and I rise to this occasion to thank you for listening tothe voice of the people, for it has been silenced for far too long. I share with you my soleconcern with the implementation of the Fostering Connections to Success and IncreasingAdoptions Act of 2008 (P.L. 110-351), and that is a lack of checks and balances.
Understanding the failure of implementation
Since 2001, I have been seeking the explanation of parental rights. More than justa statutory definition, I sought to understand its epistemology beyond the generalconsensus of social theory.Why had there yet to be demonstrated a logically constructed, conceptual andoperational formula for the determining factor of parental rights? My only recourse wasto deconstruct the policies of child welfare. What I found was the existence of a well-founded methodology in determining parental rights, including its clear and conciseevidentiary standard. The foundation of parental rights had been laid many centuries agoin property law, theorized through microeconomics.The reason child welfare, specifically child protective services, foster care andadoption, in its current state, will never meet its end goal of functioning in the bestinterest of the child with the current implementation of this Act, is because no oneunderstands what it is that is being protected. It is not the child, per say, but the future of the child to mature to be a tax-paying contributor to society. No one understands that checks and balances of the child welfare system do notexist.
Child welfare as a frontier industry
Child welfare must not be understood as an industry that was constructed tomaximize the profits of society through the best interests of the child, but it must beunderstood as a profit-maximizing industry that has schemes to increase its inputs,throughputs and outputs to ensure the economic sustainability of the public and privatecontractual arms of the states. Inputs are children who enter child welfare; throughputsare foster children; and, outputs are those children that exit the system, whether throughreunification, adoption, maturation or attrition.The Fostering Connections Act can be properly implemented, but only if thisCongress understands that there needs to be a substantial change in its current operations by implementing checks and balances.
A lack of market regulation
Since foster care and adoption statutorily became a fully, publicly funded industryin 1974, it has operated strictly with federal funding and regulations, only in the form of financial penalties if the market shows signs of weakness, as states must meet and exceedthe previous year’s federally mandated benchmark of the number of children under the
 
auspices of the state to avoid financial penalties. The market is devoid of competition asthe government is monopolistic with its statutory control and possesses sufficientauthority to acquire the goods and procure the services, through the removal of the child by and through the removal of the legal rights to the grant of custody and guardianship.Upon further examination, it will be demonstrated that it is the right of the state togrant the custody and guardianship, for it is the state that is the possessor of parentalrights to the acquisition of goods.Due to the lack of this understanding, federal and state policies have beenimproperly formatted and implemented. We, as a nation have witnessed the residualeffects of a system devoid of oversight, and that is our financial system. Now, we areexperiencing the second wave of fraud as our national leadership is fast asleep at thehelm of the ship named health care.Child welfare operates in a risk aversive market, as it intentionally never includedthe oversight mechanism of accountability and transparency; there are no checks and balances, hence, no incurred liabilities from error.The mechanical error that I have identified is the systemic deficiency of checksand balances, embedded deep within the ethos of foster care and adoption. Checks and balances, essential elements in tripartite governments, must be readily recognized asaccountability and transparency.
No accountability
If it has been determined that law and policy has been violated within themechanical procedures of foster care and adoption, it is considered as an acceptablemistake, with a federally acceptable range of error of 0.10. This acceptable error is thedestruction of a family. Nothing is publicly reported, not even for the purposes of ameliorating futurematerial and provisional violations of law and policy, particularly those committed under the color of law. This phenomenon is largely due to an inherent conflict of interest breedwithin the philosophical edifice of the child welfare system. Under the doctrine of 
 parens patriae
, the states attorney general have been granted the powers of parental rightsthrough statutory declarations of commerce.It thus becomes a contentious issue of intervention: “Do the states attorneygeneral advocate to further a compelling governmental interest in the representation of the state and its contractual arms of child welfare, or do the states attorney generaladvocate for the citizen individuals who have been granted the gift of custody andguardianship? The child welfare system, in whole, incorporating all facets of theindustry, functions on the fallacy of affirming the disjunct, that is, the governmentoperates in good faith and there is no need to advocate for the citizen individuals whoallegedly violated the granted gift of custody and guardianship.Simply put, it is in the best interests of the child for government to invest in the profitable return of a future tax-paying, productive citizen, and not to advocate for thenon-productive individual citizen, for that individual has violated the social compact infailing to contribute to the society as a whole, whether it be morally, intellectually,financially, or economically. Because of the belief government functions in good faith,there is no need to construct and implement a congruent system of checks and balances inchild welfare. The crime of poverty has been justified.
 
Public disenfranchisement
Where public access and voter participation into the mechanical process of thismarket are the checks, the general public is disenfranchised because child welfare lawand policies are neither put up for public discussion nor full disclosure. Even more so, atargeted population is specifically disenfranchised because children are not allowed theright to vote.Child welfare protects and preserves itself by importing policies to obviatetransparency and accountability, whereby, it has manufactured obfuscatory policies toterminate parental rights of the granted gift of custody and guardianship to “
cloak”
theindustry of abuse and neglect.That "
cloak 
", for which I reference, is laced with public policies to create thetapestry of public perceptions, to conceal the inner workings of the industry of childwelfare. This cloak is impenetrable to empirical analysis, as it is hermetically sealed bythe Freedom of Information Act, and the institutionalized belief that sealed information of child welfare policies furthers a compelling governmental interest. That compellinggovernmental interest is the general welfare of the public, now and in the future.When the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention Treatment Act
i
 was designed, a fatal flawwas inculcated into 1997 Adoption Safe Families Act, and its subsequent legislativeactions. I speak again of the lack of checks and balances. This philosophical tenet isembedded deep within core of public belief, woven into the historical fabric of societyand engrained into the academic discipline of policy analysis, where nothing could be of the contrary. Initial funding streams from Social Security Title I, Title II, Title IV-A, B, Dand E, Title V and Medicaid Targeted Case Management (TCM), as well as others, werecreated to flow down to the states to care for abused and neglected children who werequalified as impoverished under the means test of Title IV-A under the Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF). Simply put, poverty is codified as abuse and neglect and thediscipline of Social Work has generated the only literature of analysis, which has beenmostly qualitative.
No transparency
Under the Eleventh Amendment of the United States Constitution, states possesssovereign immunity from prosecution of wrongdoing by the federal government.Immunity is then draped to circumvent accountability and transparency in non-reporting/non-disclosure through Freedom Of Information Act exceptions. Basically,anything dealing with errors in child welfare cases, more intuitively recognized as fraud,waste and abuse, is kept from the public for the protection of the child, justifying the lack of need for exclusionary databases and reporting protocol.Due to the lack of transparency, federal and state policies have been improperlyformatted and implemented. We, as a nation have witnessed the residual effects of asystem devoid of oversight, and that is our financial system. Now, we are experiencingthe second wave of attack on our nation’s economic security as our national leadershiphave been fast asleep at the helm of the ship named health care. The monster namedMedicaid fraud has victoriously raised its ugly head, with no one to battle, until now.
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Constance_Cumbey

Beverly Tran and her analyses are nothing short of brilliant. That especially goes for this onE!

reply02 / 09 / 2011
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