Every year, Wisconsin takes more than $10 million from some of its most vulnerable residents — foster children and the parents trying to bring them home.

When a child enters foster care, the state is legally required to provide for them. But in Wisconsin, some of those children are actually paying for their own care out of their own pockets. If a foster child receives Social Security benefits — because they have a disability or because a parent has died — the state can take that money and use it to cover costs it was already obligated to cover. Kids don't find out until they're about to age out of the system, often at 18, with no family safety net and no savings. That money — sometimes hundreds of dollars a month — was meant to help them survive that transition. Instead, the state keeps it.

This is what advocates call the "orphan tax." And Wisconsin collects about $3 million of it every year.

At the same time, Wisconsin bills many biological parents for the cost of foster care — even parents who are actively trying to get their children back. Child welfare authorities in Wisconsin bill the parents of 7 in 10 foster children in the state. Research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that a charge as low as $100 delayed family reunification by more than six months. A 2024 UW-Madison study found children whose parents were billed spent more than twice as long in foster care — an average of 21 months instead of nine — and were less likely to ever return home. Many of these families were separated in the first place because of poverty and neglect, not abuse. Billing them makes it harder to reunite — and actually costs taxpayers more than it saves.

Wisconsin's own Department of Children and Families wants both practices to stop. Republican and Democratic lawmakers have introduced bills to end them. Ten other states have already banned the taking of foster children's Social Security benefits entirely. The Trump administration called on states to end the practice in December 2024. Even so, Wisconsin has done nothing.

We are calling on Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers and the Wisconsin State Legislature to pass legislation that protects foster children's Social Security benefits — holding that money in trust for kids until they leave care — and ends the billing of parents for foster care costs. Fund the counties so they can make the transition. Stop making children and struggling parents foot the bill for a system that is supposed to help them.

These kids have already lost so much. Don't take what little they have left.