How Federal Welfare Funding Drives Judicial Discretion

Social Security, Welfare, and Child Support Enforcement
How federal welfare funding drives judicial discretion in child-custody determinations and domestic relations matters.

By Lary Holland and Jason Bottomley
February 2006

Introduction
There is a growing pandemic in this country where the very fabric of our society, the family, is being attacked and destroyed. Our children are systematically being torn away from willing and capable parents who want to be involved in parenting their children. Families are systematically being torn apart instead of being helped when they turn to the states' family courts to solve domestic relations disputes. This document demonstrates an attempt to trace this problem back to its source.

The topics and issues being discussed are quite complex because of the nature of the multiple welfare programs created within Title IV of the Social Security Act (SSA); so the authors have attempted to provide a simplified overview of how federal welfare funding motivates the state family court judges to remove a willful parent and create high child support orders.

The authors have spent a tremendous amount of time researching external economic factors that they believe drive judicial discretion and influence professional judgment in domestic relations matters. Through their research and experience, the authors have concluded that a relationship exists between the federal funding of state welfare programs and the determinations made by state family court judges presiding over child-custody and domestic relations matters. They believe that it is this relationship that de-emphasizes the importance of sharing parental responsibility, and instead emphasizes a manufactured public policy concerned only on the financial obligations of one parent - rather than on the real interests of the children involved.

The authors have also concluded that, while this relationship has successfully been masked behind what is commonly termed "the best interests of the child," the federal funding created within the Social Security Act provides clear monetary incentives to states that have a high-occurrence of one-parent households, where a child has the majority of access to only one of their parents. The authors believe that this "best interests of the child" standard is loosely subjective, gives unlimited discretion to state family court judges, and ultimately leaves a tremendous amount of room for abuse.

In simplest terms: State family courts are forcibly depriving children's access to a parent because it is a source of revenue for the states - and because they can.