Ricky Holder: Back Families. Balance the Books.
By Ricky Holder
My family cost taxpayers millions of dollars over the past several decades. By eviscerating the programs that working people across the country rely on, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act guarantees that billions more will be spent on families like mine in the years to come. Instead of reducing the deficit (as proponents of this legislation allege), this bill merely shifts costs downstream, from Medicaid and SNAP rolls to foster care placement, courtrooms, and prison cells. Fortunately, cutting costs and supporting families needn’t be in tension with each other. Democrats should extract one vital lesson — and message — from the subsidized destruction of my family: the earlier you invest in working families, the more you save in the long run.
In the 1990s, my mother struggled to keep my brothers and me fed and housed, a plight exacerbated by the ‘end of welfare as we know it,’ which curtailed access to the cash benefits she desperately relied on. The cruel irony of this legislation was that while it was intended to end ‘welfare dependency,’ it merely shifted this dependency to another agency: the foster care system. The link between the social safety net and child welfare system involvement is well-established, with a 2022 study finding that restrictive cash assistance policies correlated with more neglect victims and higher foster care placements. In a roundabout way, then, former Speaker Newt Gingrich got his wish: while orphanages didn’t exactly make a comeback, children from low-income families were funneled into foster care. Such was the case with my family.
My mother succumbed to a potent combination of poverty and addiction, and was incarcerated in 2001. My brothers (15, 14, and 12) and I (9) were placed in foster care. Never again would we all live beneath the same roof.
My brothers were placed in group homes — long understood as warehouses for children unwanted by foster families. Youth in these placements experience bleak outcomes, such as staggering rates of homelessness and incarceration. My brothers fulfilled this statistical destiny, emerging from the system more damaged than when they entered it, transformed from bright-eyed boys into broken men struggling with poverty and incarceration.
I fared better, but just barely. Over a decade in the system, I lived with half a dozen families, where I routinely experienced emotional (and occasionally physical) abuse, among countless other indignities. But I was lucky: by enlisting in the US Navy, I escaped the system relatively unscathed. Had I been one of the 77% of young Americans who are ineligible for military service, I fear I too would have succumbed to the tragic outcomes experienced by those who “age out.” I believe that if my life were replayed 100 times, 97 of those times I would be in an unfathomably worse position than I am today: a Marshall Scholar and graduate from the University of Oxford.
All of this was purchased at a tremendous cost. My foster families, collectively, were paid over $300,000 for my care over a decade, a conservative estimate that excludes costs such as social worker salaries and clothing allowances. My brothers’ group home placements were even more expensive, together costing nearly $20,000 per month. That $806 a month my mother was receiving prior to welfare reform seems like quite a bargain compared to these figures.
But these are merely the direct costs of our care; when the indirect costs are factored in, the picture worsens dramatically. The years of incarceration, the diminished economic opportunities (and thus reduced tax receipts), the bouts of substance abuse, and the poor health outcomes are all direct consequences of my brothers’ time in care, and all exact an incalculable, ongoing toll on the taxpayer. Our story is simply an encapsulation of one study that found that every $1 spent on foster care generates a negative social return between -$3.64 and -$9.55. When you tack on the cost to incarcerate my mother, it cost taxpayers millions to produce four tragic outcomes and one lucky break.
There are thousands of families just like mine, all over the US, and our continued destitution has far-reaching consequences. A 2018 study estimated that the annual economic burden of child maltreatment in the United States ranged from $428 billion to $2 trillion, representing the lifetime costs incurred each year. Instead of simply responding to child maltreatment, we should work to prevent it.
For example, instead of slashing Medicaid, we should expand it: Medicaid expansion has been linked to reductions in child neglect cases and substantial decreases in entries into foster care.
Instead of restricting access to food assistance, we should strengthen it: expanding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits has been linked to fewer child maltreatment investigations and reduced foster care caseloads.
Instead of keeping pay stagnant, we should boost the minimum wage: just a $1 increase in a state’s minimum wage is associated with a 9.6% decrease in child maltreatment investigation rates.
Instead of resisting cash assistance, we should embrace it: cash transfer programs, like Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend and the Expanded Child Tax Credit in 2021 have been shown to reduce child neglect, physical abuse, and child mortality.
The ink is dry on OBBBA, but the damage hasn’t yet been done. In the years ahead, millions more families will experience what mine did. As such, the next Democratic Congress must not only reverse the OBBBA’s cuts but advance its own agenda: broaden health coverage, strengthen food assistance, expand direct cash assistance programs, raise wages, and invest in the proven supports that keep families healthy and whole.
To win support for that agenda, Democrats should marry their moral argument to an economic truth: keeping people on Medicaid and SNAP is far cheaper than funding the foster care system, building new prisons, and cleaning up the wreckage decades later.
Ricky Holder is a U.S. Navy veteran, Marshall Scholar, and child welfare advocate. Raised in San Bernardino, California, he spent ten years of his childhood in the foster care system. In 2025, he completed an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy at the University of Oxford; he also writes “The Legacy Project,” a Substack on child welfare and family policy.
