Blame the Legislature for 30 years of DCFS failures
NOTE: In my twilight years, now age 80, I am devoting a chunk of my time to the objective of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of social services in Illinois. Below is DRAFT op-ed that challenges the Illinois General Assembly to step up, as it has failed to do in the past, to address this topic. I seek criticisms, corrections, suggestions, informed knowledge and observations, all to make my essay stronger.
Blame the legislature for 30 years of failures at DCFS
By Jim Nowlan
This past month the director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) was charged with contempt of court for allowing two children to languish, one in a psychiatric hospital and the other in a “temporary” shelter—even though the youngsters had been ready for discharge months earlier.
What’s new? DCFS has been under a federal court order to do better—for 30 years! The continuing failures at DCFS lie primarily with the Illinois General Assembly, which has the fundamental responsibility to see that things work right in our state. As a former Illinois House member whose service predates the Madigan era, I have suggestions for reform.
Illinois provides myriad, fragmented social services to one of every four of us (more than 3.5 million of our 12.8 million population). It does this through scores of federal, state and nonprofit agencies and programs, which have grown like topsy in complexity since LBJ’s Great Society programs of the 1960s.
The State of Illinois spends more than 4 of every10 dollars of its operating budget on health and people services, while we spend just 2 in 10 of our state dollars on educating our kids, from preschool through our colleges and universities. When I was a legislator in the late 1960s, as Medicaid was being implemented, we spent more on education than on social services. Obviously, getting things right in providing services to people, which will never be easy, is a big deal
Unfortunately, according to research that Tom Johnson and I did for our book Fixing Illinois (University of Illinois Press, 2014), problems with the state’s delivery of social services go much deeper and broader than DCFS. A few examples:
· Agencies and divisions operate within “silos,” unable to share information digitally about clients, whose problems they often share. As one bureaucrat put it: Interagency cooperation is an unnatural act among unwilling partners.
· Perverse incentives. As a mom lamented recently to a nonprofit agency director: “I want out of welfare, but I’m trapped in the system.” That is, if she takes a job on offer, she will immediately, before she can get her life back together, lose health care and other services for her children. So, she opts for what she thinks best for her kids and stays on welfare.
· We strand people in the system too long. DCFS keeps children in foster care longer than any state in the nation. According to the latest federal figures, only 12% of children are returned to a permanent home within a year of their removal from foster care, compared to 43% for the nation as a whole. That’s not good for the youngsters, or for taxpayers.
· The wrong people are in charge. Governors come and go, and often enter office with little knowledge of state government. By the time they develop some understanding, they and their agency directors are out the door.
As a result, social services are largely directed by the powerful public employee unions, plus the interest groups that represent hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and other interests. Their leaders are, maybe understandably, often more concerned about their members than about the mostly powerless people they are supposed to serve.
So, who is to represent the poorly educated single mother who made bad decisions early in life? Or the veteran in a state nursing home, or any of the more than 3 million of us who receive state social services?
Some of my political friends say it is the governor, but governors are transient. The DCFS failures have been with us for 30 years. Six governors have been unable to fix the problems.
So, it is the Illinois General Assembly, which is forever, and has the fundamental responsibility to oversee the executive branch. Parliamentary systems such as that in the United Kingdom do not even have an elected executive branch. Walter Bagehot, 19th Century English political economist and founder of the Economist news magazine, said, “The job of a minister (always an elected member of Parliament) is not to run his ministry (department), but to see that it runs well.” That is the challenge for our General Assembly.
Our legislature has, however, become fragmented and woefully inept at handling big picture problems. The Illinois House has 47 committees for a body of 118 members. Each can deal only with a little piece our sprawling bureaucracies.
This ridiculous number of committees has been created because: 1) each chair and minority party spokesman receive a $10,000 bump to his or her pay for heading a committee; almost every House member is a “committee leader,” and 2) the fragmentation increases the power of the legislative leaders.
I have some thoughts. First, reorganize the Illinois General Assembly. Forty-seven House committees is nutty. The fragmentation assures that nothing comprehensive and significant will be accomplished.
For example, create a permanent Blue-Ribbon Commission on Social Services, a panel of legislators plus outside expert members (interest group leaders ineligible to serve). The commission would meet throughout each year and become students of the big picture issues. In the 1980s, speaker Mike Madigan eliminated all the permanent legislative-public commissions, as part of his concentration of power in the speaker’s office.
I know many good people within both the Illinois bureaucracy and state legislature. Unfortunately, neither is organized to function effectively.
Nowlan is a former Illinois legislator, state agency director, aide to three unindicted governors, chair of the Illinois Executive Ethics Commission, professor and community newspaper publisher.
