After years of flat budgets that fail to account for the cost of inflation on public services, West Virginia’s state spending on Medicaid, child care assistance, public education, and higher education have all declined. Meanwhile, other areas of the budget, namely spending on jails, prisons, and foster care, have increased dramatically. This is an expected result of disinvestment from what is often referred to in child welfare and prevention spaces as “primary supports” or economic and concrete resources available to support families within their homes and communities before they are in crisis.
Primary supports include health care programs, cash and housing assistance, child care subsidies, and food stamps, among other public benefits programs. Plenty of research is available that shows how primary supports improve outcomes, including the role of Medicaid in reducing future levels of incarceration and the strong relationship between programs like SNAP and child care assistance and improved child well-being. Research also shows an inverse relationship between state spending on primary benefit programs and rates of child maltreatment—put simply, states that spend more through their state budgets on these programs have fewer children in the foster care system.
West Virginia policymakers and residents must recognize that cuts to social safety net programs and education will inevitably result in poorer child welfare outcomes and higher spending on the harmful downstream effects of their disinvestment.
Since 2019, inflation-adjusted state spending has declined significantly for primary supports including:
Those inflation-adjusted spending declines demonstrate that West Virginia is providing less fiscal support to those programs than it did just six years ago, resulting in less robust services available to fewer people.
Inflation-adjusted base budget spending for Medicaid is down 26 percent, although overall state spending is down just 10 percent as some of those reductions have been offset by increases in the provider tax.
These reductions in state spending have serious consequences for families and the economy, as they have resulted in increased family health care and child care costs, less access to care for those who can no longer afford it, and considerable impacts on community schools, including closures and consolidations, staffing shortages, and reduced course offerings.
In addition to these specific programs, the state budget has also shrunk overall by nine percent since 2019. Given this declining budget, there has been little room for expanding or enacting programs that support families. As such, West Virginia continues to lack resources to invest in cash assistance programs like a state-level Child Tax Credit or Earned Income Tax Credit, both of which help strengthen child welfare outcomes, while programs like child care assistance have experienced outright cuts—even before accounting for inflation—rather than expansions.
Despite the state’s shrinking overall budget, some programs have seen significant budget increases over that period. State spending on public education outside of the school aid formula is up by six percent, though all of the increase (and then some) is due to spending on the Hope Scholarship, which did not exist in 2019. If not for the Hope Scholarship, non-school aid formula education spending would also be down.
State base budget spending on correctional facilities, which includes both youth and adult jails and prisons, is up by 38 percent since 2019—a shocking budget increase compared with austerity in most other areas of the budget. Similarly, state spending on non-Medicaid Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) services—which are primarily foster care and adoption services—is up by 18 percent.
As highlighted earlier, there is a clear connection between disinvestment in public services and increased economic costs in reactive, downstream programs like the child welfare and carceral systems. It’s also essential to note the immense human cost associated with the trauma that comes along with being placed in those systems. Prior research from the WVCBP has noted the dramatically worse health outcomes for those who have been incarcerated, as well as maltreatment and abuse of both incarcerated youth and adults. Similarly, the WVCBP has documented the harms to children and families separated by the child welfare system. Among other adverse impacts, youth who have been in foster care are more likely to have a major depressive disorder and alcohol or drug dependence and are at a higher risk of suicide. They also often experience negative outcomes in education and employment.
Cuts to health and education programs combined with increases in carceral spending have an exponentially dangerous effect on our children and families and they end up costing West Virginians—both fiscally and societally. As a result of less proactive, primary investments, we end up spending more on the backend through punitive, often harmful carceral systems.
