Audit highlights cost of lawmakers’ bad budgeting

AN AUDIT RELEASED last week painted a highly disturbing picture of the state’s child protective services program at the Department of Social Services.

When DSS doesn’t do its job — when case workers don’t check frequently enough on the children they’re supposed to be protecting, when they don’t enter the names of sex abusers into a central registry, when they take too long to decide whether a child should be removed from her home — horrible things happen. Children are neglected. Children are abused. Children die.

We as a society cannot tolerate this.

But let’s be clear about where the blame lies: with the General Assembly, which slashed the agency’s budget and slashed it, until its staff had been cut by 1,300 — more than a quarter of the workforce — and the remaining workers were forced to take two-week furloughs (smack in the middle of the 18-month period being audited). The result: There simply were not enough bodies to keep up with the growing caseload.

If you think you’ve heard this story before, you’re right. Think back to the Department of Mental Health. Or the Department of Corrections.

The Legislature didn’t slash Social Services’ budget — or the Mental Health budget or the Corrections budget — because it had no options. It slashed those budgets because it was easier than shutting down optional programs or changing expensive state policies such as the ones that require us to shell out money to incarcerate petty drug users and other nonviolent criminals for years on end. It slashed those budgets because the agencies aren’t politically popular. And there is reason to believe that lawmakers took special aim at agencies in Gov. Mark Sanford’s Cabinet, and zeroed in specifically on one he requested more money for.

That’s right. The Department of Social Services was so underfunded by the time Mr. Sanford took office that even our most famous penny-pincher, who never met a government program he didn’t want to cut, saw the need to beef it back up.

This is not to say that DSS is without blame. The agency has failed to properly discipline employees whose actions endangered children; DSS Director Kim Aydlette implied that short-staffing was to blame, but that’s no excuse. And while filling out internal reports on time might understandably fall by the wayside when caseworkers are overworked, there’s no excuse for failing to enter sex offenders’ names into a central registry that is relied upon for crucial background checks.

But the agency was well on its way to addressing nearly all of the problems identified in the audit long before it was released. When Ms. Aydlette visited our editorial board in February, she outlined a series of changes — some of which were already under way, some of which she was still developing — to better supervise and train case workers and make sure policies and laws are consistently followed in all 46 counties.

To its credit, when the Legislature found itself flush with cash this year, it did channel more into the Department of Social Services — enough that Ms. Aydlette says she can hire back enough case workers to get the job done. That doesn’t help the children we might have been able to protect from further abuse and neglect had lawmakers gotten their priorities straight earlier. But it should help in the future. And this audit should serve as a further reminder of the price we pay when our lawmakers refuse to make difficult, responsible decisions.