WA lawmakers walk back agreement to end child support garnishment

The 40-year-old single mom cracked a smile and, for a brief moment, laughed alongside them. Then she reminded Justin to brush his hair out of his eyes. 

“I overcompensate, and I over-mother,” she acknowledged. “I’m very protective.” 

Silver also worries. She worries about big things, like when her five kids are going to get kicked out of this Bellingham house, which a homeless prevention program pays for, for now. And smaller things, like how to make holidays feel special with the meager income she gets from welfare, food stamps, and whatever odd jobs she can find on Craigslist.

“Their friends are having birthday parties at pony farms and Sky Zone,” Silver said. “They’re lucky if they get a store-bought cake.”

A legal order requires their father to pay child support, and he usually does – but Silver does not see all of that money. That’s because Washington intercepts tens of millions of dollars in child support payments each year from parents who receive welfare benefits, formally known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

Silver’s family is one of at least 3,300 families whose child support is garnished, according to the state Department of Social and Health Services. Some 16,000 more parents have open cases with DSHS but are not yet receiving payments above the current garnishment threshold, so it remains unclear how many of those families could lose payments to garnishment in the future.

Lawmakers voted near-unanimously last year to stop garnishing monthly child support payments starting in 2026. Then, faced with a massive budget deficit, they walked that agreement back, writing a state budget that continues the practice until at least 2029. The budget proposal now sits before Gov. Bob Ferguson for final consideration. 

“It’s devastating for me, because I can be as good a mom as I can be, but those stresses and those insecurities that they’re having to live with right now could end up having long-term effects on them,” Silver said. “For our lawmakers to not take that into account and to not see that is baffling to me.”

‘Difficult decision’

Washington takes some $40 million from low-income families through this process each year, a 2024 Cascade PBS investigation found. The federal government has allowed states to garnish child support payments going back to at least to the 1970s, but the practice has fallen out of favor in recent years: More than half of U.S. states have begun returning payments to families.

Legislators have dipped into child support on and off over the years, most recently in 2011. In 2021, Sen. Manka Dhingra, D-Redmond, sponsored a bill to redirect a small portion of payments back to families. As a revenue source, it’s uniquely regressive – lawmakers in both parties have described it as a tax levied against the state’s poorest families. And it specifically targets children.

“I don’t even really have words for it,” said Rep. Travis Couture, a Shelton Republican who sponsored last year’s bipartisan bill to return monthly child support payments to the families they were intended for. During an angry rebuke on the House floor, Couture laid into Democrats for increasing other spending while “robbing single moms … the people who absolutely need us the most.”

Faced with a looming $16 billion budget deficit, Democrats proposed a wealth tax, but Ferguson ruled that out, arguing it would be challenged in court.

Lawmakers instead scrambled to raise other taxes and fees and cut services in the last days of the legislative session last month. Ferguson proposed billions in cuts – including delaying implementation of the child support agreement until 2029, which he projected would save $13.7 million over the next two years.

Lawmakers adopted this suggestion in their final draft. They also reduced behavioral health hospital beds, closed a free early-learning program for children under 3, cut off new admissions to a habilitation center for people with disabilities, and slashed abortion access funds and college grants for low-income students.

Rep. Nicole Macri, a Seattle Democrat and vice-chair of the House Appropriations committee, characterized the child support garnishment extension as one of thousands of terrible options budget writers faced as they sought to spare housing, food and health programs. They still ended up with painful cuts like reducing Medicaid rates for dental care.

“It wasn’t a decision we came to easily,” Macri said.

The resulting $78 billion two-year budget still raised spending by over $7 billion, according to legislative budget staff. Much of that new spending covers collectively bargained wage increases for state workers, while other increases go to special education, long-term care and one of Ferguson’s major campaign promises – $100 million in grants to hire more police. 

During his campaign, Ferguson argued that low-income families “pay disproportionate taxes,” pledging to expand the state’s Working Families Tax Credit.

“We need to get more money back to those families,” he posted on Twitter last year.

Governor’s Office spokesperson Brionna Aho emphasized that the Working Families Tax Credit remained intact, but did not directly address how garnishing child support payments from single mothers fit into Ferguson’s broader economic vision. 

“Because of our budget crisis, the governor supports the Legislature’s difficult decision to delay implementing this new policy until we can afford it,” Aho wrote.

Ferguson has until May 20 to sign the budget. If he chooses to veto it, lawmakers would have to come back into session to make changes.

Savings and sacrifices

Silver grew up in a middle-class military family, jumping around bases. She said she had never experienced poverty before her now-estranged husband did a tour in Iraq and came back different. He would not get help. They lost their house and moved into a camping trailer. 

Eventually Silver and the kids fled, hiding in domestic violence shelters, she said. A local homeless prevention program now pays for a house with the overgrown backyard and the skateboard swing. But it’s unclear how long that will last. Silver is bracing for it to be taken away. 

“It’s been a pretty eye-opening experience,” she said, one that offered her painful insights many lawmakers have likely not experienced. “For them to think that this is even something that could be on the table, that’s pretty mind-blowing.”

One of the things that eats at Silver most is how poverty has shrunk her children’s worlds and opportunities. Her oldest son wanted to attend college, but she could not afford it and needed his help caring for the younger siblings. Her 20-year-old son Cody wants to be a voice actor, but there’s no money for voice lessons. Both boys stay at home to help out the family and have struggled to make friends, Silver said, without school or other ways to meet people their own age.

“The money that they’re taking to fill that deficit … is enough money that could have such an impact on a kid’s daily life, you know,” she said, “and potentially change the trajectory of their life.”

Silver has ambitions of her own, too. She carves sculptures from stones she collects on the beach, and can transform a rock into a heart-shaped necklace in under 15 minutes. She hopes one day to afford art classes and support her family with her sculpture practice. 

Silver struggled to comprehend how all the sacrifices her family is forced to make could be worth the savings.

“They’re protecting the wealthy and taking from people who literally have nothing,” Silver said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”