## Facts

- Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) provides foster care to children removed from parental custody.
- Some foster children receive Social Security benefits under OASDI (Title II) or SSI (Title XVI).
- Federal law permits the Social Security Administration to appoint a “representative payee” to receive benefits and use them for the beneficiary’s “use and benefit.”
- Federal regulations allow social service agencies and custodial institutions to serve as representative payees and permit payees to spend benefits for a beneficiary’s “current maintenance,” including food, shelter, clothing, and medical care.
- For many foster children, SSA appointed DSHS as representative payee.
- Under state practice, DSHS credited each child’s benefits to an individual account and debited the account to pay foster-care providers, thereby reimbursing the State for part of foster-care expenditures.
- A class of foster children and their guardians sued, claiming the practice violated the Social Security Act’s anti-attachment provision, 42 U.S.C. § 407(a) (and its application to SSI via § 1383(d)(1)), and improperly treated benefits as payment of a debt.
- Washington courts enjoined the practice and ordered restitution; the state supreme court affirmed.

## Issues

1. Whether a state agency’s use of foster children’s Social Security benefits, received as a duly appointed representative payee and applied to foster-care costs, is barred by 42 U.S.C. § 407(a) as “execution, levy, attachment, garnishment, or other legal process.”
2. Whether using benefits to cover foster-care costs is consistent with the representative payee duty to spend funds for the beneficiary’s “use and benefit,” including “current maintenance.”

## Decision

- The Supreme Court unanimously reversed.
- DSHS’s obtaining representative-payee status and applying benefits to foster-care costs did not employ “execution, levy, attachment, garnishment, or other legal process” within § 407(a).
- Using benefits to pay for foster care constituted spending for the child’s current maintenance and therefore fell within permitted representative-payee use.

## Legal Principles

- Under 42 U.S.C. § 407(a), “other legal process” is construed in line with the listed enforcement devices (execution, levy, attachment, garnishment) and refers to a judicial or quasi-judicial mechanism that compels a transfer of property to satisfy an actual or anticipated liability.
- A state agency acting as a representative payee, appointed through the federal administrative scheme, does not use “legal process” merely by receiving and administering benefits in that capacity.
- Representative payees may apply benefits to the beneficiary’s “current maintenance,” including essential living needs; payment for foster-care maintenance can qualify as such use.
- The Social Security framework contemplates that social service agencies and custodial institutions may serve as representative payees; concerns about conflicts in a payee’s dual role are addressed through SSA oversight or legislative change, not by expanding § 407(a).

## Conclusion

The Court held that Washington’s foster-care agency, acting as a federally appointed representative payee, did not violate the Social Security Act’s anti-attachment clause by using foster children’s benefits to pay for foster-care maintenance, because the practice involved no judicial or quasi-judicial “legal process” and fit within authorized payee expenditures for current maintenance.


Wash. State Dep’t of Soc. & Health Servs. v. Guardianship Estate of Keffeler, 537 U.S. 371 (2003)