How government mistrust sank legislation aimed at better supporting Wyoming families

Going into the legislative session, a bill to give the Wyoming Department of Family Services more flexibility to use the confidential data it collects appeared very passable.

The statute change had been vetted and sponsored by the Wyoming Legislature’s Joint Judiciary Committee and studied by policymakers for the last two years. It fit into a statewide effort, driven by the Legislature, to better manage both behavioral health programs and the juvenile justice system.

Though the data concerned families and children in difficult situations, their identities would remain protected, according to DFS officials and lawmakers who crafted and backed the legislation. The result would be more timely early interventions and more targeted state services for vulnerable families, as well as deeper knowledge about what government-funded programs are helping, or hurting, Wyoming’s youth, proponents said. 

By the time the session began in January, House Bill 48, “Department of family services-confidentiality amendments,” was the kind of bill most legislators like to pass — it was well-vetted and narrowly targeted, and the government agencies and service providers involved were lined up to support it. 

“We thought this was a nice clean-up deal,” Fremont County Republican Rep. Lloyd Larsen, a prominent sponsor and lawmaker long focused on improving public health programming, told WyoFile.

But new House lawmakers killed not just one, but two versions of the bill on tight committee votes. The legislation’s saga highlights a challenging political environment for social programming, and perhaps particularly for the Wyoming Department of Family Services, as Wyoming’s political shift rightward empowers lawmakers who are skeptical about government institutions.

Proponents say the bill ran into often vague, unspecified opposition that seemed less focused on the statute than on generalized distrust of DFS. In one committee room, a lawmaker raised a past dispute with the agency over health care decisions for his child. That Feb. 27 exchange presaged the second and final “no” vote, killing the bill as the session drew to a close. 

Long road to a dead end

Trouble started in the session’s first week, when the House Judiciary Committee, composed of majority freshman lawmakers, shot down the bill with a 5-4 vote. There was practically no debate on the bill, though two new Republican representatives, Marlene Brady of Rock Springs and Laurie Bratten of Sheridan, voiced privacy concerns. It was one of two committee bills the committee voted down that day produced during the legislative off season known as the interim — with the second being an expansion of a pilot program in some Wyoming counties, where adult criminal offenders receive court-mandated and supervised treatment for mental illness and substance abuse disorders. 

Believing that perhaps new lawmakers just needed more information on the bills, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Jared Olsen, R-Cheyenne, brought new versions of both measures in his chamber. Senators advanced both bills. And in February, the bill expanding the pilot court program passed back through the House judiciary with a 5-4 vote, this time going the other way. The bill was ratified by both chambers.

When the DFS bill, now called Senate File 157, “Department of family services-confidentiality amendments-2,” came back around to the House, however, leadership assigned it to a new committee — the House Labor, Health and Social Services Committee.

There, Rep. Joel Guggenmos, R-Riverton, described a DFS investigation into his family. 

The investigation began after Guggenmos and his wife chose to pull their son out of chemotherapy. Their son had a form of child cancer, but an initial round of chemotherapy beat the disease back into remission. Though a doctor in Salt Lake City wanted the boy to undergo more chemotherapy to ensure the cancer’s retreat, his parents wanted to pursue naturopathic remedies and listen to their son, who hated the side effects of the treatment. 

The doctor reported them to DFS. The agency visited the family and conducted an investigation, which it’s mandated to do by statute in the wake of such a report. No charges were filed against the couple, and their custody of the son was not challenged. 

But the investigation was invasive, and carried an implication he and his wife were being callous with their son’s health, Guggenmos told WyoFile. “We were not going into this decision lightly,” he said. “We shared with DFS and the doctor our game plan. ‘This is what we’re going to do. We’re not just going to pull him off of chemo and just hope for the best.’”  

In the committee hearing, Guggenmos, his voice taut, recalled how the investigation into his family lasted weeks. 

“I’m just wanting to make sure that this bill would not have made my life even more of a hell,” Guggenmos said to DFS Director Korin Schmidt. 

The bill would not impact DFS’s decisions to investigate or how those investigations were conducted, Schmidt said. She told Guggenmos her agency had been doing its job as outlined in statute. “This is blending a little bit of two different situations,” she said. “If we receive a report, we do have to look into that. That’s not voluntary and that’s not what this bill does.”

As the investigation went on, the Guggenmos family shared their plight on social media and with the news site Cowboy State Daily, drawing community support. But Guggenmos also told WyoFile he stayed in contact with the hospital, keeping up blood tests for his son after the rift over chemotherapy. His son has stayed healthy. “He’s growing like a weed,” Guggenmos said. 

Guggenmos wasn’t the only lawmaker with a personal experience on his mind. 

Before Health and Labor voted on the bill, Rep. Darin McCann, R-Rock Springs, spoke up. “I find it a little weird that you’ve got two people on this panel that have had negative experiences with DFS,” he said, referring to himself, “so I think we need to be careful what we allow them to do.” 

McCann later told WyoFile he was not talking about Wyoming DFS, but to an interaction he had with Colorado’s agency while living in that state. Regardless of being an entirely different state government, he said he was left with the sense that such agencies tend to “overstep their bounds,” and that it was “a theme across the states.”   

The agency’s investigations are nearly always confidential, and Schmidt declined to outline DFS’s interactions with either lawmaker. 

Guggenmos did not vote no because of the investigation, he told WyoFile. Instead, he attributed his vote to worries about increasing rates of medication in children for ADHD and other behavioral disorders. Though he did not raise those concerns in the meeting, he said he saw increased data-sharing by DFS as something that could potentially augment that trend. 

“I just didn’t want to give more of a streamline to an end that I don’t support,” he said. 

Though the investigation into his family rankles, Guggenmos said he would not let his experience get in the way of voting for future DFS initiatives. “If I see something that the agency is doing that I believe would be advantageous and helpful, I’m not gonna have a grudge hold me back from supporting it,” he said.

Schmidt did not recall another instance where a lawmaker raised a personal experience with DFS ahead of a vote, she said. But, “I’m sure that impressions and perceptions of what we do is going to indicate to some lawmakers how they’re going to vote on a particular topic,” she said.

DFS investigations are often complicated and uncomfortable, she said. “That’s going to be something that stays with any client that we interact with, if it doesn’t go the way that they had hoped it would,” she said. If someone is left with the perception “that the system misstepped, if the agency misstepped, that is the belief we’re going to leave with that one person,” she said. “And so it matters.” 

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Larsen, however, said lawmakers should have set aside personal experiences and looked at the broader impact of the bill. “Nobody wants to have that happen,” he said of the investigation into the Guggenmos family, but he noted DFS can’t ignore a report filed by a doctor. “DFS doesn’t go down through the phone book saying, OK, let’s go to these houses and investigate them today.’”

To Larsen, the system seemed to work because Guggenmos wasn’t charged and the state didn’t attempt to intervene in custody, he said. 

When it came to McCann, Larsen said that “as an elected official, if we’re going to make those kind of claims, you really should be willing to share the facts.” From Larsen’s position watching the committee, it seemed the distrust of DFS expressed by McCann and Guggenmos swung the vote. “That sentiment ruled the day,” he said.

Looking ahead

Lawmakers who voted the bill down may not have understood its intention, proponents said. One of DFS’s goals with better data sharing is helping families before the government has to intervene with heavy-handed measures like child welfare investigations, Schmidt told WyoFile. Part of the bill would have made it easier for them to refer a family to a social service provider that might provide support to a household at risk of deteriorating.

“The attempt was to do a better job of being able to connect [families] to those necessary services, so that they don’t come into a place where there’s court involvement or law enforcement involvement, which is big government,” she said.  

In a legislature increasingly dominated by government skeptics, both support for parental rights and doubt of government agencies that intervene — even for the protection of children — is likely to grow. Schmidt, however, does not necessarily believe that spells a dark future for any legislation enhancing her agency’s abilities. 

New lawmakers need time to understand what DFS does and learn about the vulnerabilities of both the families and children they work with, she said. And the tension over parental rights isn’t new, she said. 

“The new legislators very much care about family,” she said. “And we very much care about family. For us, though . . . child safety is what we’re really looking for. And that is always going to intersect with parental rights. There’s no way it can’t.”

As for this year’s bill, it ultimately died on a 4-4 vote — a tie vote does not advance a bill. Rep. Clarence Styvar, R-Cheyenne, was the missing tie-breaker. In another wrinkle, Styvar has chosen not to attend Health and Labor committee meetings throughout the session. Critics have accused him of protesting being passed over by the Wyoming Freedom Caucus for the chairman’s position, despite having a longer tenure in the Legislature. In an interview, Styvar denied that, telling WyoFile he was put on the committee by mistake and so has chosen not to attend its meetings. 

Styvar will not serve on the committee in the interim session, and will be replaced by Rep. Pam Thayer.

Styvar would have voted for the bill, he told WyoFile.

“Grr,” Larsen said.