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When a state government suddenly faces hundreds of millions or potentially billions of dollars in legal claims, taxpayers have every reason to pay attention.
That money has to come from somewhere.
A dollar spent resolving lawsuits cannot simultaneously pay a teacher, repair a bridge, expand mental-health services or provide assistance to families struggling to make ends meet. Governments do not possess an unlimited supply of money, and pretending otherwise does nothing to help survivors or anyone else.
But there is something troubling about the way this debate is increasingly being framed.
The people receiving compensation are depicted as the problem.
A recent Seattle Times editorial called for tort reform as Washington confronts rapidly increasing lawsuit payouts. The underlying numbers are unquestionably significant. Washington paid approximately $537 million during the fiscal year ending June 30 for settlements and judgments involving government misconduct. That figure is five times what the state paid in 2021. About $388 million was associated with the Department of Children, Youth and Families, which oversees Washington’s child-welfare and juvenile-detention systems.
Washington is hardly alone.
Maryland has spent the past several years confronting thousands of childhood sexual-abuse claims after passage of its 2023 Child Victims Act, which eliminated the civil statute of limitations for child sexual abuse. State officials have warned that the potential liability could reach billions of dollars. Maryland responded in 2025 by reducing the amount recoverable on certain previously time-barred claims filed after June 1, 2025.
California has faced the same uncomfortable arithmetic. Los Angeles County agreed in 2025 to a roughly $4 billion settlement involving nearly 7,000 claims alleging sexual abuse in juvenile facilities dating back decades.
Those are staggering numbers.
But there is an important distinction between identifying a financial consequence and identifying its cause.
The Lawsuit Did Not Create the Abuse
When a government pays millions of dollars to someone who was abused while in foster care, sexually assaulted in a juvenile facility or harmed by an employee an institution negligently hired or supervised, the lawsuit did not create the underlying financial liability.
The institutional failure did.
The budgetary cost may not appear until decades later, when a survivor finally has an opportunity to bring a claim. But the chain of events began much earlier, with the abuse itself and, depending on the case, with failures to screen employees, investigate complaints, supervise staff, act on warning signs or protect children entrusted to an institution’s care.
Maryland’s own examination of Child Victims Act litigation illustrates the point. Lawsuits against government institutions commonly do not contend that the institution itself committed the sexual assault. Rather, claims may allege that an institution failed to adequately supervise employees, respond to warning signs, investigate complaints, implement appropriate safeguards or protect children in its custody.
If those allegations are proven, the payout isn’t merely an unfortunate expense appearing out of nowhere.
It is a bill arriving late.
Who Should Bear the Cost of Institutional Failure?
That leads to a more difficult question.
If someone was seriously harmed because an institution entrusted with protecting children failed in that responsibility, who should absorb the financial consequences?
There are only so many possibilities.
The institution can bear them.
Its insurer can bear some of them.
Taxpayers can ultimately bear them when the institution is governmental.
Or lawmakers can restrict what the injured person is allowed to recover, effectively requiring the survivor to bear a greater share of the loss.
Damage caps do not make the harm disappear. Instead, they determine who absorbs more of its consequences.
That does not mean every verdict is necessarily reasonable or every claim meritorious. Courts should scrutinize evidence while defendants deserve due process. Questionable claims should be and are challenged. Extraordinary verdicts can legitimately provoke debate about how damages are calculated.
But none of those concerns requires us to accept the idea that compensating people who were actually harmed is itself the societal failure.
Were You Harmed by an Institution That Failed to Protect You?
Schools, youth organizations, religious institutions, residential facilities and other organizations may be held accountable when negligence allows sexual abuse to occur. Learn more about institutional abuse claims, survivor rights and potential legal options.
Civil Liability Has Another Purpose
Compensation is only one reason institutional accountability is critical. Liability can also create an incentive to prevent the next case.
Consider what a state, school district, church, youth organization or residential facility might do when serious misconduct carries substantial financial consequences.
It may strengthen employee screening; investigate complaints more aggressively; tighten supervision; make reporting easier; cease quietly transferring a troublesome employee from one location to another; retain records that could reveal patterns of misconduct; and finally, it may invest money in prevention today because failing to do so could become extraordinarily expensive tomorrow.
That is particularly important in institutions serving children and other vulnerable people.
Reducing liability without simultaneously strengthening prevention risks treating the price of institutional failure rather than the failure itself.
There Is Room for Reform Without Shortchanging Survivors
None of this means governments should simply write checks indefinitely without examining the system.
Washington’s rising liability costs are a legitimate fiscal problem. Its self-insurance fund recently faced a temporary deficit potentially reaching $1.7 billion, and state and local governments are searching for ways to control legal expenses. Washington also spent more than $76 million during the latest fiscal year on government and outside lawyers handling claims.
Certainly, reforms worth considering.
States could create faster procedures for evaluating well-documented claims, encourage early settlement before years of litigation consume enormous legal fees, improve transparency about settlements and defense costs, strengthen risk-management programs and offer voluntary mediation processes that do not require survivors to surrender their right to a court hearing.
Yet above all, governments should study why claims are occurring.
States should closely examine: Which institutions generate disproportionate numbers of cases? Were warning signs ignored? Did supervisors know about previous allegations? Were background checks inadequate? Were complaints documented but never investigated? Did policies exist on paper but fail in practice?
Every preventable case avoided protects both a potential victim and the public treasury.
That is tort reform of a different kind; more editorial boards across the country will hopefully adopt and clearly signpost these positions.
The Budget Conversation Should Start Earlier
How can taxpayers possibly afford this? That’s the reflexive yet understandable public reaction when an enormous settlement appears in the headlines.
A paradigm shift is called for where the public (and newspaper editors and journalists) instead ask first and foremost: How did a taxpayer-funded institution allow conduct serious enough to create this liability?
In many childhood sexual-abuse cases, survivors could not realistically seek justice when the abuse occurred. Some were children. Some did not understand what had happened to them. Some feared retaliation or were not believed. Others lived in states where statutes of limitations expired long before they were prepared to confront what happened.
Revival laws and expanded filing periods have forced institutions (and sometimes today’s taxpayers) to confront misconduct that occurred years or decades ago.
That creates difficult fiscal choices.
But calling those payments evidence that survivors are receiving too much money risks confusing accountability with extravagance.
The better goal is not a system in which governments become financially secure because badly injured people recover less.
It is a system in which fewer people are abused in the first place.
And if government officials truly want to bring lawsuit costs down over the next generation, that may be the most effective tort reform available. Tort reform shouldn’t shortchange abuse survivors.
