Guardianship Is a State System. The Harm It Causes Is a Federal Problem.

Guardianship is governed by state law — fifty separate systems, each with its own rules, its own courts, and its own record of failure. Some states have procedural protections that exceed federal constitutional minimums. None has proven capable of policing the system it administers. The pattern of abuse is too entrenched, the financial incentives too powerful, and the oversight too underfunded for state courts alone to correct what state courts, in many cases, have enabled.

But guardianship does not stay within state lines. When a guardian controls access to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, federal benefits are implicated. When assets are moved across state lines, or when vulnerable adults are relocated from one jurisdiction to another to complicate family intervention, federal jurisdiction follows. When the conduct is coordinated, sustained, and organized for financial gain — as the evidence increasingly suggests it is — it is not merely a local problem of inadequate probate oversight. It is a federal enforcement matter.

And yet enforcement, essential as it is, addresses only what has already gone wrong. The federal role in guardianship is not only to prosecute the pipeline — it is to prevent it from forming in the first place.

Guardianship most often enters at moments of institutional failure: a hospital discharge with no care plan, a housing crisis with no coordinated response, a family caregiver who has reached the limit of what they can sustain alone. In these moments, the system reaches for its most powerful tool because no lighter one was available. The result is not protection. It is substitution — of a person's rights for a set of services that should have been offered, coordinated, and delivered long before a court was ever involved.

The Pipeline Begins Before the Courthouse

State and federal programs already have the tools to intervene earlier. Area Agencies on Aging, Medicaid home and community-based services, Adult Protective Services, legal aid, benefits navigation, and caregiver support programs can, when properly coordinated, address the conditions that guardianship is called in to resolve. The challenge is not the absence of resources. It is the absence of coordination — the chronic failure of systems to find the person who needs help before crisis forces the issue into a courtroom.

A no wrong door approach — in which any point of contact with any service system can connect a person to the full range of supports available to them — is both a best practice and a proven model. When it works, it catches people before they fall. It redirects them toward supports that preserve their rights rather than remove them. It treats guardianship not as a default response to vulnerability but as what it should be: a measure of last resort, reserved for circumstances in which every less-restrictive option has been genuinely considered and found insufficient.

Multisector plans for aging, now adopted in a growing number of states, provide the policy architecture for this approach — aligning health care, housing, long-term services, caregiving, and community support around the shared goal of keeping people in control of their own lives for as long as possible. When these plans are fully implemented and adequately funded, guardianship filings should decline. That decline is not a side effect. It is the measure of success.

The federal government is positioned to accelerate this work. The Elder Justice Coordinating Council, the Administration for Community Living, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the network of State Units on Aging are all instruments of the same basic commitment: that older Americans deserve coordinated, rights-preserving support — not a pipeline to a courtroom.

The United States Department of Justice has also positioned itself to act on the enforcement side. Its Elder Justice Initiative maintains a national network of elder justice coordinators — Assistant United States Attorneys designated in every federal judicial district, trained in elder abuse, financial exploitation, and the intersection of both. Its Criminal Division includes a dedicated money laundering and asset recovery section. These are not hypothetical resources. They exist, they are funded, and they are authorized to move.

The FBI's White Collar Crime Units are a natural enforcement anchor for guardianship fraud — involving embezzlement, money laundering, conspiracy, and in some cases the interstate movement of vulnerable persons — which falls squarely within their jurisdiction. The legal theories are not novel. The investigative tools are in place.

What is needed is coordination. The Elder Justice Coordinating Council exists precisely for this purpose: to align the work of the agencies — the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Health and Human Services, and others — whose authorities, taken together, are sufficient to address what no single agency and no single state has been able to stop alone.

The authority exists. The legal theory is established. What has been missing is the institutional will to pull these tools together — both to prevent the pipeline from forming and to prosecute it when it does.