The stories of neglect and drug abuse told to Idaho’s legislative budget committee were compelling.

In one, a little boy in a skeleton costume ran up and down the street periodically while state police officers watched as they prepared to bust a meth lab. The officers thought the boy was a lookout. Actually, he was trying to catch a school bus. He had dressed himself for a Halloween party while his parents were passed out on a couch.

Another child who was afraid to go home asked a friend to go with her. The friend told her parents what she saw. Ultimately, child-protection officials found five children at home, unattended and without food, a sixth duct-taped in a crawl space, and a lot of drugs, according to a report by Betsy Russell of The Spokesman-Review.

Legislators were shocked and outraged. Something will be done to fund more child-protection workers. A vulnerable population is involved.

However, lawmakers should be careful not to spend so much of their empathy and dollars on one high-profile area of the state welfare system that they neglect other sections that may not stand out as much, but are equally important to individuals on fixed incomes, disabled, or poor.

Administering food stamps doesn’t attract as much attention as the battle against Idaho’s growing meth problem. But it is crucial to a senior citizen eking out a living on a Social Security check of less than $1,000 per month. Often, food stamps enable financially strapped families to spend their meager resources on other essentials, such as shelter, clothing and medicine. Yet, the food stamp program is just as shorthanded as child protection services.

Last year, the state almost incurred a federal fine of $1 million as a result of errors in which poor people received too much or too little food assistance – a problem welfare officials tied to lack of staff. Within a few months, the department cut its errors in half by reassigning staff from other sections. But that shift created problems in child support and Medicaid sections.

In three years, staff for the entire welfare department has dropped from 709 to 550, according to Russell’s story. Legislators didn’t seem to be as impressed with those numbers as they were with the meth stories.

“It’s been my observation that that unit has chronic problems, and I’m hesitant to invest more money in it,” Sandpoint Republican Sen. Shawn Keough, vice chairwoman of the Budget Committee, said of the child support program.

She may be right. But the evidence says otherwise. The welfare department has been cut so much in recent years that only bone remains. The Budget Committee deserves credit for scrutinizing the Health and Welfare Department budget last week. Now, it faces the challenge of being open-minded and creative in dispersing limited funds to ensure as much as possible is done for as many needy people as possible.