Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.

Child welfare and maternal-child health policy often treat people as if they arrive one at a time, with neatly defined needs.

That creates a real mismatch with what families experience, and a need for constant translation:

• Families have to make themselves legible to programs to get help;

• Service providers must make themselves legible to public financing to stay sustainable; and

• Advocates in a coalition need to bridge gaps in understanding across areas of expertise to advance an agenda.

Today’s guest understands what that translation work makes possible, and what it costs, better than most.

Dr. Kimá Taylor is a pediatrician whose expertise spans health policy, clinical and public health practice, and philanthropy. She is the Founder and Managing Principal of Anka Consulting and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center.

We talked about what her time on Capitol Hill taught her about crafting effective policy arguments, why advocacy requires more than identifying harm or demanding action, and why bold change and incremental reform are interdependent.

We also talked about the central role of financing in policy, right down to how making a service eligible for Medicaid funding can change how that service is delivered, and whether it works.

Kimá’s perspective is a reminder that financing determines whether a policy vision can deliver, but that you first need a vision clear enough to build a financing strategy around it.

We’re back with your latest Weekly Wonk.

A special welcome to those finding us from this column about the child welfare workforce, which referenced our series with the Center for the Helping Professions.

This week, we’re digging into Medicaid, from an angle relevant to your ongoing work on policy around older youth in and aging out of foster care.

Wonks know that at least until Congress is back for the lame duck, the Fostering the Future Act to update the older youth-focused Chafee program is in abeyance.

Only a newbie staffer or advocate thinks recess is quiet when your policy area has unfinished business. Seasoned vets know that’s actually when deals can coalesce.

That’s why we’ve been producing new original analyses to inform your older youth policy work, digging into relevant Chafee data about:

• States Chafee service strategies.

  • See the clear approaches that won’t show up in national data.

• Homelessness outcomes among youth aging out.

  • An important outcome given the housing policy focus in this effort.

• illuminating Chafee’s returned funds issue.

  • Our must-read work with new data on the key issue in current funding talks.

This policy discussion isn’t happening in a vacuum. States are preparing for significantly reduced federal Medicaid funding under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Youth advocate Sierra Burns recently reminded us that youth who age out of care remain eligible for Medicaid up to age 26. And they’re exempt from requirements to demonstrate that they are working or in school. So… nothing to see here? Not exactly.

We’ve highlighted how exemptions do not happen automatically. They require technology and administrative activity, which can make friction even for the eligible.

Former Georgia child welfare director Tom Rawlings has written for us about the cost and administrative work these eligibility systems require.

An October 20 investigation report from Senate Finance Committee Democrats critiques firms doing that work, pointing to a likely oversight focus to expect if Democrats retake either chamber in next week’s midterms.

All of which brings us to why this crossroads of older youth and Medicaid matters, and merits a Deep Dive this week on what we know about coverage after aging out.

So Wonk Senior Contributor Laura Radel dug into the available survey data of young people aging out of care, to see what happens to their Medicaid coverage over time.

My recent WonkCast conversation with Medicaid expert Andy Schneider dug into Medicaid’s role in financing care for the child welfare population.

But first, we’ve got something worth having on your radar on the Family First Prevention Services Act.

Let’s get into it.

Putting the "Can" in Candidacy

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) has released a new policy brief about what states can do to grow the reach of the Family First Prevention Services Act.

What Happened

ACF’s new brief lays out a case for the ways states can much more expansively define the population they serve through Family First, expanding its reach.

In particular, the brief highlights how to use the significant flexibility available for how states define the concept of “candidacy”, a core component of eligibility in Family First.

Why it Matters

Family First allows claiming of open-ended Title IV-E funding for services to safely prevent foster care. Eligibility is tied in large part to a “candidate for foster care.”

Over multiple Administrations, ACF has intentionally kept the discretion available to states for defining that term for their Family First plan.

This latest move matters because it’s substantial encouragement to approach eligibility more expansively, with explicit examples of what states can do.

Somewhat confusingly, there is another “Candidates for Title IV-E Foster Care” definition, covering traditional foster care administrative funds for family preservation.

ACF has consistently said it is not applying that narrower definition to Family First.

What to Watch
Whether states update their plans. This would make for easier eligibility, but there are other barriers to implementation that also drive current claiming patterns.

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Deep Dive: Remaining Gaps in Health Insurance Enrollment After Youth Age Out of Foster Care

While nearly all youth who left foster care at age 18 or later remain eligible for Medicaid until they turn 26, NYTD surveys reveal that many youth still experience coverage gaps.

By Laura Radel, Senior Contributor

This article continues a series examining outcomes of youth who aged out of foster care using data from the National Youth in Transition Database (NYTD) dashboard.

Premium Wonks previously got our premium piece looking at homelessness among young people transitioning from foster care.

NYTD surveyed this cohort at age 17 in 2020, then again at 19 in 2022 and 21 in 2024.

This article examines health insurance coverage, primarily through Medicaid.

Most young adults who aged out of foster care were eligible for Medicaid until age 26, although this cohort predates the federal requirement extending that eligibility across state lines.

Nationally, self-reported Medicaid enrollment declined from 83 percent at 17 to 75 percent at 21. But that decline was not universal: enrollment held steady in some states and increased in others.

Those different trajectories highlight the role of state enrollment and renewal practices. Eligibility exceptions and other insurance coverage further complicate the picture.

It’s also worth noting that these figures predate reduced federal Medicaid spending and more stringent eligibility requirements resulting from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

While former foster youth are categorically exempt from the laws’ work requirements for Medicaid eligibility, we’ve previously highlighted the way that exemptions do not merely happen, but require technology and administrative activity, putting further pressure on the maintenance of continuous coverage after aging out.

Medicaid Enrollment Fell Nationally, but States Followed Different Paths

Nationally, reported Medicaid enrollment declined from 83 percent at age 17 to 80 percent at 19 and 75 percent at 21. However, there is substantial variation among states in the proportion of youth who report enrollment.

In some states, nearly all respondents reported Medicaid coverage at each survey age. In others, only about half did. And while enrollment declined nationally, some states recorded stable or rising rates.

The data on Medicaid enrollment reveal four enrollment patterns. These patterns are described below and which states follow each pattern is shown on the map in Figure 1.

Decreasing Medicaid Enrollment

In 29 states, we see Medicaid enrollment declines of 8 percent or more after youth exit foster care. Declines varied in size; in 15 of those states enrollment decreased by at least 15 percent, while declines were smaller in the others.

The declines usually occurred both from age 17 to 19 and 19 to 21, but in three states the drop occurred only from ages 17 to 19 and then stabilized. The greatest declines were in:

• Wyoming (down from 94 percent enrollment reported at age 17 to 48 percent at age 21)

• Louisiana (down from 94 percent to 53 percent)

• Idaho (down from 95 percent to 57 percent)

• Alabama (down from 94 percent to 59 percent)

• West Virginia (down from 97 percent to 63 percent)

Stable Medicaid Enrollment

In 12 states Medicaid enrollment rates remained approximately steady (change of 7 percent or less across from age 17 to 21).

In many of these states that relatively steady enrollment was at a high initial enrollment rate, including California where imported enrollment started at 91 percent and Virginia which started at 94 percent.

However, some were steady at lower rates. This includes Florida, with steady enrollment that started at 67 percent and Ohio which had an initial enrollment rate of 77 percent.

Increasing Medicaid Enrollment

In six states Medicaid enrollment among youth went up at each subsequent interview, including some that began with relatively low reported enrollment at age 17.

The greatest increases in enrollment were in:

• Hawaii (up from 63 percent enrollment reported at age 17 to 89 percent at age 21)

• Vermont (up from 61 percent to 85 percent)

• Oregon (up from 70 percent to 91 percent)

• Pennsylvania (up from 50 percent to 61 percent)

• Maine (up from 89 percent to 100 percent)

Enrollment Was Up and Down (or Down and Up)

In four states, enrollment did not show a steady pattern but instead varied up and down at each interview. This group included Illinois, Iowa, Mississippi, and New Mexico.

Other Insurance Increased as Medicaid Enrollment Fell

Some respondents reported health insurance through a job or other source.

Nationally, the share reporting insurance other than Medicaid rose from 12 percent at age 17 to 13 percent at 19 and 17 percent at 21.

Rates of other health insurance vary substantially across states.

At each survey point there, some states reported other insurance rates in the single digits, while others exceeded 30 percent.

In some cases, states with low other health insurance enrollment have high Medicaid enrollment rates, so nearly all youth appeared to have coverage.

In others, the percent of youth reporting Medicaid and other health insurance together leave a significant gap.

The two rates cannot simply be added to calculate total coverage: some youth reported both Medicaid and other insurance, and the NYTD dashboard does not identify that overlap.

Rising rates of other insurance therefore do not establish how much of the decline in Medicaid enrollment was offset by other coverage.

What Explains The Differences?

Reported Medicaid enrollment fell nationally as this cohort moved into adulthood. But some states maintained high enrollment, while others recorded increases from much lower starting points.

Some states have used transition planning, automatic renewals, and simpler documentation requirements to help eligible youth maintain coverage.

These practices offer possible explanations for the different state trajectories, though NYTD does not establish how much they account for the results.

Looking ahead, the challenge leaders will face is the looming fiscal squeeze resulting from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which will constrain resources for dedicated strategies right as the added challenge emerges of demonstrating and documenting exemption from the law’s work requirements.

Across this series, young adults’ reported experiences with housing, education, work, financial assistance, and health insurance differed widely by state.

Those differences do not establish which policies worked. They show how much a national account of the transition from foster care leaves unexplained.

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Organizations partner with Wonk to stay in front of fast-moving policy change. Our approach has offered partners benefits that have included:

• Keeping state advocates clear on why key trends and opportunities matter;

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Partnerships combine strategic sessions and leadership briefings with broad premium access for your team.

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Reach out to learn about what we offer state agencies and organizations.

That’s it for this week.

Stay sharp, Wonks.

~Z

Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.

Medicaid plays an essential role in child health financing, especially for children and youth in foster care.

Understanding Medicaid policy today means excavating sedimentary layers from decades of decisions, each embodying earlier eras.

Over time, that’s how you can end up with something like custody for care, where some young people enter foster care not for neglect or abuse, but because it’s the only way to finance their treatment.

Understanding how policy emerges from accumulated layers of decisions is not a philosophical exercise; it’s how policy wonks determine where we are, where we could go, and what leverage points could get us there.

And if Medicaid is best understood as a sedimentary structure, today’s guest is one of its foremost geologists.

Andy Schneider is a Research Professor of the Practice at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. He has over 50 years of experience working on the Medicaid program as a Hill staffer, senior CMS advisor, private consultant, and public interest attorney.

Whether you’re a preeminent Medicaid expert, or someone who knows just enough to be dangerous, this conversation will deepen your understanding of how Medicaid’s past shapes its present, and what that means for the future of child health policy.

Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk.

I wasn’t surprised that my recent WonkCast conversation with Ali Caliendo about kinship care resonated with so many of you.

She’s pressing on a central question our current debates too often pass by; is kinship care a form of prevention, or is it an intervention?

This isn’t abstract dorm room philosophizing, but a way to make sense of what we can say about declining numbers of kids in care. Otherwise, we can think lower foster care entries mean more families remain intact, when separations might be continuing.

For our Deep Dive this week, we’ve invited Ali to unpack what it means when foster care prevention still results in family separation.

Later this week, Wonk premium members and partners will get her actionable framework, with guidance on what this means for your work on Family First.

We’ve also got some way-too-early Hill developments worth watching as you plan for your work in the lame duck and the 120th Congress.

Finally, if you enjoyed Rebecca Robuck’s “what if it worked?” approach to child welfare policy, you’ll want to subscribe to her new initiative, The Trellis Project.

Let’s get into it.

See. Know. Decide.

At Child Welfare Wonk, we’re here to help you do three things:

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We do that through our team’s relentless search for and analysis of policy intelligence.

Knowing that a Congressional hearing is happening is information. Knowing why that hearing is happening in the first place, and what opening it represents, is intelligence.

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Wonkatizer

Ways & Means Preps for Musical Chairs

If you thought the 2028 presidential race was off to an early start, House Republicans are prepping for the race to be the GOP lead for the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee… in 2029.

This is not mere horse-race movement, though. If you care about child welfare and safety net policy, this matters for you because they that run through that committee.

What’s Happening

Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) currently chairs the Ways and Means Committee. Under current House GOP rules, he would hit the six-year term limit for running that committee at the end of 2028. That’s waivable, but not a given.

Other committee members are already testing the waters on a push for the lead role, including Reps. Darin LaHood (R-IL) and Adrian Smith (R-NE).

Why it Matters

The oldest committee in Congress has broad jurisdiction touching the tax code, some health policy, child welfare, and a substantial proportion of safety net programs.

The game of musical chairs will shape the leading Republican perspective on the full committee and also the relevant subcommittee for child welfare and the safety net.

What to Watch

Larger House GOP leadership deliberations on waivers to allow committee chairs to stay past their term limits will shape the current Chairman’s options.

The other thing to watch is the posture of all of these aspiring members toward safety net policy issues, for signals of how they’d lead the GOP side.

Wondering what you can do about it? Later this week, our premium members will be getting concrete guidance on how to be well-positioned for any outcome.

Deep Dive

When Foster Care Prevention Still Leads to Family Separation

Kinship care can keep a child in the family, while still separating them from their parents. Assuming prevention drives falling foster care entries may miss separation outside the system.

By Ali Caliendo, PhD

Two children come to the attention of a child welfare agency.

Child A stays home. The parent enters substance use treatment, the agency arranges in-home services and concrete supports, and the case closes.

Child B does not stay home. The child goes to live with a grandmother across town while the parent addresses the conditions that brought a caseworker to the door.

No petition is filed. No judge signs an order. The investigation closes.

In most jurisdictions, both register as prevention, but in different records. Child A appears as a family that received services. Child B may not appear at all.

Neither child entered foster care. But only one avoided parental separation.

The fundamental problem is that the child welfare field often defines “prevention” in terms of the system, rather than a child’s experience.

The system-focused question is whether the child entered care formally or not. For the child, that administrative category can be irrelevant to whether they stayed with their parents or not.

The problem is not that Child B went to a grandmother. That may have been exactly the intervention the child needed. The problem is that the system can count the arrangement as successful prevention even though the child left a parent.

Child welfare has spent the better part of a decade building policy and financing around safely preventing foster care, a necessary shift. But preventing foster care counts what did not happen, not where the child went.

Kinship care is one of the strongest resources available when children cannot safely remain with parents. But it’s a safety and well-being intervention, not a prevention of parental separation.

Relative placement can preserve siblings, extended family, language, church, school, community, and the continuity of being known, and it avoids placement with strangers.

It may keep a family connected, but it does not keep a parent and child together. “Families stay together” can hide the difference.

The distinction is not semantic. It determines what gets counted, who receives support, and who absorbs the work and cost of separation.

When a prevention framework fails to name that distinction, responsibility shifts from the system to families equipped with substantially fewer supports.

Separation Happens Without Removal

Removal is a legal action: the state takes custody and assumes responsibility for placement and permanency. Separation is a physical one. A jurisdiction can prevent the first without preventing the second.

Josh Gupta-Kagan’s work on hidden foster care documents arrangements in which agencies facilitate a child’s move to a relative without filing a petition or creating the record a foster care placement would generate (Gupta-Kagan, 2020).

Formal removal also triggers process. A petition is filed, a parent is typically appointed counsel, and a judge must find that the separation is necessary.

An agency-facilitated diversion can move the same child out of the same home without triggering those protections.

Because these arrangements are neither consistently defined nor reported, there is no reliable national count.

National data from the early 2010s suggested that kinship arrangements outside of the foster care system accounted for nearly half of out-of-home placements following a child maltreatment investigation (Walsh, 2013).

Later estimates, drawing from this work, suggested that 100,000 to 300,000 children may be diverted from foster care to relatives annually (Malm et al., 2019).

A 2026 Child Trends brief found that only 11 states could distinguish kinship diversion from agency-custody placements in their administrative data, although 14 states had reported tracking diversion in a 2022 national policy survey (Child Trends, 2026).

But a state can track only diversions that generate a document.

When diversion happened in my own family in Nevada, it generated no document.

Once the investigator learned I would pursue guardianship, the investigation closed. There was no out-of-home safety plan and no record that a child had moved.

Later, while running a kinship navigator program, I saw the pattern repeat. Separations without paperwork remain outside the count.

The absence of a record did not mean the absence of a separation.

Separation Creates Three Sets of Needs

Naming the separation raises a question the field rarely asks. If state intervention helped separate children from their parents and create a kinship family, what does the state owe that family?

The answer shapes which supports get built and which families manage on their own.

Kinship care, regardless of how it interacts with the foster care system, should be understood as an intervention for children in nonparental care, and resourced accordingly.

The relevant unit is the kinship triad of child, parent, and caregiver.

The child may face grief, divided loyalties, behavioral health needs, and a need for safe parental contact. The parent may need services, a reunification plan, and a timeline.

The caregiver faces immediate financial, legal, housing, child care, and health coverage needs.

Families outside foster care often face those demands without the infrastructure formal foster care is supposed to provide. The child may have no assessed needs, no behavioral health referral, and often no one formally responsible for arranging safe contact with the parent.

Parents may receive fewer formal reunification services or no clearly defined timeline.

Caregivers may receive limited or no training and no financial support. Some federal benefits are also tied to the formal foster care pathway.

Title IV-E KinGAP, for example, generally requires a child to have been eligible for foster care maintenance payments while living with the prospective relative guardian for at least six consecutive months (42 U.S.C. § 673(d)(3)). A diverted child does not meet that requirement simply by living with kin.

This is also the limit of a kinship navigator program. Federal law describes navigator programs as helping caregivers learn about, find, and use programs and services, through information and referral systems, outreach, and partnerships (42 U.S.C. § 627(a)(1)).

Because navigator programs do not require a child welfare removal, they are among the few supports that reach families formed outside the foster care system, which is precisely where help is most scarce.

Most navigator activity is designed to connect a family to something that already exists. If a service does not exist, a navigator cannot produce one.

A navigator can help a grandmother apply for child-only TANF or Medicaid, but cannot refer her to a Title IV-E guardianship subsidy for which she is ineligible outside the foster care pathway.

The program meets families where they are, and then can offer them only what that pathway already provides.

The separation occurred. The infrastructure did not follow.

When Prevention Hides Separation, the Burden Shifts

A system can report fewer foster care entries without knowing whether fewer children were separated from their parents, or whether those separations shifted into kinship arrangements outside foster care.

National data cannot reliably distinguish between those two stories.

Private kinship families and agency-facilitated diversions are usually folded into the same informal population, even though one formed independently and the other followed government intervention.

That data blind spot becomes an accountability blind spot. When separation occurs outside foster care, the formal system carries fewer costs, procedural duties, and monitoring obligations. The child, parent, and caregiver carry more.

That is hidden foster care: the separation produces no foster care record, no guaranteed path home, and far less support, while the agency’s role can be described as prevention.

What Decision Makers Need to Know

A declining foster care entry rate cannot, by itself, answer the separation question. It may reflect fewer separations—or more separations occurring outside foster care.

At minimum, every case counted as prevention should answer two questions:

Did the child avoid entering foster care?

Is the child still living with a parent?

A yes-then-no case achieved foster care prevention, but not prevention of parental separation. Treating both outcomes as the same obscures the different responsibilities each creates.

If a prevention framework permits children living with kin, that arrangement should be explicit in policy and data, disclosed to parents and caregivers, and paired with the financial, legal, well-being, and reunification supports the separation required.

Child Trends recommends much of the necessary data architecture: federal guidance clarifying how diversion is classified, clear state definitions, required data fields in administrative systems, and regular outcome reporting that mirrors what is expected for children in formal foster care (Child Trends, 2026).

Precision does not require bringing every child living with kin into foster care. Foster care is not a support program, and a kinship arrangement is not inherently better simply because it occurs inside the system.

Nor does precision require greater skepticism of kinship care. It requires naming the outcome accurately. A child who moves in with a grandmother may have avoided foster care, but that child did not avoid parental separation.

The system should be able to say both—and account for what follows.1

That’s it for this week.

Stay sharp, Wonks.

~Z

Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.

You can’t talk about modern child and family policy without referencing the Social Security Act.

For nearly a century, thinking about these issues has meant thinking through the architecture and assumptions of that framework.

But today’s guest points to the road almost taken, and what it reveals about the policy architecture we inherited instead.

Michelle Bezark is a social welfare policy historian and early childhood policy researcher.

Her new book, Making Babies Count, unpacks the history of the Sheppard-Towner Act.

It’s the less well-known maternal-child health law that forged the modern administrative state, shaping the federal-state framework for social policy upon which the New Deal would later build.

We talked about what becomes possible when policy makes families and government legible to each other, and what that means for anyone working to shape what comes next in child and family policy.

The successes, setbacks, and contradictions in Sheppard-Towner underpin much of what we take as given in safety net policy.

Understanding this history does not offer tidy lessons. But it does surface new ways of seeing the central tensions child and family policy continues to grapple with, a century later.

We’ve loved hearing from those of you in public-sector agencies about our new offering just for you. Reach out here if you want to learn more.

From the Founder’s Desk

Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk.

We’ve got the latest on a new data dashboard you’ll want to track for the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF) A Home for Every Child initiative

And we’ve clarified and corrected our Wonkatizer entry last week on the proposed rule that would eliminate regulations for states’ Title IV-B planning and reporting requirements.

Our Deep Dive this week digs into how technology modernization embodies one of the paradoxes of public sector procurement; trying to make large projects less risky can inadvertently make them more cumbersome and less effective.

And it’s written by someone who has been deeply engaged in child welfare technology modernization; from leading that work in Louisiana to being a central advisor shaping the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF) reforms.

Let’s get into it.

A Message From the Wonk Briefing Room

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If you find the Weekly Wonk newsletter and our WonkCast beneficial to your work, you should know that those are just the outer layer of what we do.

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Just in the past couple of weeks, premium Wonks have received:

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Check out the Wonk Briefing Room site to learn more, and reach out to connect about partnerships for organizations and state agencies.

Wonkatizer

The latest signals worth watching.

Data Dashboard Live for A Home for Every Child

ACF’s A Home for Every Child dashboard is now live, tracking data from submitting jurisdictions with approved Program Improvement Plans (PIPs).

What’s Happening

This dashboard is a centerpiece of the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF) A Home for Every Child initiative.

The dashboard tracks:

• # of homes

• # of children

• The ratio of homes to children

• % of children with kin

• % of children in congregate care

• % of children with substantiated maltreatment in the past month with prior substantiation in the last 6 months

• % of homes caring for children that had a disruption in the past month

The current ratio ranges from 1.21 (Idaho) to 0.59 (Tennessee).

Why It Matters

A home for every child is more than a metric; it’s the central principle organizing ACF strategy.

As we’ve previously broken down, because it tracks both homes and children, it connects to strategies across the child welfare continuum, from prevention through foster care, all the way to permanency.

Now it’s encoded in monthly public data reporting.

What to Watch

All states are participating in A Home for Every Child, and 33 states, DC, and Puerto Rico have approved Program Improvement Plans aligned with it.

That means that all states are on the path to being visible in the dashboard as ACF finalizes their PIPs and begins collecting data.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

The Procurement Paradox

When Trying to Eliminate Risk Makes CCWIS Riskier

By Creighton Cody Cathey

After nearly a decade of CCWIS implementation, the question of whether child welfare agencies need better technology is clearly settled in the affirmative

The more important question is if the way government buys technology is actually helping states modernize— or making modernization harder.

A recent ASPE report found that combined federal and state claims related to child welfare information systems had reached approximately $2.28 billion over a decade, but that only a fraction of CCWIS projects were operational.

Roughly 85 percent of those claims supported maintaining transitional or legacy systems, rather than new CCWIS development.

The report points to a familiar list of barriers:

• long procurement timelines;

• large bundled contracts;

• limited staff capacity;

• organizational readiness;

• federal processes; and

• continued reliance on transitional systems.

But together, those barriers point to a deeper problem for policymakers and leaders.

The structures government uses to reduce modernization risks can create a different kind of risk: they can make it harder for agencies to learn, adapt, and change course as implementation unfolds.

That is the procurement paradox.

The Appearance of Predictability

Traditional government procurement rewards the appearance of predictability more than the ability to respond when assumptions change.

That means a state may spend months or years developing detailed requirements before releasing a solicitation, and vendors then compete to deliver against those requirements.

A 500-page requirements document can feel safer than a 50-page one because more has been decided in advance.

But every requirement is also an assumption about how workers should complete a task, how data should be structured, how another system will behave, what users will need, or what technology will still make sense years later.

Some of those assumptions will inevitably be wrong.

When workers actually implement a workflow, they will find the frustration points in what looked good on paper. A planned integration may depend on a system that is itself being replaced.

The requirement that seems essential may become obsolete after a subsequent policy change.

But once those assumptions are embedded in a contract, adapting can become expensive and difficult, showing up as change orders, delays, disputes, workarounds, technical debt, and user frustration.

That creates a deeper problem: learning can start to look like failure.

A project may appear well controlled because it has a defined scope, a schedule, milestones, and a set price, even when those commitments are based on assumptions that no longer hold.

That can distort incentives on both sides.

Agencies may over-specify to manage ambiguity and risk in procurement. Vendors may promise unattainable compliance rather than challenge unrealistic assumptions. Frontline staff may be deeply involved defining requirements but far less involved once implementation begins.

The result is a system that can reward staying “on contract”, even when the contract itself is no longer producing the best technology or optimal outcomes for children and families.

When Accountability Becomes Dependency

Large procurements create a similar problem. Bundling a modernization effort into one large contract can make the work feel easier to manage: one implementation plan, one vendor, and one organization responsible for delivery.

States have understandable reasons for doing this. Managing multiple contracts can overwhelm already stretched procurement and project teams, and some may make the argument that it is more cost-effective to consolidate into one large contract.

But consolidation does not eliminate complexity. It often just moves that complexity inside one large vendor relationship.

The stakes grow as implementation stretches over time. The ASPE report found that new CCWIS builds had been underway for a median of roughly six years.

Active projects that had not reached operational status averaged nearly eight years since declaration. Transitional systems accounted for approximately $1.95 billion in claims.

Over that kind of timeline, states can become increasingly dependent on the vendor delivering the system. That means architecture, integrations, institutional knowledge, and technical capacity accumulate in one place, deepening a critical dependency.

And the balance of leverage changes. Competition is strongest before the contract is awarded. Afterward, switching vendors may be so disruptive and expensive that continuing with an underperforming arrangement seems like the safer option.

The contract designed to create a single point of accountability can morph into a single point of dependency.

Modularity Helps, But It Is Not Enough

One obvious response is to break large procurements into smaller pieces. While that can be part of the answer, it is not the whole answer.

Ten poorly governed contracts can be even worse than one large contract. A state can buy separate products for intake, payments, licensing, provider management, analytics, and case management and still end up with a fragmented environment that does not work together.

The real shift is not simply from large contracts to small contracts.

It is from treating modernization as the purchase of a finished system to treating modernization as a governed portfolio of capabilities that can evolve over time.

Procurement as a Governance Model

That does not mean abandoning procurement rules, planning, budgets, contracts, or oversight. It means changing the gravity of accountability, so it spreads across implementation rather than concentrating at the award.

The safest procurement is not necessarily the one that promises the most certainty at the beginning. It is the one that gives leaders early evidence about whether the approach is working, and enough flexibility to act when it is not.

Procurement, in other words, is not just a procedural step that happens before modernization begins. Procurement decisions determine how modernization will be governed for years afterward.

Accountability and adaptability are not competing goals. The real challenge is designing a model that produces both.

Part II will look at what that model can look like in practice.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Administration for Children and Families, the United States Government, or any current or former employer, client, contractor, or affiliated organization.

That’s it for this week.

Stay sharp, Wonks.

~ Z

Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.

There’s a fundamental challenge in crafting public policy to support children and families.

What sounds like a shared, unifying goal sits on top of differing and even directly contradictory perspectives about the right relationship between the state and families.

Coalitional partners can align around a policy idea while still having genuinely divergent views on what support for families is, what purpose it serves, and even what family means.

Today’s guest, for example, is a conservative who has partnered with progressives on the child tax credit, but also sees its purpose less as an anti-poverty program than as a way to reduce the financial friction families face.

Patrick Brown is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and he writes the weekly newsletter Family Matters, a must-read for anyone working on child and family policy issues.

Our conversation centered around what matters and is becoming possible amid growing cross-partisan dissatisfaction with the status quo in family policy.

One big unlock it generated for me was that the familiar question of “how much should government do?” obscures a harder one; what would it take to design future family policy that gives more families more options and support, without imposing assumptions upon them about what a family should be.

As always, if you enjoy our Weekly Wonk newsletter, you should know it’s only the outer layer of what we have to offer.

Leaders across our field are inundated with information, and much of it is noise.

The hard part is knowing what matters, what’s actually moving, and what you can do about it.

We can help you separate signal from noise so that you can:

• See power and policy more clearly;

• Know where you can shape what’s possible; and

• Make confident decisions despite uncertainty and volatility.

Reach out to learn more about what we offer public agencies and organizations.

From the Founder's Desk

This week, we’re wrapping up our series with the Center for the Helping Profession on the child welfare workforce and safety.

Part-one looked at the relationship between workforce conditions and safety.

Part-two explored how policy and institutional risk management can actually reduce safety.

Part-three unpacked how the rational focus of safety reviews can miss the root drivers of decision quality and its relationship to risk.

This final installment looks at lessons child welfare leaders have been applying to learn from other safety-critical industries, like aviation and hospitals.

Let’s get into it.

Wonkatizer

Family First Phases In

October 1 begins FY 2027. It’s a big milestone for the Family First Prevention Services Act, which just has an increase in the federal share of financing for prevention.

What Happened

Congress wrote Family First with phased-in federal financing of prevention. Until now, the federal share was 50 percent.

Going forward, it’s the state’s Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP), the formula that governs the state/federal split of Medicaid financing.

You can see the FMAP rates for FY 2027 here and in this map:

Why it Matters

Like Doug Steiger has shown our premium members, you can’t understand Family First without understanding the political negotiations that underpin it.

Cost containment was central to compromise on Family First; this phased-in bump made it easier to pass the law.

What to Watch
The previously lower reimbursement created a further rate limit on top of those Family First faced already. This could change the calculus.

Premium Wonks know that while official data lag, we can find more recent data.

ACF Proposes IV-B Planning & Reporting Changes

Note: this updated entry clarifies and corrects an earlier version.

Today, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) issued a proposed rule to eliminate regulations for states’ Title IV-B planning and reporting requirements.

What Happened

The proposal rests upon a provision from the 2025 reauthorization of Title IV-B of the Social Security Act, which instructed ACF to reduce related paperwork at least 15%.

The most significant rollback is the regulatory requirements related to Child and Family Service Plans (CFSPs) and related reporting framework at 45 CFR 1357.

The requirements for those plans in statute remain. This would repeal the regulations that overlay them.

This does not remove the Child and Family Service Review (CFSR) and Program Improvement Plan (PIP) process, which remain in place with conforming edits.

Why it Matters

This formal proposal doesn’t touch or eliminate the CFSR process; it continues to reshape other related oversight to align with and reinforce the broader shift.

We’ve highlighted before ACF Assistant Secretary Alex Adams’ big bet on durable policy change to encode federal reporting and oversight changes.

ACF has every state participating in its A Home for Every Child initiative, which offers states an offramp from the CFSR process and alternative, streamlined PIPs.

In return for less overall reporting, states report more frequently on data relevant to A Home for Every Child. This further aligns other oversight with that shift.

What to Watch.

Public comment is open through November 4; expect quick implementation after that.

ACF’s Expectant Parent Policy Push

Family First also has an unexpected new eligibility population: expectant parents.

What Happened

The Administration for Children and Families has rolled out a new policy saying that expectant parents can receive services funded through Family First.

This follows a comprehensive overhaul of the Child Welfare Policy Manual, something we cross-walked comprehensively to update our premium members.

Why it Matters

Infants are the largest age group entering foster care. But there’s a complicating factor.

Family First service eligibility is predicated on the child. An option to serve expectant parents means operationalizing required data tracking for an unborn child.

What to Watch

Finding a way to satisfy or reform those data requirements without such data tracking would seem to be key for scaling this approach; watch for likely movement to use implementation flexibility to make this option appealing to more states.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

The Job Description No One Would Post

What the science of psychological safety reveals about leadership, and what one state built

By Michael Leach and Elizabeth Riley

Imagine a child welfare agency posting a job for its next director: “Seeking a leader with a strong track record of using fear and blame to motivate safe behavior.” No agency would post it. No one would apply.

Yet the pressures surrounding the job can push leaders toward exactly that approach. When a child dies, elected officials and the press demand answers.

Agency leaders face pressure to identify who failed, fire someone, and add a rule. Each offers visible evidence of action. Whether it makes the system safer is a different question.

Staff learn from those responses. When leaders publicly blame workers for mistakes, raising a concern can start to look like risking a job or reputation.

Uncertainty stays private. Bad news arrives late. The response to one crisis can make the next risk harder to see.

That makes leadership a safety-critical issue in systems like child welfare. Workers need to feel safe enough to speak up, admit uncertainty, and surface bad news while there is still time to act.

Leaders create the permission structure for this culture, and only then can staff enact it.

The Science of Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is a term that describes the conditions under which this culture is built.

Amy Edmondson defined it as the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, the felt permission to say: “I’m not sure,” “I missed something,” or “This doesn’t look right.”

Leaders build or erode it through their responses to errors, mistakes, and critical feedback.

The counterintuitive finding is that safe teams reported more errors, not fewer. Crucially, these teams were not making more mistakes; they were simply reporting them more consistently.

Blame does not reduce errors; it reduces the reporting of them.

Nursing units that talk openly about what is going wrong log fewer medication errors and patient falls in the months that follow, showing that speaking up isn’t just safer for morale; it’s safer for patients.

The mechanism that underlies psychological safety is disclosure. Early, open discussion of errors or questioning workflows allows teams and systems to remain watchful, pivot when necessary, and learn from outcomes.

Systems do not improve by firing bad apples. Blame that looks like accountability blinds a system to its own risks.

Accountability must be shared across a system, from frontline worker to agency director; psychological safety is the precondition for this accountability, not its absence.

Psychological safety makes that scrutiny possible. Staff can be expected to account for their decisions while leaders account for the conditions in which those decisions were made.

Culture is Measurable and Changeable

Agency culture is something leaders often gesture at vaguely. But it can be measured reliably with numbers and metrics, using validated scales, compared across teams, and tracked over time.

The TeamFirst Assessment of Safety Culture (TASC; Center for the Helping Professions) has collected more than 50,000 responses across more than twenty child welfare agencies, using validated scales adapted to child welfare, including psychological safety.

Higher psychological safety is associated with less emotional exhaustion, stronger connection, better teaming, and greater intent to stay.

Just as culture can be measured, it can be changed. Across agencies, psychological safety scores look nearly identical, but vary widely between teams across agencies. The same pattern appears in hospitals and their internal units: an organization’s average can conceal very different experiences within its teams.

Culture is built locally through teachable habits like daily huddles, structured communication handoffs, and debriefs after hard cases. Leaders provide that necessary permission structure and resources to build and sustain it.

Building Trust in South Carolina

South Carolina shows what trust looks like in practice. The system had made little meaningful progress on its settlement agreement in four years before Mike and his team took on leading the agency. Leadership had changed repeatedly.

The agency was running a deficit.

Staff had asked for help, heard “no” enough times, and stopped asking. People were leaving faster than it was possible to replace them, and too many families could not get the services they needed.

On many measures, South Carolina was near the bottom nationally.

You cannot move a system like that with a memo; it takes trust building while doing the work. That looked like talking with local office staff carrying cases to askwhat was getting in their way, and asking families what stood between them and help.

It also meant surfacing the good and bad news in the data, and returning to the same questions. Staff had seen leaders come and go. Consistency mattered more than a speech.

One of the biggest barriers was fear.

People watch what leaders do when the news is bad. That is when they decide whether it is safe to speak up next time.

What made a difference was accountability with support; asking what went wrong and what a reasonable person could have done, but also whether the agency had the conditions around them to make good decisions more likely.

What Changed, and What Took Longer

The TASC survey showed whether those SC staff actually felt the difference. Over three years and under stable leadership:

Over three years and under stable leadership:

• Workplace connectedness rose from 78 to 81 percent.

• Mindful organizing rose from 71 to 82 percent,

• Psychological safety rose from 63 to 67 percent, and

• Intent to remain rose from 62 to 70 percent.

• Emotional exhaustion fell from 38 to 28 percent.

Psychological safety improved, though less than some of the other measures. That gap is itself a finding: connectedness and mindful organizing are things a team can practice together starting tomorrow, but psychological safety asks people to unlearn years of watching colleagues get blamed.

It is the slowest trust to rebuild because it is the trust leaders broke most directly. It told us trust was still work to be done.

Listening only counted if it changed decisions, which required securing funding, redesigning policy, and making culture into decisions, not just values statements.

When the Next Crisis Comes

The lesson is not that the work is easy: psychological safety is a state you maintain, not an initiative you complete. Pace and turnover pull against it constantly. The burden of maintaining it is heaviest when a crisis makes blame most tempting.

Other safety-critical fields learned this long ago.

Aviation and medicine treat a workforce that feels safe to speak up as a safety asset in its own right, because the alternative is losing experienced people who catch problems early. That is a loss child welfare can least afford.

The question is not whether psychological safety can be built. It can.

South Carolina did it over the course of three years of hard work, and many other child welfare systems in the National Partnership for Child Safety have seen similar growth over the years.

The question is whether any system can hold it long enough to outlast the people who built it.

Nobody would ever say they want a leader who rules by fear and blame, but our systems keep pulling us into that same kind of leadership anyway.1

Mike Leach is the Chief External Engagement Officer at Think of Us. From 2019-2025, he was Director of the South Carolina Department of Social Services.

Elizabeth Riley is the Chief Analytics Officer at the Center for the Helping Professions.

That’s it for this week.

Stay sharp, Wonks.

~Z

Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible

Thanks for reading Child Welfare Wonk! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.

Federal and state policy have invested billions of dollars in the information and technology infrastructure on which child welfare systems rely.

You’d think that combination of investment and the extensive data these systems gather about families would allow hyper-specific targeting of interventions and support.

Instead, even the basics often remain out of reach: things like case workers having an accurate phone number, families knowing when they need to be in court, or documents reaching the right recipient.

Today’s guest came to this paradox with the clarity of a beginner’s mind, as a longtime software entrepreneur who first entered child welfare as a foster parent baffled by its tech stack.

Ryan O’Donnell is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sunlight, where he works directly with agencies on technology aimed at improving communication and coordination to better serve families.

We talked about how child welfare ended up with technology over-engineered for compliance, and under-engineered for actual usability, and why better software alone won’t fix financing and procurement.

A field that has often seen overpromising and underdelivering is understandably skeptical by default of the AI era’s hype. This is a clear diagnostic of how we got there and what could shift it.

Leaders in public-sector agencies: we’ve loved hearing from so many of you already about our new offering just for you. Reach out here if you want to learn more.

Not a public agency? we’ve still got you covered, too! Reach out here to learn more about our organizational partnerships.

From the Founder's Desk

This week, we’re continuing our series with the Center for the Helping Profession for Child Welfare Workforce Development Month.

Part-one looked at the relationship between workforce conditions and safety.

Part-two looked at the ways we can create risk when trying to control it.

In this installment, Michael Cull looks at what makes good decisions possible.

On WonkCast, I sat down with kinship care expert Ali Caliendo for her incisive perspective on what’s missing from conversations on kinship and prevention.

If you were intrigued by last week’s Chafee update, don’t miss our new premium brief.

Publicly available reports only cover up to FY 2022 expenditures. We built an approach to analyze the most recent funding for our premium members and partners.

It’s the kind of timely intel we provide premium members each week, and integrate into the even deeper insights we offer organizational partners.

Let’s get into it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

Working at the Edge: What System Safety Reveals About Child Welfare Failure

Child welfare reviews focus on the decision that failed. Safety science asks how much room the system left for any decision to succeed.

By Michael Cull

When a child welfare tragedy makes headlines, the review that follows almost always asks the same question: what did the worker miss, and why?

The decision is placed under a magnifying glass and measured against policy, best practice, and the information available at the time. That scrutiny is necessary.

But it often rests on an assumption: that the decision was made under conditions stable enough, resourced enough, and predictable enough for the “right” call to be readily available and reasonable to expect by default.

Safety science gives us reason to question that assumption. It directs attention beyond the final decision to the conditions surrounding it:

• workload;

• staffing;

• time;

• information;

• service capacity; and

• the accumulated workarounds required to keep the system moving.

That changes the question.

The issue is not only whether a worker made the wrong call. It is how much room the system left for anyone to get the call right—and how long that margin had been narrowing before the case ever arrived.

Understanding that gap matters for effective leadership and policymaking.

Three Pressures, One Shrinking Margin

Safety science studies how complex, high-risk systems succeed and fail under real-world conditions. Rather than treating an error as an isolated lapse, it examines how pressures across an organization shape the choices made by people on the front line.

Two influential researchers in this field were Jens Rasmussen, who developed a model for understanding how organizations migrate toward failure, and Richard Cook, who later applied systems-safety thinking to health care.

Their work, mostly in the fields of aviation, nuclear power, and healthcare, offer a useful lens for child welfare.

Rasmussen and Cook described every operating system as moving within a space bounded by three limits:

• Economic failure: the organization cannot sustain the cost of operating this way;

• Unacceptable workload: the people doing the work cannot sustain what is being asked of them; and

• Unacceptable performance: the system can no longer reliably prevent serious harm.

Organizations are constantly moving within this space. Pressure for efficiency pushes them away from the economic boundary. Workers adapt and triage to avoid the workload boundary.

Both responses are rational. But together, they can move the system closer to the boundary of unacceptable performance.

In child welfare, an agency may contain overtime while absorbing vacancies. Workers carry more cases and administrative demands than they can reasonably manage, leaving less time to assess risk, consult a supervisor, or follow up when information conflicts.

Management pressure for efficiency, throughput, and cost containment pushes operations toward the boundary of unacceptable performance, because that is the direction that looks like productivity, right up until it doesn’t.

Each adjustment helps meet an immediate demand. Together, they consume the margin that protects the system when something unexpected happens.

No one has to consciously choose greater risk for this drift to occur. The system appears to be doing more with less. What it is actually doing is spending down its capacity to absorb the next surprise.

When the Edge Becomes Normal

The problem is that a system can spend down that capacity without recognizing it. There is rarely a clear warning sign that a system has run out of margin.

Performance at the edge looks like ordinary work from the inside because it is ordinary work, simply performed with less and less room for anything to safely go wrong.

Cook called the condition that emerges when a system loses its remaining slack “going solid” - the slow tightening of a system until the normal variation that once absorbed small errors has nowhere left to go.

The buffers that once allowed one part of the system to absorb a disruption somewhere else are gone.

A staff absence, an urgent placement search, or a delayed record no longer remains an isolated problem. It consumes capacity elsewhere, allowing a relatively small disruption to travel across the system.

A related distinction in safety science is work as imagined versus work as done.

Work as imagined is the version that lives in policy manuals, training curricula, and job descriptions: caseloads at standard, timelines without competing emergencies, and assessments completed with full information in hand.

Work as done is what actually happens on a Tuesday afternoon with two dozen open cases and a shared car.

Some distance between the two is inevitable. The danger comes when that distance grows and becomes so routine as to render it invisible.

At that point, leaders may believe the system is operating as designed when workers are actually holding it together through constant adaptation.

The Workarounds Are the Work

Anyone who has worked in child welfare will recognize the gaps between work as imagined and work as done. Caseloads routinely exceed published workload standards.

Workers document from memory between visits because there is no time to do it any other way. Placement decisions are made within a service landscape where the right resource has a six-month waitlist or doesn’t exist at all.

None of this is hidden. In a great many jurisdictions, it is ordinary practice. Workers respond as people in constrained systems always do: they adapt.

They reorder priorities, build workarounds, and triage competing demands, trusting hard-won instinct when the system will not give them the time or information to be certain.

To describe them as corner-cutting would ascribe an intent to deplete the system, when in reality these strategies are often how experienced professionals reconcile demands that cannot all be met at once.

These adaptations can introduce risk, but they can also be what keeps a chronically constrained system functioning at all.

That is the central paradox: adaptation is both how risk enters the system and how workers create safety to reduce the risks within that system.

We rarely describe these adaptations that way while things are going well. We call them workarounds, or just “how the job gets done.”

It is only after a case goes badly that the same behavior gets a different name: a missed step, a lapse in judgment, or a failure to follow protocol.

How Reviews Learn the Wrong Lesson

This is where public, political, and organizational review can go wrong.

Once the outcome is known, reviewers reconstruct the decision as though it occurred under textbook conditions, comparing work as done against work as imagined.

Against that baseline, a decision that may have been reasonable, even skillful, under the actual circumstances, can look negligent.

Much of the “How could they have missed that?” reaction following a tragedy comes from this gap between the conditions under which the decision was made, and conditions the reviewer assumes were available.

None of this means individual judgment doesn’t matter. Some decisions are avoidable. Some decisions are indefensible under any conditions a system could reasonably provide.

But when every serious failure is treated primarily as a story about one person’s decision, the organizational response becomes predictable: retrain the worker, discipline the worker, or replace the worker.

Those actions may address the person closest to the failure. They do not necessarily address why the system had drifted so close to its safety boundary that one misstep could produce a catastrophic outcome.

The case may be closed. The conditions that produced it remain. And the next worker inherits the same shrinking margin.

Accountability Before the Tragedy

A more honest accounting would ask a different set of questions in every serious case review:

• How close was this team, office, or agency to its margin before this case ever opened?

• What pressures had already narrowed the room for error, and for how long?

• Did the workload standards, timelines, and service expectations on paper bear any real relationship to the conditions in practice?

These are not only questions for post-incident review.

Leaders can track the conditions that narrow operating margin before a tragedy occurs: vacancies, caseloads, overtime, supervisory capacity, placement shortages, service waitlists, and the growing reliance on workarounds.

Policymakers and oversight bodies can treat those conditions as part of accountability and core elements of policy and financing design, not merely as context offered after something goes wrong.

That leads to a different set of responses. Retraining may address an individual mistake. It will not create more time, reduce an impossible caseload, open a placement, or shorten a service waitlist.

When those conditions helped produce the failure, treating them as secondary fixes the symptom while preserving the cause.

Understanding failure in child welfare requires holding two things at once: individual decisions matter, and so do the conditions under which those decisions get made.

A system that examines only the first will keep disciplining workers for adaptations upon which it uncomfortably depends, rediscovering the same pressures after the next tragedy.

Child welfare should not have to wait for a tragedy to discover that its ordinary way of working has reached the edge.

From the Wonk Briefing Room

If you’re working on older youth policy this Congress, you know that bipartisan interest in expanded Chafee investment is constrained by returned funding.

But the latest analysis of that issue is a 2025 report that goes to FY 2022.

So we developed a high-confidence1 analysis of the most recent likely returned funds.

It’s a must-read for anyone working on this issue right now.

Clarifying Chafee’s Cash Crunch

Recurring returned funds are a financing feature. It follows two very different patterns that are easy to miss.

By Zach Laris, MPH, Founder & President, Child Welfare Wonk

The primary federal funding stream for services to support young people’s transition from foster care has been essentially flat-funded since 1999, even as its purchasing power has eroded and states report substantial unmet need.

Yet states also appear to routinely return funds from this program, often only to request them right back.

But that overall rate masks a sharp divide: states likely returned just 1.1 percent of standard Chafee funds, with those returns concentrated in a small number of states, compared with 13.2 percent of ETV funds, with returns spread across more than half of states.

To get the full brief and much more like it, join the Wonk Briefing Room.

Read the Full Premium Brief

That’s it for this week.

Stay sharp, Wonks.

~Z

Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.

Over the past 5 years, we’ve seen entries to foster care decline by nearly one-fifth.

The stock story our field assumes about that decline is prevention, making the debate about whether that’s progress to celebrate or a growing safety risk.

But should we be so sure that data point is measuring what we think it is?

Today’s guest thinks our kinship care and prevention policy debates bypass a bigger question; are we separating fewer children from their parents, or merely moving them outside the categories we typically track?

Ali Caliendo is a kinship care expert, social entrepreneur, and professor whose work spans policy, research, and direct service delivery.

In wondering “where did the children go?”, she raises an uncomfortable question; is kinship care primarily prevention, to avoid foster care, or an intervention, for children who can’t remain with their parents?

We dug into what shaped her perspective, the gap between formal policy and its implementation, and how she decided to pass the baton at Foster Kinship after founding and building it over 15 years.

We’ve loved hearing from those of you in public-sector agencies about our new offering just for you. Reach out here if you want to learn more.

From the Founder’s Desk

Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk, where we’re continuing our series with the Center for the Helping Profession for Child Welfare Workforce Development Month.

Part-one looked at the relationship between workforce conditions and safety.

For part-two, first-time Wonk contributor Tiffany Lindsey has a Deep Dive looking at how policy and institutional design generate a fundamental tension for child welfare agencies; rational risk management can create new safety risks.

For last week’s WonkCast, I had the privilege of sitting down with Sierra Burns to talk about what she’s learned from an advocacy trajectory that has taken her from South Carolina to the State of the Union.

Let’s get into it, with a Wonkatizer on Chafee and Tiffany’s Deep Dive.

Wonkatizer

The latest signals worth watching.

Whither Chafee?

Federal child welfare policy world continues to grapple with an open question this Congress; what will happen with the Chafee program?

What’s Happening

Congress established the John H. Chafee Foster Care Program for Successful Transition to Adulthood in 1999. It’s the largest federal funding source dedicated to helping youth prepare for life after foster care.

We’ve recently analyzed the latest data on services it funds for older youth.

A bill to make modest reforms to the program unanimously passed the House in May and has deep support from First Lady Melania Trump.

For anyone not in the weeds of DC policy process, you’d likely have a reasonable question; why hasn’t it moved through the Senate, then? Funding.

Why Funding Matters

The program has $143 million annually, plus an additional appropriation of around $43 million for education and training vouchers.

Funding has been essentially flat since the program’s start.

Complicating the point of eroded purchasing power by inflation is this 2025 GAO report, looking at unspent and returned funding despite unmet service needs for youth, which it attributes to factors including procurement barriers and staff turnover.

GAO also noted that ACF reported prioritizing reallocation of unspent funds to requesting jurisdictions rather than working directly with states with unspent funds to address underspending.

HHS indicated plans to support states on using unspent funds going forward, but what that led to is less clear.

Wonks have been watching for a proposal to update those mechanics in response to the GAO report, and Senator Grassley’s discussion draft gestured at addressing it. But the absence of a fleshed out proposal on that further complicates talks.

The Politics of Funding

The Senate could simply advance the House-passed bill to finish this work before the current Congress ends in January. But assuming they would misreads the incentives.

Whatever your politics or policy preferences, policy negotiation is inevitably driven by choke points. When someone needs your support, you can extract concessions.

If you’re perplexed that a bill would get slower after unanimously rolling through the House with the First Lady’s support, that’s actually why it’s likely to get slower.

When the minority party knows the majority wants something, that makes it a bargaining chip. Think like a staffer.

What to Watch

There’s already bipartisan legislation (H.R. 9485) to boost Chafee by $20 million annually, which makes that a natural opening point for talks to finish this effort.

It will be worth watching whether a compromise can cohere that increases funding, and addresses the issues GAO has identified so those funds actually reach youth.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

Designed Not to Know

How we perpetuate the conditions that discourage child welfare from asking the questions that can save children’s lives.

By Tiffany Lindsey, EdD, LPC/MHSP, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, Center for the Helping Professions

A caseworker enters a home on a general neglect referral involving a twelve-year-old who has been missing school.

Inside, the worker finds an infant, a couch, and an exhausted single parent in recovery from a substance use disorder and taking sedating medication.

Two of the highest-yield safety questions are simple: Where does the baby sleep? Where are medications stored?

Those questions often can go unasked (Ahlers-Schmidt et al., 2021). Not because the worker does not care, but because asking can create a record of risks the agency may not be able to eliminate.

If the family insists on bedsharing, or if the worker identifies unsecured medications or firearms that remain in the home, that documentation can later become evidence that the agency “knew.”

After a fatality, lawsuit, or news story, “did the agency know” is often the first question.

That means workers and agencies face a dangerous incentive: stay close to the allegation, document what they can control, and avoid surfacing hazards they may not be able to fix.

Asking about risk can help prevent harm. But in child welfare, knowledge can also create liability.

The system has been designed, unintentionally but effectively, not to know. This paradoxically undermines safety and accountability in the name of advancing them.

The Question Unasked

Blame-oriented accountability can produce defensive, compliance-focused behavior rather than safety-focused practice (Munro, 2011).

When identifying a hazard also creates a record that can later be used to judge whether the agency did enough, even routine prevention decisions can carry institutional risk.

Consider the decision facing a worker who identifies a risk but cannot control what the family does next:

• Ask about infant sleep practices → the family insists on bedsharing → documented, unresolved risk.

• Provide a trigger lock → it sits unused → the record shows the agency knew of an unsecured firearm.

• Provide a lockbox → the family sells it → the agency knew of unsecured medications.

• Provide Narcan → the family uses it to save their baby → the agency knew drugs could be an ingestion risk.

After a tragedy, hindsight can make commonplace judgment appear negligent (Hugh & Dekker, 2009), so workers learn to minimize documented exposure to ambiguity.

As Cull (2026) posited, when accountability demands certainty the evidence can’t support, errors are more likely to get concealed rather than examined. The frontline result is that risks may go unelicited rather than engaged.

Workers stay close to the referral, assess what the allegation requires, and hesitate to surface hazards the agency cannot eliminate.

The predictable consequence is allegation-bounded assessment that training alone will not resolve.

The Resources Withheld

The same dynamic can operate at the agency level.

In my work on child death review and injury prevention with more than half of the state child welfare agencies in the country, I’ve heard multiple accounts of agencies obtaining naloxone with opioid-settlement dollars, then delaying distribution while leaders considered the legal and public consequences of providing it to families.

Others have raised concerns about unintended effects of take-home naloxone– that an antidote in the home might make riskier use feel safer, or make families slower to call 911 (Ager et al., 2024).

The available harm-reduction evidence points to the contrary. People who receive naloxone and overdose training show no increase in drug use afterward (Jones et al., 2017), and communities that distribute naloxone see overdose deaths fall (Fischer et al, 2025).

Naloxone reduces the likelihood that an overdose becomes a death. It doesn’t add drugs to the home nor create the underlying drug risk.

Yet the institutional calculation remains. The image of a child welfare agency providing naloxone to a family can be recast as evidence that the agency knowingly left a child in danger.

That scrutiny is not hypothetical. (National Partnership for Child Safety, 2025). It can unfold publicly, become politicized, and last for years (Rantz, 2026).

Under those conditions, locking away the naloxone can feel institutionally safer than distributing it.

Consider the contrast. When a police department hands a gun owner a free cable-style gun lock, such as Project ChildSafe - no one later treats the gift as admission the department is accountable for the family’s firearm storage.

Likewise, when a hospital provides parents of a newborn with a car seat, it is not presumed to control how the seat will be installed or used.

Child welfare operates under a different logic because its helping function is legally and culturally fused to its investigative function.

An effort to reduce danger can be recast as evidence that the agency knew danger was present—and should have prevented whatever happened next.

The Accident Pathways the Data Obscure

The public imagines maltreatment fatalities as intentional brutality. The data says otherwise.

In federal fiscal year 2024, states reported 1,773 child maltreatment fatalities.

Fewer than 40 percent of those fatalities involved physical abuse, while the majority involved neglect without co-occurring abuse (Children’s Bureau, 2026).

But NCANDS does not record cause or manner of death - itself a telling data gap. A death classified as neglect could involve unsafe sleep, drug ingestion, drowning, a firearm, or another mechanism entirely.

That omission prevents the field from determining how many maltreatment fatalities follow potentially preventable pathways. It also makes those pathways easier to overlook when designing child welfare practice.

Three hazards that drive a significant number of overall child fatalities illustrate the gap:

• Sleep-related deaths. About 3,400 infants died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2024.

  • Of those, 947—approximately 28 percent— were classified as accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed (CDC, 2026).

  • Risk concentrates exactly where child welfare already is - with caregivers who are overwhelmed, under-resourced, and sometimes managing substance misuse (Hornstein et al, 2014).

• Drug exposures. In 2023, 539 children younger than six experienced fentanyl exposures (Temple and Hendrickson, 2024).

  • These incidents can arise from failures of storage and containment rather than an intent to harm.

• Unsecured firearms. Roughly once a day in America, a child finds a loaded, unsecured gun and unintentionally shoots themselves or someone else (Cannon et al, 2023)).

  • Of 1,262 unintentional firearm deaths among children, the firearm was stored loaded in three-quarters of cases - most often in a nightstand or bed (Wilson et al., 2023)

  • Storage choices by caregivers can reflect circumstances that complicate prevention: a recent victimization, neighborhood violence, or hypervigilance following trauma.

These national figures do not tell us how many child maltreatment fatalities resulted from each pathway.

They show that serious and sometimes fatal hazards can arise through the interaction of household conditions, caregiver capacity, product access, and safety design — not only through an intent to injure.

If child welfare data collapse those deaths into the broad category of neglect, the system cannot reliably identify which prevention strategies might have interrupted them.

Design with an Assumption of Error, not Perfect Compliance

The accident pathways described above raise a different question: How should a system respond when serious harm can result from predictable human error?

The contrast with medicine and aviation offers one framework.

Human factors engineering — the safety science used in both fields — starts from a basic premise: error is often a consequence of upstream conditions like fatigue, stress, and cognitive load, not the root cause of a failure.

Environments can steady or overextend individuals. People generally do what makes sense to them at the time, given the resources and constraints they face (Dekker, 2019).

The goal is not to eliminate individual responsibility. It is to design systems in which predictable mistakes are less likely to become catastrophic.

Safety science also ranks interventions. Engineering controls, which make a hazard physically harder to reach, are generally stronger than administrative rules. Rules, in turn, are generally stronger than warnings and education alone.

A medication lockbox, a trigger lock, naloxone on the shelf, and a portable crib are engineering controls. These interventions work because they do not depend entirely on perfect behavior.

Locked and unloaded firearm storage, for example, is associated with meaningfully lower risk of youth firearm injury and death (Grossman et al., 2005).

Current child welfare practice leans largely on the weakest rung: safety brochures, verbal education, assessment of the home environment, and safety plans that depend on a caregiver’s promise to avoid crib clutter and keep medications and firearms out of reach.

Those approaches have a role. But they depend on sustained attention and compliance from caregivers who may be exhausted, under-resourced, managing substance use, or responding to trauma.

And when a risk falls outside the original allegation or formal assessment, it may not be addressed at all.

We know which controls work better. The system is simply not built to place those protections routinely in families’ hands.

WHAT DECISION MAKERS NEED TO KNOW

A human factors approach to child welfare would begin with universal precautions. Ask every family and offer every family the same basic protections.

When the questions and resources are routine, asking signals prevention rather than suspicion.

That could include:

• Safe sleep assessment, education and portable crib distribution in every case involving an infant, aligned with pediatric guidance (Moon et al., 2022).

• Medication lockboxes and naloxone co-distribution in households where high-risk drugs may be present.

• Lethal means counseling and free storage devices, drawing on models used in pediatric health care and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

This is not a new investigative model. It is motivational interviewing and collaborative safety planning applied to common accident pathways.

It positions the caseworker as safety consultant for accident-pathway risks, alongside their protective mandate.

Workers and families need to know that asking about a hazard is meant to reduce it—not simply document it for later use.

Harm reduction has never meant accepting unnecessary risk. It means meeting families where they are, and reducing the chance that a dangerous condition becomes a child’s death.

But whoever funds the naloxone must also protect the worker who distributes it. Otherwise, the rational institutional response remains the same: Do not ask about a risk you cannot fully control.

No new statutes are required to start, but statutory protections and legislative support will be needed to sustain.

A System Able to Know

Return to the living room. Same baby, same couch, same exhausted parent.

Under redesigned incentives, the caseworker addresses the truancy conditions involving the 12-year old but does not stop at the allegation.

The worker also asks where the baby sleeps, where medications are stored, what support the parent needs, and what contingency plans are in place for continued sobriety and safety.

The questions are routine. The resources are available. The caseworker can leave a portable crib, a medication lockbox, and naloxone—and document not only that the risks existed, but what the agency did to reduce them.

None of those interventions gives the caseworker control over what happens next. That is the point. A safety system should not require control it cannot possess.

It should make it easier to identify foreseeable hazards, provide practical protections, and respond proportionately to the risk.

Concrete help may also change the relationship between families and the agency. A worker who arrives with something useful—not only questions, findings, and requirements—has another way to build the trust on which honest safety planning depends.

A system designed not to know is a system unable to protect. Families are not the only ones who need harm reduction. Our systems do too.

That’s it for this week.

Stay sharp, Wonks.

~ Z

Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.

Turning an idea into an enacted policy takes years of infrastructure building, hard work, and well-timed luck.

When something takes that much time and investment, it can feel like a culmination.

By notching some big developments early in her advocacy career, today’s guest has learned that what feels like the peak is often actually just the end of the beginning.

Sierra Burns has experienced a high-velocity advocacy trajectory, from successfully advocating to extend foster care in South Carolina, to being a guest of First Lady Melania Trump at the 2026 State of the Union address.

We talked about what it takes to turn a policy from advocacy win into reality, what she’s learned from her advocacy for housing vouchers, and what it looks like to approach lived experience as a capability rather than an identity.

As federal policymakers continue work on older youth policy, Sierra offers insights to inform current and future conversations, and to equip the next generation of advocates.

New Opportunity: Wonk for Public Agencies

Whether you’re leading a child welfare agency or making it run, you know what it’s like to operate in a complex and highly scrutinized decision-making environment.

We hear all the time from leaders in child welfare agencies about how that work is now becoming even harder amid rising risk, uncertainty, and volatility in public policy.

We’ve been listening, and have created something to help you move through those challenges with confidence. It includes:

• Targeted briefings for leadership teams making and executing on key decisions;

• Strategy sessions to pressure-test upcoming high-stakes interactions with leaders and policymakers, to maximize the strength of your approach;

• Monthly conversations with other public sector leaders and the Wonk team;

• Agency access to our premium Wonk Briefing Room resources; and more.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can reach out here.

And no need to feel left out if your organization is not a public agency; we’ve still got you covered, too! Reach out here to learn more about our organizational partnerships.

From the Founder’s Desk

September is Child Welfare Workforce Development Month. These recognition months often get some generic platitudes and the occasional baked goods.

Maybe you get stoked to see a box of donuts in the break room, only to find they’re sad and stale because your colleagues have inexplicably cut them into quarters.

The vital workforce assuring child safety and promoting child and family wellbeing deserves better than a pat on the back and a yoga session at lunch break.

The child welfare workforce is a core component of state capacity and execution capability, but often unfairly assumed out of those relevant policy debates.

Here at the Wonk, we’re not going to give you stale donuts, deep breathing exercises, or a water bottle that will disintegrate in your dishwasher.

Instead, this month we have a series for you taking this workforce and its role in safety seriously, and exploring how policy can too.

Through a collaboration with the team at the Center for the Helping Professions, we’re digging into the deeper tensions and what they mean for your work.

Relatedly, last week’s WonkCast with Mike Leach explored the well-intentioned ways we design policies and institutions to reduce risk that paradoxically exacerbate it.

Let’s get into it.

Wonkatizer

The latest signals worth watching.

ACF Prevention Infrastructure Funding Drops

What Happened

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) has awarded $7.3 million in Title IV-E Prevention Accelerator Grants ranging from $600,000 to $750,000.

These funds target capacity to implement the Family First Prevention Services Act. This includes targeted direct service expansion and also approaches like claiming systems, referral pathways, data infrastructure, and provider capacity.

The funds are going to Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, and South Carolina.

Why it Matters

While these are relatively small awards, the framing of focus points to an ACF recognition of the need to deepen the state capacity for delivering prevention.

We’ve highlighted this dynamic before, and later this week premium Wonks will see more on it from Senior Contributor Laura Radel, building on her recent finding that expanding the Family First Clearinghouse barely budged the contents of state plans.

What to Watch

What role one-time awards like this can play in building sustainable infrastructure, and whether these projects surface strategies other states can use with new investments.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

The Oxygen Problem: What Workforce Conditions Reveal About the Limits of What We Can Ask

By Michael Cull, PhD, MSN

We have come to expect safe performance from systems we have allowed to become structurally depleted.

Child welfare agencies today operate under chronic vacancies and persistent frontline turnover.1

Documentation and administrative requirements consume substantially more of a caseworker’s time than contact with children and families.

Nearly half of caseworkers in the most recent nationally representative federal workforce survey reported at elevated levels.2

At the same time, public and political expectations for safety continue to rise. Those expectations are legitimate.

But each tragedy resets the standard on the same depleted system, widening the distance between what we ask of the workforce and what we provide it.

Workforce conditions cannot be separated from child safety. They shape whether agencies can deliver practices as designed, recognize emerging risks, exercise sound judgment, and act when it matters.

Staffing, workload, supervision, and organizational climate are not merely operating conditions. They are part of the system’s safety infrastructure.

September’s Child Welfare Workforce Month offers an opportunity to examine that connection more closely.

This piece opens a four-part series on what workforce conditions reveal about the capacity of child welfare systems—and why building safer ones requires more than asking individual workers to become more resilient.

Who Supplies the Oxygen?

The field has adopted a familiar metaphor for this problem, borrowed from the instruction to put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others.

Workers cannot give what they do not have, and so we remind them to attend to themselves first.

But it is worth considering what that metaphor actually describes, and where it diverges from the reality it’s meant to represent.

No passenger is expected to bring oxygen aboard, and none is asked to demonstrate the personal fortitude required to manage without it.

The mask is already installed, and it is released without anyone having to request it. The instruction was never about self-reliance.

Commercial airlines fly at around 35,000 feet, a height similar to the summit of Mt. Everest. If a cabin loses pressure, oxygen becomes essential.

But ensuring that oxygen is available is not the passenger’s responsibility; it is engineered into the system.

Child welfare adopted the reminder without designing for the standard and automatic provision.

Conditions in the field have been deteriorating for years, and the response has consisted largely of encouraging staff to manage their own depletion more skillfully: wellness programming, self-care messaging, and resilience training.

These supports can matter on the margin and with a solid foundation of support.

But when they are offered without corresponding attention to workload, staffing, supervision and organizational conditions, they risk treating endurance as a personal attribute than a function of how work is organized, supervised, and resourced.

No yoga pose, however well held, will fix an unsustainable caseload.

When we focus on building the resilience of individual professionals instead of building resilience into the system, we place responsibility back on those professionals.

We aren’t deploying their oxygen masks to match the situation, but asking them if they remembered to bring one from home, and maybe an extra to share.

Depletion is a Safety Condition

Workforce research offers some indication of what depletion looks like from the inside.

In the most recent nationally representative federal survey of child welfare agencies, supervisors identified job stress and worker burnout as the leading reasons staff had left their units—more often than compensation or workload.

Findings of this kind are typically categorized as human resources concerns: matters of retention or morale to be managed alongside the substantive work of the agency.

That interpretation misses the point.

Three decades of organizational research suggest these conditions are more accurately understood as indicators of system safety, with attendant implications for children and families.

Drawing on seven years of national longitudinal data, Glisson and Green (2011) found that maltreated youth served by systems with more engaged organizational climates had significantly better outcomes, and that climate shaped both the quantity and the quality of the casework services delivered.3

Williams and Glisson (2014) subsequently found that organizational culture and climate together explained the large majority of system-level variance in youth outcomes across a national sample.4

More recently, a statewide analysis of roughly 373,000 screened-in reports found that the odds of substantiation, case opening, and timely assessment all declined as caseworkers approached departure from the agency.5

Workforce conditions, in other words, are already shaping the decisions that determine which children are seen, which cases are opened, and how quickly.

They are measures of whether a system has the capacity to notice risk, exercise sound judgment, communicate concerns, and act when it matters most.

The research points to two consequences of sustained depletion that deserve more attention than they ordinarily receive.

What Depletion Breaks

First, workforce instability presents a problem of fidelity, not simply one of staffing.

Every practice model, assessment protocol, and evidence-informed intervention in this field assumes a trained, stable, and adequately supported workforce capable of delivering it as designed.

I have written previously about the limits of the evidence base for many of the outcomes child welfare is asked to produce, even under favorable conditions. Under chronic vacancy and turnover, that base grows thinner still.

When a family’s third caseworker in twelve months administers an assessment on which she was trained the previous month, the agency may no longer be delivering the intervention that was originally designed and evaluated.

The model may be the same on paper. The intervention reaching the family is not.

Depletion can erode even our better practices into ones we have never actually tested.

What Depletion Silences

The second consequence is that depletion undermines precisely those behaviors on which early identification of problems depends.

Caseworkers who are exhausted and carrying unmanageable caseloads may have less capacity to surface near misses, raise concerns about a case, or acknowledge their own uncertainty.

This is not a matter of commitment. Each of those actions requires available time and a reasonable expectation of a fair hearing. Depleted systems tend to supply neither.

That means the agency loses its peripheral vision at the moment it has the greatest need for it.

When a case does end badly, reviews often narrow to the actions of individual workers rather than the conditions surrounding them. The workforce learns again that candor is expensive. Fear finishes what depletion started.

Workforce Conditions As Safety Infrastructure

This is the paradox at the center of the field.

We continue to demand more from the system while underinvesting in the basic conditions people need enough of to do the work safely and well: time, support, and stability to make careful work possible.

Naming the tension is considerably easier than resolving it. Budgets are real, competing priorities are legitimate, and funding alone cannot create a stable workforce.

A productive start is reconsidering what we count as an investment in child safety.

Practice models, technology, and oversight structures are funded as safety infrastructure. Staffing levels, supervision quality, and manageable caseloads are treated as operating overhead— and are too often the first items reduced when resources contract.

That distinction is not well supported by what is known about how this work actually gets done. It persists because workforce conditions are difficult to point to, while a new tool or a new reporting requirement is more visible in the aftermath of a tragedy.

But visibility and safety are not the same thing. The choice before the field is sharper than our policy debates usually acknowledge.

We can continue to demand near-perfect safety from systems we have allowed to become depleted. Or we can treat the conditions of the work as inseparable from the safety of the children that work is meant to protect.

We cannot coherently do both.

For some time, we have tried to demand without providing the second. The strain has become visible in the only place it could: among the people we keep asking to hold the whole thing together.

If we are serious about safer systems, the conditions that make safe performance possible have to become part of the safety strategy itself.

That’s it for this week.

Stay sharp, Wonks.

~ Z

Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.

Public sector accountability can easily drift into process theater, rewarding caution over outcomes.

Today’s guest ascribes this trend in child welfare to an institutional risk aversion that is as rational in the near-term as it is corrosive in the long-term.

Mike Leach ran the South Carolina Department of Social Services underGovernor Henry McMaster, and held senior roles in Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services. Today, he’s the Chief External Engagement Officer at Think of Us.

We talked about the key role agency leaders play in shaping the decision making environment within their institution, and why seemingly rational decisions to reduce risk can create far worse outcomes in aggregate.

We also talked about litigation and consent decrees, and how he sees them as both a symptom of these challenges and an amplifier of them.

This conversation illuminates some of the top impediments to visionary leadership for agency leaders, and some of the strategies that have surmounted them.

At a moment when Congress is looking to update the older-youth focused Chafee program, it’s especially instructive for anyone looking for new approaches.

Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk, and we hope you had a relaxing holiday weekend.

First, some brief Wonk news. Today we’re launching something new and exclusive for public-sector agencies.

Leaders within child welfare agencies have long faced a complex and highly scrutinized decision-making environment.

What has changed is the rising risk, uncertainty, and volatility in public policy.

We’re offering public-sector partners strategic insights and resources to navigate it confidently. Interested public agencies can reach out here to learn more.

Not a public agency but looking to benefit from what Wonk offers? We’ve still got you covered too; reach out here to learn more about our organizational partnerships.

Now back to your regularly scheduled Weekly Wonk programming.

In May, the U.S. House unanimously approved the bipartisan Fostering the Future Act (H.R. 7432), to update the older youth-focused Chafee Program.

While the bill would not materially change the financial picture of Chafee, it would make broadly supported changes to how its funds and programming target housing, education, and workforce preparation.

These reforms look increasingly likely to pass this year; the question is whether Congress will find funding to accompany them.

As policymakers work their way through updates to the Chafee program, we have a new Deep Dive for you that looks at the services states select, and why that matters.

On our most recent WonkCast, I sat down with paid leave policy expert Vicki Shabo to talk about paid leave, policy design, and coalition development.

Let’s get into it.

Wonkatizer

New ASPE Brief on Title IV-E’s Declining Eligibility

What Happened

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) has a new brief on a key child welfare financing trend.

The brief looks at the Title IV-E foster care program, finding that eligibility rates continue to decline, even as the cost of determining eligibility keeps rising.

Why it Matters

This tracks with what Laura Radel has recently written for us about declining federal match rates for the program, and elevates the issue of deeper financing reform.

In addition to its cost, the brief also raises questions about state compliance with the eligibility determination process.

What to Watch

Administration for Children and Families Assistant Secretary Alex Adams and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Cody Inman co-authored the report with ASPE.

Since briefs like this tend to precede ACF action, and the brief itself notes that prior presidential budget requests have floated finance reforms, it would be worthwhile to presume the administration will lay down a marker on finance reform.

Trump Admin’s Draft Proposal on Stay-At-Home-Care

What Happened

The Trump Administration has a draft proposal to offer married, stay-at-home parents access to funding through the Child Care Development Block Grant.

Why it Matters

This specific proposal, coming right before the midterms and framed narrowly for married parents, arrives as a politically inflected Rorschach test.

Child care policy wonk Elliot Haspel has noted the proposal would likely contradict the plain language of the law, meaning only Congress could make such a change anyway.

The draft has also drawn pushback from conservative child and family policy thinkers like Patrick T. Brown (whose Family Matters newsletter is worth reading), for not adding any new funding, thereby creating more competition for fixed funds.

What to Watch

While this reported effort to use CCDBG funds to support parental care looks legally and fiscally constrained, it’s surfacing a deeper cross-partisan policy discussion on expanded options for parents, which Elliott touched on in his WonkCast appearance.

Beyond this proposed rule, it’s worth watching the broader underlying debate, and whether further ideas for supporting families financially garner bipartisan support.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

Chafee’s State-by-State Service Divide

National data on how many youth receive various independent living services mask substantial variation among states in what forms of assistance are emphasized.

By Laura Radel, Senior Contributor

The John H. Chafee Foster Care Program for Successful Transition to Adulthood — usually referred to as the Chafee Program, or by its former title, Independent Living — is the primary source of federal funding for services that help older youth prepare for life after foster care.

The program distributes $143 million to states by formula. But it gives states broad discretion over how to spend their share, producing strikingly different Chafee programs across the country.

With limited funding and a wide range of allowable services, states must decide what to emphasize: education, housing, financial assistance, classroom-based life-skills training, or some combination thereof.

Where a young person lives can shape not only which services are available to them, but what kind of transition support the state’s program is built to provide for them.

Data from the National Youth in Transition Database (NYTD) make those differences visible. States report how many eligible youth receive services across 14 categories.

The national totals suggest a program without a dominant focus.

The state-level data tell a different story that matters for national policy deliberations: many states have made clear — and sharply divergent — choices about where to concentrate their limited Chafee resources.

THE NATIONAL PICTURE

Nationally, no single type of Chafee service dominates. In 2023,the most recent year available, the share of eligible youth receiving the 14 reported services ranged from 12 to 44 percent, as shown in Table 1.

Independent Living Needs Assessment, Academic Support, and Budget and Financial Management reached the largest shares of youth.

Supervised Independent Living and various forms of financial assistance, such as Room and Board and Educational generally reached fewer.

This partly reflects cost, as direct housing and financial assistance are typically more expensive per youth than assessments, academic support, or the range of classroom-based skills classes.

But that lack of focus nationally masks the choices states are making. For each service category except Educational Financial Assistance, at least one state provided the service to over half of its eligible youth.

There is also at least one state that reported providing the service to no youth at all.

The national picture therefore looks more balanced than many state programs actually are. Beneath the averages are states concentrating their limited resources on very different forms of transition support.

FIVE WAYS STATES USE CHAFEE

The state-level data reveal five broad approaches to using Chafee funds. The groups are based on the services reaching the largest shares of youth in each state.

Because assessments commonly accompany other services, they are not used to define the categories.

These profiles do not capture every feature of a state’s program. They show where states have chosen to concentrate their limited Chafee resources.

Education-Centered Programs

Sixteen states and the District of Columbia place the greatest emphasis on Academic Support. Some also provide classroom-based life-skills, mentoring, or financial assistance, but education remains the center of the service array.

States in this group:

• California

• Delaware

• District of Columbia

• Georgia

• Idaho

• Illinois

• Kentucky

• Minnesota

• Missouri

• Nebraska

• New Hampshire

• New York

• North Carolina

• Ohio

• South Carolina

• Washington

• Wyoming

Housing-centered Programs

10 states focus their Chafee funding on housing. These programs emphasize Supervised Independent Living, Room and Board Financial Assistance, and/or Housing Education and Home Management Services.

Some also provided academic other forms of financial assistance, but housing predominated.

States in this group:

• Arizona

• Connecticut

• Hawaii

• Maryland

• Michigan

• Mississippi

• Montana

• Rhode Island

• Tennessee

• West Virginia

Classroom-Based Programs

Eight states rely most heavily on classroom-based instruction, particularly Budget and Financial Management, Housing Education and Home Management, Health Education and Risk Prevention, and Family Support and Healthy Marriage Education services.

Some of these states provided other forms of educational support such as Career Preparation (also often a classroom-based endeavor) in addition to the classroom services that predominated.

States in this group:

• Colorado

• Indiana

• Louisiana

• Maine

• Massachusetts

• New Mexico

• Texas

• Wisconsin

General Financial Assistance Programs

Eight states concentrate their resources on financial assistance not tied specifically to housing or education. Some pair that assistance with extensive Academic Support.

States in this group:

• Alabama

• Alaska

• Nevada

• Oklahoma

• Oregon

• Utah

• Vermont

• Virginia

Broad-service Programs

Eight states spread their Chafee resources across a wide range of services rather than allowing any single type of service to dominate.

States in this group:

• Arkansas

• Florida

• Iowa

• Kansas

• New Jersey

• North Dakota

• Pennsylvania

• South Dakota

These program emphases are mapped in Figure 1.

WHAT DECISION MAKERS NEED TO KNOW

National figures provide broad-brush information about national service utilization but mask important differences in how states choose to provide services funded by the Chafee Program.

Broad federal rules establish what states may fund, but limited dollars force states to decide which needs to address and which youth to reach.

Those choices create a tradeoff between breadth and intensity.

Classroom-based services can likely reach more youth at a lower cost per person. Housing and direct financial assistance may provide more substantial help but generally reach fewer youth.

A state’s service profile therefore reflects not only what it considers important, but how it allocates scarce resources across competing needs.

The practical consequence is that where a youth lives makes a big difference in what transition services are available.

Youth in one state may encounter a program centered on education; a similarly situated youth elsewhere may receive housing assistance, financial support, or a broad menu of life-skills classes.

NYTD makes those differences visible, but it does not establish which strategy works best.

The data show what services states provide and how broadly they provide them—not their quality, intensity, or effect on youth outcomes. Future articles will address Chafee program outcomes and spending.

From the Wonk Briefing Room

The latest in premium Wonk intel is an analysis of three years of all approved state plans for prevention under the Family First Prevention Services Act.

The takeaway? Even as the clearinghouse expanded, the inventory of programs states have in their plans to draw down funding has barely budged.

That doesn’t just matter for conversations about revising Family First; it’s also instructive for thinking about the purpose and design of future financing policy.

Here’s an excerpt of what our premium community is talking about.

The Clearinghouse Expanded. State Prevention Plans Barely Budged.

Dozens of programs have become eligible for federal reimbursement since 2023. Most have gained little traction in state prevention plans.

BY LAURA RADEL, SENIOR CONTRIBUTOR

The Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse governs what services are eligible for financing through the Family First Prevention Services Act (Family First). Over the past three years, it has expanded the universe of programs it permits, but that has led to little change in what states have included in their Family First plans.

Since January 2023, the Clearinghouse has added dozens of programs, and 10 additional states have received approval for prevention plans.

Since those plans must list the services for which states will claim federal funds, that expansion provides a useful opportunity to examine whether more federal options have translated into more varied state choices.

This analysis compares state plans in 2023 and 2026. It finds that most new states selected programs already used elsewhere. States updating existing plans also favored familiar interventions, particularly those rated well-supported.

Programs added to the Clearinghouse in recent years rarely appeared in state plans. Notably, no new addition was adopted by more than one state.

These findings do not resolve why Family First implementation has been slow. But they clarify where the narrative on Family First implementation holds up and breaks down.

The number of programs eligible for federal reimbursement has grown substantially while the range of programs states are preparing to deliver has not. That narrows the search for the law’s real limits.

Read the full brief here

To read the full brief and access all our premium resources, join the Wonk Briefing Room. Individuals can sign up here, or get the team membership rate here.

Organizations interested in going even deeper can reach out to learn more about our partnerships for public and private organizations to integrate our intel in your strategy.

That’s it for this week.

Stay sharp, Wonks.

~ Z

Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.

As we continue digging into paid leave, it’s a perfect encapsulation of a key question for child and family policy development; is policy design an overture to broker political compromise, or an instrument to memorialize one?

Much policy and political debate assumes the former.

If you look at the example of paid leave, there’s no shortage of punditry suggesting that the way to widen the tent of support is to channel your inner cattle auctioneer, offering various versions of your proposal that scale back who it covers or with how much until there’s support.

Those are the kinds of strategies that are ready at hand when you see policy design as an invitation to compromise.

Today’s guest instead presumes that political coalition formulation precedes policy design, treating it as a covenant that captures compromise.

Vicki Shabo is a Senior Fellow at New America’s Better Life Lab, where she leads work on gender equity and paid leave and care policy and strategy.

She has played a central role in shaping strategy related to paid leave at the national and state level, and the way media narratives portray caregiving.

We talked about why moving too quickly to policy design ends up smuggling genuine disagreements over vision and values into the minutia of benefit mechanics.

We also discussed how the durability of any policy often emerges from the way it changes people’s behavior over time.

Regardless of your policy priorities and preferences, this underscores the central role of offering clear and contestable visions to advance any sustainable child and family policy.

Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk.

As we examined last week, caregiving is interwoven throughout our lives and the economy, with outsized impact on families who may come into contact with the child welfare system.

Our exploration of paid leave policy last week included Rachel Anderson’s Deep Dive on the missing side of paid leave policy and my WonkCast conversation with Paid Leave For All Founding Director Dawn Huckelbridge on building policy advocacy infrastructure.

This week, we’re going further down the rabbit hole with a Deep Dive by first-time Wonk contributor Jason Kanter, on coordination of state paid leave programs.

Jason’s background included a staff role on the House Ways and Means Committee, where he played a key role in shaping paid leave policy proposals.

His piece looks at a question whose importance only grows in the absence of a federal paid leave policy, as states continue developing their own paid leave programs; how do you coordinate across those different state approaches?

Differing state approaches to paid leave have been a font of policy experimentation and innovation.

Those differences also create interstate complexities with implications for state leaders, employers, workers and their families, and anyone working on caregiving policy.

We’ve also got an excerpt from our latest premium brief unpacking what’s missing from debates about reforming family first when we misread bargains underpinning its origin.

Let’s get into it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

The Next Frontier in Paid Leave Policy: State Coordination

By Jason Kanter

In 2021, Congressional Democrats led a budget reconciliation effort to create a national paid family and medical leave policy that ultimately did not advance.

Since then, the congressional debate around the issue has shifted.

This shift reflects a maturing state policy landscape that illustrates the core tension of state-by-state policy design: states acting in the absence of federal policy can create momentum for a federal framework, but that very action can also make a federal framework more challenging to enact when state designs diverge drastically.

Whether the federal government should create a national paid leave benefit remains a contested policy question.

Focusing on it exclusively misses another one that its resolution relies on. How can a growing number of state paid leave programs work together in a labor market that does not stop at state lines?

The Interstate Paid Leave Action Network (I-PLAN) Act, H.R. 3090, is one concrete congressional expression of that shift.

Bipartisan House Working Group on Paid Leave Co-Chairs Reps. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) and Stephanie Bice (R-OK) authored the bill, which is also included in the Working Group’s broader More Paid Leave for More Americans Act (H.R. 3089).

This effort has gained additional momentum with the recent introduction of a Senate companion by Senators John Boozman (R-AR) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), S. 5017.

The legislation is just one signal of a broader structural problem that has grown as more states enact paid leave programs: fragmentation without a coordinating framework.

PROBLEM: A STATE PATCHWORK

Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted paid leave programs. That state-by-state growth has generated momentum for the national conversation, and is increasingly its constraint.

While state programs are generally similar in purpose, each reflects different policy choices on core program elements, including eligibility, levels, and administration.

They also each have technical variation in terms, timing, and processes. While these differences vary in importance, each state’s aggregate of choices reflects a series of compromises and commitments that made its program possible.

At the same time, harmonization presents an opportunity to build something stronger from these experiences.

What began as a state innovation story is increasingly producing an interoperability constraint. For employers, particularly those operating in multiple states, the challenge is operational.

A uniform paid leave benefit becomes harder to administer when each state program operates under different rules, timelines, and standards.

Employers may offer robust, nationwide benefits, including in states without paid leave programs, yet still run into barriers aligning those benefits with state requirements.

For workers, the issue shows up as access friction. That matters most for workers whose employment spans multiple states, who hold multiple jobs, or who move to another state for work.

It also affects workers who have existing access to paid leave through their employers, as new state programs can add financial and administrative burdens and may reduce the benefits available to them.

That is where patchwork becomes a coordination problem that raises deeper questions about the pathway from state to national policy.

WHAT COORDINATION IS ACTUALLY TESTING

Coordination enters the conversation because the problem is no longer just state variation. It is interstate interaction.

Interstate interaction can involve many things:

• shared definitions;

• aligned claims processes;

• data-sharing standards;

• portability rules;

• employer-equivalency frameworks;

• interstate agreements;

• federal grants; or

• a convening entity with authority to help states work through technical conflicts.

The point is not that any one state version is inevitable. It is that once separate state systems begin interacting, some mechanism has to create interstate coordination.

There is historical precedent for this kind of problem. After state unemployment compensation laws were enacted, states developed interstate agreements to address workers with employment across state lines or those who moved for work.

One longstanding example is the 1938 Interstate Benefit Payment Plan, which remains in effect today.

Paid leave faces a similar question: how can separate state systems be made easier to navigate and understand?

In fact, Congressional report language enacted in FY26 and additional pieces included in the House Appropriations Committee’s Labor-HHS mark for FY27 recognizes challenges that varying state programs can create for workers, states, and employers, with a modest step to create a unified federal list of key policy terms and spend up to $1M convening states to discuss coordination.

TRADEOFFS: WHAT COORDINATION CAN’T DO

A coordination-centric model comes with limits. It does not instantly resolve underlying differences across state programs—and is not intended to.

Greater uniformity could come over time through collaboration, and it could offer a foundation for addressing challenges that no single state can solve alone.

Coordination could address practical pressure points, like harmonizing how states evaluate the equivalent value of employer-provided leave programs.

Yet some states may also resist coordination efforts they view as constraining their legitimate policy experimentation. But not engaging in that conversation ignores the potential for progress and success.

Effectiveness will also depend on participation.

Coordination mechanisms are as strong as the willingness of states and administrators to meaningfully engage, but there are early examples of collaboration on program integrity, technology, and data sharing. Incentives like federal grants can also help foster successful coordination.

LOOKING AHEAD

As more states enact paid leave programs, shared infrastructure has become harder to treat as a technical afterthought.

Access is no longer only about how to create a program. It is also about whether programs can work together when workers, employers, payroll systems, and family and medical needs intersect.

That does not necessarily make coordination the entire answer to the national paid leave debate. It makes coordination the next national implementation problem and design question created by state expansion.

Much of the paid leave debate is understandably focused on a prospective policy question, of whether and how to create new national benefits.

The outcome of that debate depends at least in part on whether the benefits already being built can function as a coherent system.

Wonkatizer

ACF Signal to States on Tightening Adoption Subsidies

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) is signaling a push to curtail adoption subsidies for caregivers who have ceased caring for a child.

What Happened

On Friday, ACF sent a letter to states announcing updates to the child welfare policy manual related to adoption subsidies under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act.

The new guidance highlights existing authorities states can use to regularly renew or recertify agreements, to ensure adoptive parents are still actively caring for a child.

The move aims at reports of adoptive parents receiving subsidies despite permanently sending a child back to foster care or ceasing to care for them.

Why it Matters

We’ve previously covered how the Title IV-E foster care program has morphed from one financing foster care to one predominantly financing adoption subsidies.

That also inevitably brings new scrutiny to where those funds are going.

What to Watch

Guidance to states reminding them of an authority they already have does not on its own make for a decisive policy shift.

It’s worth watching whether there are further ACF moves that point to a changing posture toward oversight of adoption subsidies writ large, or efforts to make voluntary guidance like this more binding through mechanisms like inclusion in grant criteria.

From the Wonk Briefing Room

For this week’s premium brief, Doug Steiger examined the origins of Family First’s prevention policy design in the context of the bargain behind it.

We often misread policy when we look at it in the abstract.

Technical glitches and inartful drafting do happen.

But more often, what seems like a mistake or oversight is actually a heavily negotiated compromise upon which the rest of the policy depended for its survival.

The construction of legislation is where policy makes contact with power. Not just the vague power of well-resourced “interests”, but that of:

• The skeptical lawmaker is willing to listen if it can also fix an atypical edge case she heard about from a constituent;

• The trusted advocacy group willing to withhold essential support over a priority;

• The narrative setting media leader with an unusual connection to the topic; or

• The local nonprofit with outsized influence because they’re represented by a Member of Congress in an influential post on a key committee or in leadership.

When you have access to this kind of intel and insight, you’re able to understand and do more to shape what’s possible in policy. Without it, you’re in the dark.

To See What’s Next for Prevention, Look at the Bargain Behind Family First.

What the history of the prevention services in Family First tells us about the prospects for expanding or redesigning federal prevention financing.

BY DOUG STEIGER, SENIOR CONTRIBUTOR

The Family First Prevention Services Act (Family First) was a breakthrough in federal child welfare financing.

For the first time, states could claim open-ended Title IV-E funding for services intended to prevent children from entering foster care.

The first piece in this series examined how pairing prevention services with congregate care reform helped make that breakthrough politically and fiscally possible.

This piece looks more closely at the prevention side of the bargain.

As Child Welfare Wonk has widely covered, nearly eight years later, the results have been more limited than many anticipated.

States face a narrow menu of eligible services and a burdensome approval process, and federal spending remains modest.

It is tempting to treat those limitations as mere flaws to be fixed, but that would be a fundamental miscategorization.

Many of the core constraints that have made Family First difficult to use were the carefully negotiated compromises and design choices that made federal prevention funding politically credible and fiscally possible in the first place.

Changing those constraints therefore means reopening the foundational questions they originally answered:

• What’s the appropriate role for federal child welfare financing in preventing child welfare involvement?

• How should policymakers determine which services should such funding pay for?

• Who comprises a viable coalition of lawmakers sufficiently supportive to enact that change?

Our deliberations often treat these as technical questions of efficiency with obvious and correct answers. But they’re vision and governance questions that never stay constant, and which advance into policy only through debate, negotiation, and accommodation.

Many of what are often portrayed as technical drafting errors within Family First serve as a functional Rosetta Stone for understanding what it takes for policymakers to agree on expanded financing of services for families.

Read the full brief here

To read the full brief and access all our premium resources, join the Wonk Briefing Room. Individuals can sign up here, or get the team membership rate here.

Organizations interested in going even deeper can reach out to learn more about our partnerships that help you leverage and apply our intel in your strategy.

That’s it for this week.

Stay sharp, Wonks.

~ Z

Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible

Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.

It takes real capacity to turn even the most popular idea into a durable agenda for action.

Paid leave encapsulates many of the friction points requiring that capacity to take an idea from popular concept to durable enacted framework.

Most Americans can tell you that we’re among only a handful of developed countries without a national paid leave policy, even though the concept has widespread support.

Where divergence emerges is on why.

There are earnest debates over the best way to develop a policy and why, how to craft engaging messages about it, and the advocacy and political strategy to advance one.

What is less debatable is that paid leave has moved from popular idea to credible policy.

A national proposal came within a vote of enactment in 2021. 13 states and DC now have mandatory paid leave policies, and another ten have voluntary ones.

Whenever you see policy acceleration of that kind, it’s worth looking beyond the individual efforts and organizations to the infrastructure making them possible.

Today’s guest plays a pivotal role in building the capacity meant to make paid leave inevitable.

Dawn Huckelbridge is the Founding Director of Paid Leave for All, a national campaign advocating for paid family and medical leave.

We talked about what infrastructure was necessary to create prominence and momentum for the issue of paid leave, what went into that capacity building effort, and why.

The takeaways go beyond paid leave itself to the designing, building, and stewardship of infrastructure for any big policy target, which will be beneficial for anyone who has led or funded an advocacy campaign, or wondered why their powerful policy idea keeps hitting resistance.

Welcome back to your latest Weekly Wonk after last week’s summer break.

Caregiving is interwoven throughout our lives and the economy. All of us require it, and nearly all of us provide some amount of it.

These are issues that touch all families, and whose policy design can have an outsized impact on families who may come into contact with the child welfare system.

We’ve highlighted how child care access is related to child welfare, and how our fragmented policy systems struggle to see the complexity of families fully.

On the paid leave front, we’re continuing the topical exploration we kicked off earlier this year, with a Deep Dive from first-time Wonk contributor Rachel Hope Anderson.

Much of the paid leave policy conversation understandably focuses on what makes leave work well for families.

Rachel’s piece digs into the policy design dimensions that matter for employers operationalizing the policy, which matters for both buy-in and last-mile policy delivery.

It’s a valuable vantage point for anyone interested in why issues with broad support encounter structural barriers to enactment and implementation.

On our latest WonkCast, I talked with C.A.S.E. co-founder and CEO Debbie Riley about how policy misunderstands ambiguous loss, child welfare, and mental health.

This past Saturday marked the 30th anniversary of "ending welfare as we know it.”

Child welfare financing has been frozen in time ever since, one of many reasons we Wonks won’t let it go. Laura Radel’s latest premium analysis maps the impact by state.

Let’s get into it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

The Missing Side of Paid Leave Policy

Paid leave policy has focused heavily on benefits for families. Its effects on employers—and the operational problems employers actually face—remain far less developed.

By Rachel Anderson

A key hurdle to securing paid family leave in the United States, despite the policy’s popularity and well-documented benefits, is its reach into two domains: family life and the workplace.

Paid leave supports families and children, but it also requires employers to manage workers’ absences.

Yet the employer side of paid leave policy remains less developed relative to the beneficiary side.

Employer concerns are often framed primarily as opposition to costs or workplace mandates, leaving practical questions involving staffing, continuity, compliance, and administrative capacity with less attention.

That is a missing piece of the paid leave debate, and an opening for policy innovation.

WHY BUSINESS OPPOSITION PERSISTS

Paid family leave offers value to employers by enhancing worker recruitment, retention, and job satisfaction.

Nevertheless, many business groups have declined to champion policies that would make paid family leave common across the workforce.

State chambers of commerce, restaurant and retail associations and other business federations routinely oppose legislation that guarantees paid family leave for private sector workers.

For these organizations, opposition reflects more than a weighing of the costs and benefits of paid leave. It also reflects a longstanding resistance to government intervention in the workplace more broadly.

An institutionalist lens helps explain why: for repeat players in policy debates, “the legacies of previous conflicts set parameters on current policy.”1 Opposing one policy effort may be partly about preventing the next one.

Smaller employers may have different considerations.

Public paid family leave programs could help them compete for talent with larger firms, but many have not yet championed these policies.

Recent research on the politics of small business owners suggests that accumulated regulatory burden has a measurable impact on their political posture.2

Their reluctance to endorse paid leave is therefore less about opposition to this particular policy than about the accumulation of compliance demands and legal risks created by various programs over time.

Business associations and small employers may arrive at the same position for different reasons.

The former often resist workplace regulation as an institutional priority; the latter may be responding to its cumulative operational burden.

WHAT EMPLOYERS ACTUALLY STRUGGLE WITH

Not all employers are alike, and many face problems related to paid family leave that the current policy debate does not fully address.

Organizations engaged in human services – social work, counseling – face the challenge of replacing workers who have a personal relationship with their clients.

Rural employers may struggle to find replacement staff at all. Health sector employers have a workforce with substantial licensing and credentialing requirements that make securing temporary staff operationally complex even when financially possible.

Organizations whose workforce consists disproportionately of individuals in caregiving roles and life-stages may experience higher-than-average leave-taking.

Educational institutions, health care organizations, and other human services providers may have more leave-takers in any given year than, for example, a trucking firm.

Small and mid-sized organizations also face compliance and implementation challenges. These employers typically operate with smaller, less specialized human resources departments.

Compliance with payroll and eligibility rules can be time-intensive or involve costly accounting and legal services. For small employers with remote workforces dispersed across several states, those complications can multiply.

These are not arguments against paid leave itself. They are operational problems created when workers take leave—and they vary considerably by employer, industry, and location.

WHAT THE CURRENT POLICY MENU MISSES

To date, paid leave policy proposals have sought to address employer concerns through several tools: employer tax credits, authorizing private insurers to issue family leave coverage, exemptions from payroll contributions or participation in state programs altogether.3

It’s a policy menu with multiple dishes but a few predominant flavors; voluntarism and exemption. Neither of these directly addresses employers’ core operational concerns about managing leave.

In some cases, the existing menu may exacerbate these problems.

Creating a private market for paid leave insurance, for example, places another set of tasks on small business owners’ plates: finding, vetting, and monitoring an insurance provider. The result is a mismatch.

Current policy proposals largely focus on whether employers must participate and how benefits are financed.

Employers may be more concerned with what happens after an employee takes leave: who performs the work, how continuity is maintained, and how the rules are administered.

BEYOND VOLUNTARISM AND EXEMPTIONS

There is an opportunity for policymakers to look beyond voluntarism and exemptions by considering how to build employers’ capacity to manage leave, rather than merely finance and administer it.

This might mean support for skilled staffing pools - a task potentially suited to unions, trade associations, or professional groups.

Grants to state nonprofit and small business incubators could help employers navigate accounting and tax requirements.

Policymakers could also consider whether workplaces with unusually high rates of leave-takers require additional or different support.

One approach might adapt the unemployment insurance system’s experience rating model in reverse, providing payroll tax credits to employers whose workforce uses parental leave at higher than average rates.

Those resources could support job-sharing, cross-training, or other practices that make employee absences easier to accommodate.

These approaches might come with trade-offs.

For example, some tools may be appropriate for several but not all components of the traditional paid leave bundle: parental, caregiving, and personal medical leave.

State capacity matters as well.

States that run their own paid family and medical leave programs need sufficient staffing and infrastructure to process claims quickly, administer rules consistently, and provide employers with the technical assistance needed to comply.

These ideas remain largely untested. But they shift the policy question from whether employers should be required to participate to what they need to make participation workable.

WHAT THIS CHANGES ABOUT THE DEBATE

Employer-sensitive policy design tends not to receive primary focus among those already convinced of the merits of paid leave.

That’s understandable as a strategy to avoid an emphasis on workplace burdens detracting from the business case for leave or distracting from the family values that drive the issue.

But taking employers’ operational challenges seriously does not require retreating from paid leave.

It may instead reveal why the existing policy debate has struggled to build broader business support.

Recent interest among progressive leaders in reducing regulatory burdens suggests there may be room for a different approach—one that pairs paid leave protections with greater attention to employers’ administrative and staffing capacity.

The employer side of paid leave is not simply a political obstacle to overcome. It is a set of policy-design problems that voluntarism and exemptions have not solved.

WHAT DECISION MAKERS NEED TO KNOW

There are active paid family and medical leave proposals in many state legislatures.

Congress may also shift into the role of prompting and coordinating state innovation.

Legislation such as the bipartisan More Paid Leave for More Americans Act (H.R. 3089/S. 5017) would direct competitive grants to states to establish public-private partnerships related to paid family and medical leave.

Were these grants to become available, policymakers could test new ideas such as enhancing states’ technical ability to deliver paid leave and novel approaches to supporting employer capacity to implement and accommodate leave.

Longstanding robust discussion has focused on designing paid leave policy to optimally serve families.

Employers also routinely face employees taking leave; an expanding focus on crafting policies that are equally attractive to firms and families would meaningfully change the paid leave policy debate.

Rachel Hope Anderson is a coalition-builder, facilitator, and policy advisor with a background in law as well as faith and community affairs. She is the Principal of Hope& Consulting.

From the Wonk Briefing Room

We recently explored how the echoes of 1996 remain with us in the transformation of the U.S. safety net created by the 1996 welfare reform law.

Our latest premium brief looks at another key structural tension from 1996; that lingering long shadow looming over child welfare financing known as the lookback.

Federal child welfare financing bases a key eligibility standard on a defunct program’s 1996 income test, with no inflation adjustment.

It’s a policy frozen in time, to when Tupac’s California Love was topping the charts and Independence Day was dominating theaters, before a combined release on VHS and DVD.

With each passing year, there’s a rising structural tension in how that shapes financing. Laura’s latest must-read analysis maps it and unpacks why it matters.

The Legacy of the Look-Back Date

From the day the “look-back” provision was inserted into federal child welfare law 30 years ago, it was clear that freezing income eligibility criteria without adjusting for inflation would undermine the foster care program.

However, as with so much in child welfare, states have been differentially impacted.

BY LAURA RADEL, SENIOR CONTRIBUTOR

30 years ago, Congress created the Title IV-E “look-back” provision as part of the last-minute compromise necessary to pass welfare reform.

This “look-back” provision permanently tied foster care income eligibility to state welfare rules from 1996. As inflation has eroded those income thresholds, fewer children qualify for federal reimbursement — driving down states’ effective federal match rates.

Those differences mean the look-back does more than reduce federal funding over time. It creates winners and losers among states based on policy choices made three decades ago in a program that no longer exists….

Read the full brief here

To read the full brief and access all our premium resources, join the Wonk Briefing Room. Individuals can sign up here, or get the team membership rate here.

Organizations interested in going even deeper can reach out to learn more about our partnerships that help you leverage and apply our intel in your strategy.

That’s it for this week.

Stay sharp, Wonks.

~ Z

Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible