Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk.

Our series on advocacy tradecraft has covered tactics for the appropriations process and committee hearings, and the under-the-radar tools that compound across time.

This week’s Deep Dive digs into the building blocks of legislation:

• drafting legislative text;

• holding coalitions together through hard trades; and

• cultivating champions who carry issues across Congresses.

Doug Steiger wraps this series by zooming out on all eight of the tools his series explores, and what it is that separates premier advocates.

This series has offered a free look at what distinguishes our premium work.

The Weekly Wonk offers what’s essential for our field to know. Our premium work offer actionable approaches, tools, and frameworks for what you can do.

For those ready to go deeper, our premium member community gets new briefs each week, plus access to our full library of resources, live member-only events, and more.

Individuals can sign up here, or get the team membership rate here.

For our latest WonkCast I sat down with Erinn Kelley-Siel, who shared why she thinks we’ve misplaced the tension between child protection and family support.

To round out your Weekly Wonk, we’ve got updates on TANF and Trump Accounts.

Let’s get into it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

Evolving Your Advocacy Toolkit, Part 3

By Doug Steiger, Senior Contributor

Moving child and family policy has always required patience, and as we laid out in How Advocacy is Evolving, the ground has shifted in ways that demand more of it.

Power has redistributed inside Congress, regular order has given way to leadership-driven vehicles, and a fragmented media environment reshapes what reaches members before advocates do.

This series was built to offer a prescription for that diagnosis: the organizations that consistently move child and family policy share a fluency with a second layer of tools beyond the essential table stakes of relationship-building and policy pitching.

Part 1 of this series covered the appropriations process and committee hearings.

Part 2 turned to the tools that compound over time: GAO and OIG studies, report language, and the confirmation process.

Part 3 covers the three tools that operate closest to the legislative product itself:

• Technical assistance on legislative text

• Negotiation and coalition arch

• Seeding issue championship

Tool #6: Technical Assistance - Draft TA, Not Takes

Most congressional staffers are not lawyers. When an idea needs to become legislative text, there are, broadly speaking, three places that help comes from:

1. The House and Senate legislative counsels, the nonpartisan drafting experts who work for Congress. However, they prioritize committee or leadership staff, which can mean long wait times for everyone else;

2. The Administration, where the relevant agency may provide language –if it’s relevant to an Administration proposal or priority. If not, they likely have little time or interest;

3. Advocates, if they know how to review and craft legislative language.

For an advocate, providing language may help turn an idea into an actual bill faster. But speed is the secondary benefit.

The real prize is holding the pen on the first draft.

Everyone who has lived the difference between writing a first draft and commenting on someone else’s knows why: the first draft sets the default frame to which everything else responds.

Two disciplines matter when you draft.

First, jurisdiction.

Where you place language in the underlying statutes dictates which committee owns the bill and what institutional path it must travel.

You and the staffer you are working with will have a preference, and it should be a deliberate one.

Second, status.

Be clear about where the language stands within the coalition or community.

Does it represent a consensus or one organization’s preference? Language already blessed by allies is stronger, but the non-negotiable is honesty with staffers.

They don’t appreciate surprises, and they remember who delivered one.

Building the Capability

Handing a staffer language that legislative counsel has to rebuild burns the exact credibility this tool is supposed to compound.

The good news is you don’t have to start by writing statutory language. There’s a ladder.

Start with the specifications memo

Before anyone writes text, a drafter needs specs: which statute, which section, what change, who it applies to, when it takes effect, and what conforming amendments follow.

A precise spec memo captures most of the pen-holder’s advantage by framing the choices, and gives the staff a tangible set of instructions for legislative counsel.

Master your statute

You can’t place language well in the Social Security Act if you don’t know its architecture. Knowing where things live and how they relate is essential to finding effective ways to build upon them.

Learn from introduced bills. Statutory drafting follows standard formulas.

Pull bills that amend the same sections of law you care about and study how they do it: the amendatory formulas, the definitions, the effective dates. Congress publishes thousands of free templates a year.

Tool #7: Negotiation and Coalition Architecture – Better Together, When You Can Be

Building a coalition can feel like managing a set of individual relationships, juggling personalities and quirks. Yet it is really an exercise in putting together a structure of organizations.

Recall the strengths map from Part 1: grassroots reach, grasstops relationships, technical expertise, administrative knowledge, lived experience, thought leadership, connective capacity.

A well-architected coalition is one where members occupy different positions on that map.

Each organization brings something the others can’t, and each can point to a role that justifies its seat.

They also represent a delicate balancing act. Successful coalitions don’t paper over that difference. They metabolize it through deliberation and negotiation.

This is why what looks like personal conflict is usually organizational interest in disguise.

One member needs to testify to demonstrate value to its funders; another needs to author the report for the same reason. The clash isn’t between two people. It’s between theories of change, strategies, public posture, and business models.

The hardest moment comes when you have made enough progress that your Hill partners reach the negotiating table.

Deciding when to hold a position and when to trade can be excruciating for a coalition. Members will make different calls based on their own constraints; where you sit is where you stand.

The best protection is a pre-commitment: before your Hill partners ever reach the table, get the coalition to agree on what’s core and what’s negotiable.

Reaching alignment in writing, while everyone is calm, creates a common starting position and framework.

You can’t eliminate the hard calls, but deciding the criteria in peacetime means the wartime decision is about applying an agreement, not testing loyalties.

If coalition members do make different calls, remember it’s organizational interests talking, not character.

The partner who breaks with you at the table this year may be the anchor of your next coalition. Treating the divergence as structural rather than personal is what keeps that future available.

Tool #8: Seeding Issue Championship - Finding and Building Leaders

Moving policy requires champions inside the House and Senate. Not just smart staffers who care, but actual members willing to learn the issues and spend political capital on colleagues to support bills and amendments.

Champions often come from personal experience: lived experts, foster parents, former state and county officials, members who worked these issues before Congress. Researching member biographies is a real advocacy work, not trivia

Sometimes champions emerge from a strong relationship with constituent advocates. Over time, that can build policymakers’ accomplishments and make them known for their commitment.

The structural challenge is that child and family policy offers a champion little of what usually motivates issue leadership. These don’t tend to be issues that get you splashy coverage, viral videos, or campaign cash.

So advocates have to build the reward themselves. Leadership on these issues can generate praise from constituents and positive local press and social media back home.

Advocates who can channel this district or state-level response — and keep it flowing over the years these bills take — keep champions engaged. Everyone likes praise, including members of Congress.

Stories help here, too. Many politicians absorb issues through people, not research studies. A strong anecdote will stick with them better than an outcome evaluation.

The growing role of lived experience in this field is an opportunity to connect champions with the people their leadership affects.

And there’s a silver lining in the low profile: less competition to “own” a specific proposal. Junior members can take a leadership role quickly. Eventually, junior members become senior ones.

The champion you seed in their second term may be a subcommittee chair with a decade of credibility on your issue when the window finally opens.

Champions are built through a growing stack of asks, not a single big request. Start small with a sign-on letter, a question for the record, a cosponsorship.

The member who leads your bill in four years is the member who signed your letter this year and liked how it felt.

What the Toolkit Adds Up To

These last tools are where the rubber meets the road: shaping actual legislative text, holding coalitions together through hard trades, and building the leaders who carry issues across Congresses.

Step back, and the eight tools in this series share an underlying logic of building credibility through supplementing capacity Congress needs.

None of them are flashy new technology or radical approaches to the work.

Instead, they deliver on fundamentals essential for policy development at a moment when many of the other sources of those fundamentals are eroding or unraveling

Mastering these can take an entire career. Developing and building them will open doors to drive your agenda forward.

Wonkatizer

TANF Child-Only Cases Get ACF’s Magnifying Glass

What Happened

The Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF) Office of Family Assistance has a new report out that takes a critical look at child-only cases in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.

The report examined ~85,000 TANF child-only cases in FY 2024 involving parents ineligible for benefits because of their immigration status, which was about a quarter of all child-only cases. The report argues those are contrary to TANF’s intent.

Key Context

Child-only cases are TANF financial assistance on behalf of a child, which exclude a parent or caregiver from eligibility determination.

Previous ACF reports have noted that child-only cases are especially salient for child welfare, estimating that one-third to half of covered children had child welfare contact.

They’re frequently used to support kinship placements, particularly those who with relatives who aren’t formally licensed as foster parents.

They also can provide financial support when a U.S. citizen child has a parent who is not a U.S. citizen.

Why it Matters

A research product laying out a structured policy argument, signed by ACF’s top official, is typically a precursor to administrative action.

It would be reasonable to anticipate forthcoming ACF policy impacting TANF child-only cases, particularly related to parents ineligible based on immigration status.

That would fit a larger pattern of HHS policy alignment with immigration enforcement. But it’s important to note two reasons that it has far larger implications.

First, any expansion of citizenship verification or eligibility enforcement focused on immigration status would still add administrative burden to unaffected cases; the challenge with exemptions is that you still need to demonstrate that they apply to you.

Second, the report’s arguments apply in narrative to the caseload related to non-citizen parents, but they critically raise deeper questions about whether TANF financial assistance should be available when a parent would be ineligible.

That’s much harder than it seems to cordon off from something like child-only cases supporting kin placements, which work on the same policy logic.

What to Watch

New ACF policy curtailing child-only cases tied to parental immigration status, and how it could impact kinship child-only cases that have nothing to do with immigration.

Fostering the Future’s Financial Focus

What Happened

ACF and Treasury jointly released guidance to help states open Trump Accounts for eligible youth in foster care, branded “Fostering the Future Accounts” under First Lady Melania Trump’s initiative.

Trump Accounts are the new federally backed, tax-advantaged children’s savings accounts created under last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with funds generally accessible at 18.

The guidance makes state child welfare agencies the account-opener and “Responsible Party” for children in their custody, permits depositing federal survivor benefits and unobligated TANF funds, and allows Title IV-E administrative claiming for account setup.

The Administration’s goal is for all states to open accounts for eligible foster youth by December 2027. Twenty-three states have already pledged to do so.

Why it Matters

“Fostering the Future” now spans an Executive Order, a House-passed Chafee bill, and a savings vehicle; it’s the thread across the Administration’s older-youth agenda.

We’ve previously covered ACF’s ongoing push for states to end state interception of social security survivor benefits for youth in foster care.

The new guidance explicitly invokes that shift, and names the new accounts as a vehicle for conserving those funds instead.

Deposits are permitted, not required, so practice will vary state by state.

What to Watch

How states operationalize custody transitions will be where the rubber meets the road; handing off account authority at reunification, adoption, or guardianship.

It’s also worth watching whether this advances broader conversations about asset building and financial literacy for children and youth in foster care.

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.

Our laws and funding task the same agency with removing children from families when there’s a safety risk, and helping those same families avoid crisis and heal.

Today’s guest says that asking one agency to hold both is a fundamental problem.

Erinn Kelley-Siel Spent over thirteen years in public service leadership in the state of Oregon, including four as Director of the Oregon Department of Human Services.

In 2016 she joined Friends of the Children, serving as Chief Officer of Strategy & Innovation to scale a long-term professional mentorship model for children who have experienced multiple Adverse Childhood Experiences before kindergarten.

She reframes that safety and support tension into shared partnership, with government leading on safety and community supporting families through durable relationships.

We talked about how this tension shapes the way leaders make decisions, and how the wrong pockets problem complicates sustainable financing.

These fundamental questions of accountability, governance, and funding are essential for anyone interested in shaping what comes next.

Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk.

Last week, we kicked off Doug Steiger’s series on advocacy tradecraft with tactics for informing key moments of the appropriations process and committee hearings.

This series offers three free actionable resources we normally make available only to premium members, showing what we offer in that deeper layer of our work.

In this week’s Deep Dive, Doug turns to tools that work across time. These are moves that are more often under the radar for people outside of the DC Beltway.

What they lack in flash, these moves deliver in duration by compounding over time, by building evidence, shaping regulations, and maintaining attention.

That matters because policy takes years to develop, often building momentum across multiple Congresses and Administrations.

We’ve also got updates on the new Medicaid work requirement rules from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Our most recent WonkCast with Rebecca Robuck emphasized the importance of clear vision, with “what if it worked?” as her invitation to see new options for what’s next.

Let’s get into it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

Evolving Your Advocacy Toolkit, Part 2

By Doug Steiger, Senior Contributor

Moving child and family policy has always required patience, and as we laid out in How Advocacy is Evolving, the ground has shifted in ways that demand more of it.

Traditional pathways have eroded as power has redistributed inside Congress, regular order has given way to leadership-driven vehicles, and the media environment has fragmented in ways that reshape which inputs reach members before advocates do.

That diagnosis is what this series is built to answer.

The organizations that consistently move child and family policy share a common feature: fluency with a second layer of tools beyond relationship-building and policy pitching — the procedural levers, informational assets, and institutional mechanics that convert goodwill into durable outcomes.

Part 1 covered the first two: the appropriations process and committee hearings. Part 2 introduces three more:

• Building the Paper Trail: GAO and OIG studies

• Communicating Congressional Intent: Report language

• Nominating Your Ideas: Confirmations, QFRs, and commitments

Tool #3: Building the Paper Trail- The GAO and OIG For The Long Game

Many advocates have studies and data they rely on to make their case.

That information often faces skepticism because of distrust in the source, an obstacle that has sharpened as parts of the political ecosystem have turned against the mainstream media, academia, and the research establishment.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the departmental Offices of Inspector General (OIG) sit in a different category.

Both are generally perceived as having less of an agenda than advocacy research organizations, and both produce findings that members and staff treat as authoritative.

The GAO in particular is a familiar feature of life on the Hill. GAO is an arm of Congress.

Committee leaders use GAO as a source of oversight information, requesting studies on agency actions or the implementation of legislation. In child and family policy, GAO routinely surveys state agencies or visits states or communities for in-depth research.

OIGs sit inside executive branch departments and operate semi-independently from agency leadership.

They focus primarily on fraud, waste and abuse, but they also conduct implementation studies that bear on policy questions.

How to Use Them

GAO prioritizes requests from committee leaders, but any member can ask it to review a program’s operations or a law’s implementation.

OIGs are less accessible from the outside, though they will sometimes meet with advocates who can surface evidence of waste or fraud to investigate.

Sophisticated advocates know they can plant the seeds for the future elevation of issues they care about by asking a Congressional champion to request a GAO report, or prompt an OIG one through legislation or oversight.

Both produce reports slowly, and that is part of the value.

A GAO and OIG report can be cited for years, building an evidentiary record that policy isn’t working as intended.

They can demonstrate that state agencies are slow to implement a new requirement, that a regulation is producing unintended consequences, that a program’s structure is failing the population it was designed to serve.

These agencies are also persistent.

GAO tracks whether its recommendations have been followed for years. OIGs do the same, though they draw less Hill attention since they don’t work directly for Congress.

For advocates working on issues that won’t resolve in a single Congress, that durability is the point.

Tool #4: Communicating Congressional Intent- Report Language

When a committee approves a bill, it usually issues a report alongside it.

The report lays out the context for the legislation, the reasoning behind it, and how the Committee intends it be interpreted.

Conference reports, which are produced when the House and Senate reconcile differing versions, carry particular weight as the final statement of intent before a bill goes to the President.

These reports are important even though they lack the force of statute.

Courts look to report language to discern legislative intent when statutory language is ambiguous.

More routinely, agency career staff read report language alongside statute when drafting regulations and implementation guidance.

This is the real leverage point for report language, which can shape how an agency translates the law into rules. Agencies that disregard report language risk the ire of the legislators who wrote it.

This dynamic is sharpest in annual appropriations bills. Ignored report language one year can become statutory language the next, or trigger painful oversight, targeted budget or staffing cuts.

Drafting Language That Gets Picked Up

Advocates who get into the process early can help shape report language directly.

The best report language follows a consistent pattern: it states factually what the statutory provision does, then describes the intent behind it.

Vague aspirational language gets ignored.

Specific language tied to concrete expectations is harder for an agency to wave off, including implementation timelines, populations to be served, and data to be reported.

When a bill represents only a partial step towards an advocate’s goal, report language can lay groundwork for the next step.

For example, a report might state that if the enacted provisions prove insufficient to achieve the committee’s intent, further legislation will follow.

That kind of forward-looking text builds a record advocates can point to in the next Congress and future ones, building the long game needed to inform policy over time.

Tool #5: Nominating Your Ideas- Confirmations, QFRs, and Commitments

The Senate confirmation process for Administration appointees is another opportunity for advocacy, And not just in the obvious ways of how a vote might go.

Organizations can collaborate with congressional staff on questions designed to get a nominee on the record about a key issue, extract policy commitments, and build accountability that travels with the nominee into office.

The leverage is greatest at the sub-cabinet level, such as Deputy and Assistant Secretary level.

Confirmation hearings for Cabinet Secretaries are often consumed by the political crisis of the day or page one issues like health care, leaving little room for child and family questions.

However, the press pays little attention to the confirmation process for sub-cabinet posts, giving advocates more ability to get attention from Senators and their staff.

Sub-cabinet nominations operate under different conditions: less press attention, more space for substantive questioning, and Senators who are often genuinely looking for sharp questions from informed outside parties.

It is also a process, not just a single moment at a hearing. Senators can press for answers before, during, and after a hearing itself. Advocates who understand the full arc have more entry points than are typically used.

Working the Process

If you can’t get a question asked in the hearing itself, the next vehicle is the question for the record or QFR. QFRs let a Senator submit a written question after the hearing and require a written formal answer from the nominee.

They are well-suited to detailed policy questions that wouldn’t translate to oral exchange.

Typically, a nomination will not move until QFRs have been answered, which can take weeks, even months. That timing creates real pressure on the nominee to engage seriously.

One further step is asking a Senator to extract a commitment from the nominee: a promise to rescind specific guidance to meet with advocates on an issue, to issue a particular kind of regulation.

Commitments made on the record create accountability that outlasts the hearing itself.

If the nominee fails to follow through, the failure registers as disrespect to the Senator, not just the advocates who sought the commitment. That changes the dynamics of follow-up substantially.

The Senator’s office has its own reason to press the agency, which gives advocates a partner in enforcement rather than the burden of carrying it alone.

Tools that Work on Time

The three tools in this installment share a property the first two don’t.

Appropriations riders and committee hearings work on live moments; GAO and OIG studies, report language, and confirmation commitments compound over time.

They plant artifacts that exert influence long after the immediate fight has moved on in the form of evidentiary records that build across Congresses, instructions that guide rulemaking years into the future, and commitments that travel with appointees into office.

For organizations working on issues that will not resolve in a single legislative window, the long-horizon tools are often the ones that matter most, even if a “win” on them doesn’t have the glamour of a big vote..

The third and final installment in this series will turn to the tools that operate closest to the legislative product itself: technical assistance on bill text, coalition architecture, and the long work of cultivating champions on child and family issues.

Together they cover what it takes not just to engage the machinery, but to shape what comes out of it.

From the Wonk Briefing Room

Entitled To What?

Title IV-E of the Social Security Act is synonymous with foster care, for which it provides states open-ended federal funding on behalf of all eligible children.

In this premium brief, Senior Contributor Laura Radel maps the difference between what we assume Title IV-E foster care funds pay for and what it mostly covers in reality.

Rather than funding room and board for foster care, it’s primarily a federal investment in state capacity through administrative funds. That matters for the future of financing policy.

In the technical sense, Title IV-E foster care is an entitlement program. But as Laura points out, the deeper question is “entitlement to what?”

As always with our premium resources, it not only analyzes but offers actionable steps, with a framework of questions for leaders to shape strategy.

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.

On Our Radar

Medicaid Work Rules Force a Late, Costly System Rebuild

What Happened

On June 1, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released an Interim Final Rule implementing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s Medicaid work requirements.

The law requires most non-pregnant adults ages 19-64 to demonstrate that they’re engaged in at least 80 hours per month of employment, education, job training, or community service.

The rule expands on those requirements.

For example, while the law waives the requirement for those deemed “medically frail”, under the rule a diagnosis alone is insufficient; you have to prove it precludes work.

As part of a concerted rollout strategy, the HHS Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation team released a report arguing work requirements incentivize employment and reduce poverty.

Notably, the report acknowledges “Our analysis assumes no implementation delays”.

Why it Matters

Regardless of your perspective on the merits of connecting safety net benefits to work, the policy architecture itself is built on documenting and verifying work.

The policy rollout will be focused not on promotion of and connection to community engagement, but procurement of technological infrastructure, with a reasonable assumption of implementation delays based on state experiences.

Kristi Putnam oversaw an earlier high-profile rollout of Medicaid work requirements in Arkansas. In our recent WonkCast conversation, she highlighted the challenges of setting up technology systems, and how central they are to the policy working as designed.

Former Georgia child welfare Director Tom Rawlings previously wrote for the Wonk about how that friction plays out and how it can impact child welfare systems.

A majority of Medicaid beneficiaries already work or attend school.

Beneficiaries the law exempts, including former foster youth and parents, can still face potential impacts, since the policy hinges on proving exemption.

For example, we’ve previously projected that up to 68,000 eligible children could lose coverage purely through administrative burden.

What to Watch

States have a relatively short runway to get their systems set up, and that will come right as state budgets tighten in anticipation of reduced federal Medicaid funding.

The rule does allow self-attestation of work or exemption status through 2027, but in 2028 states must have data systems working to verify exemptions.

CMS is accepting comments on the rule until July 31st.

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.

Child welfare policy often swings between two possible answers to the system’s purpose: protecting children or supporting families.

Even efforts to move beyond that debate can end up recreating it as an argument over whether to reform the system or replace it altogether.

Today’s guest is someone who refuses to collapse that complexity.

Rebecca Robuck is a Partner at ChildFocus Partners, and the Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child and Family Well-Being.

As a leading national policy expert, she leads coalition advocacy and advises national organizations on what’s happening and what’s possible in child welfare policy.

We talk about why innovation happening on the ground doesn’t always reach national conversations, the role of coalitions in reshaping federal policy, and what’s next in child and family policy.

At its core, our conversation is about what we lose when policy debates don’t surface foundational questions like what a system like child welfare is actually for.

For anyone feeling overwhelmed by current policy volatility, this captures why an era of disruption and uncertainty also offers opportunities for re-imagining what’s possible.

Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk.

As someone whose prior work was in advocacy, I’m always curious about what distinguishes the influential people and organizations that have outsized impact on policy development.

Even the most sophisticated strategy will always fail without effective application of tactics that match your unique strengths.

This has only become more pronounced as the conditions within which you are trying to shape policy are harder, as we explored recently.

Child Welfare Wonk exists to provide the strategic policy intelligence anyone with a stake in child and family policy needs to be effective.

This free newsletter is our open source layer, making meaning of what matters.

Our premium Wonk Briefing Room and organization-specific partnerships go deeper, offering actionable tools and strategic application of our insights to your work.

To offer a sense of what that distinction looks like, today’s Deep Dive kicks off a toolkit on policy influence tradecraft.

We’ll be releasing all three parts through the Weekly Wonk, to show the next layer of our work.

Let’s get into it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

Evolving Your Advocacy Toolkit, Part 1

Helping you to make a difference despite changing conditions.

By Doug Steiger, Senior Contributor

Advocacy for children and families is hard work. As we laid out in a recent piece on How Advocacy is Evolving, the ground has shifted in ways that have made it harder still.

The organizations that consistently move legislation share a common feature: fluency with a second layer of tools beyond relationship-building and policy pitching, including procedural levers, informational assets, and institutional mechanics that convert goodwill into durable outcomes.

A huge rally at the Capitol or marquee bill introduction with a splashy quote roll can bring visibility to an issue. As tools, that visibility also makes them quite blunt.

The tools we’re talking about are specialized ones for the craft of shaping and moving policy. They reward sustained momentum over dramatic moments.

This is the first of three installments.

The full toolkit will cover eight tools spanning the legislative and executive branches.

Part 1 begins with self-awareness about what your organization brings to the table, then turns to two underused vehicles in child and family advocacy: the appropriations process and committee hearings.

Understand Your Strengths

Effective advocacy starts with self-awareness about what your organization does uniquely well, and what Hill staff think you’re good at.

From the perspective of someone who has been lobbied a lot as a Hill staffer, advocates have different strengths.

Staffers tend to develop a mental map of who to call for what, and where you sit on that map determines whether your input shapes legislation, creates coalitions to advance it, or merely pads the press release.

The categories include:

• Grassroots reach that can generate calls and emails – a role social media influencers can also play;

• Grasstops reach that can target key decision-makers with individual relationships, like when you have a board member who is close with a Senator;

• Technical experts to draft or fine-tune bill text so it works as intended;

• Administrative knowledge of how a state or county would actually implement legislation;

• Lived experience that anchors policy in on-the-ground reality and personal impact;

• Thought leadership that provides the vision, theory of the case or ideological frame that defines the conversation; and

• Connective capacity to assemble the broad coalitions valuable in child and family policy, given the lift necessary to get policies to be a priority

Obviously, organizations can play more than one of these roles, and each is valuable.

But nobody does them all well, and the ones you do best are where you’ll have the most influence.

Self-awareness about how inside players view your organization makes you more effective, helping you focus where you’re most effective and decide what to let others lead on.

Knowing which those are determines the difference between being pulled into a drafting conversation and being added to a coalition letter.

And if they don’t see you as filling any of those roles, you may not have any influence at all.

On to more specific aspects of working the Hill…

Tool #1: The Appropriations Process as a Policy Vehicle

An important avenue for policy-making on the Hill is the appropriations process, through which Congress funds much of the government each year.

It can be a tricky thing to influence, as it has an insular culture and distinctive approach to legislating.

This includes greater bipartisanship than the rest of Congress retains; the long-standing joke in Washington is that there’re actually three political parties, and they’re Republicans, Democrats and Appropriators.

For programs that get funded through the annual appropriations process, there are two sets of important policymaker stakeholders.

If you want to increase funding for a program, go to the Appropriations Committee.

If you want to rewrite a program’s rules, you should be looking to its authorizing committee, which designs the program through which the funds flow.

Then come the exceptions. Appropriators routinely attach policy to funding through three mechanisms:

• Riders that restrict how funds can be used, often of a “thou shall not spend on x” variety

• Set asides that carve out a portion of a program’s funding for a particular purpose

• Congressionally directed spending (or the artist formerly known as Earmarks), which directs money to a particular activity or project, often specific to the state or district of the appropriator who secures it

Because much of the federal government shuts down when appropriations bills don’t pass, they offer a way to force Congress to deal with an issue that authorizing bills lack.

Persuading a member of the Appropriations Committee to propose a rider can often generate a real debate faster than having a junior member introduce a freestanding bill.

The children and families advocacy community underuses this avenue for two reasons.

First, the policy conversation can be overshadowed by large mandatory spending programs like Medicaid and SNAP, that largely sit outside the annual appropriations cycle.

Second, there is also a long history of tension over turf between appropriators and the authorizing committees, which can make advocates wary of risking authorizer relationships by going to appropriators for policy riders and set asides in their bills.

That’s a reasonable tension to balance, but there are ways advocates can carefully approach it, particularly by communicating clearly with staffers about the underlying goal and strategy.

Tool #2: Making Hearings Work

Committee hearings remain part of the traditional legislative path, even if they are often little more than a “check the box” performative exercise that lets a committee chair claim regular order.

Most are arranged to make a point, rather than gather facts, and advocates often respond in kind, treating hearings as visibility events to demonstrate their constituency exists and that their organization matters.

That underutilizes them. On many child and family policy issues, members at best have surface knowledge and ideological gut-reactions, rather than deeply considered positions.

A well-prepared witness can break through staff-drafted talking points with a moving story or a sharp statistic, and shift how a member actually understands the issue.

And a few strategic moves right after a hearing can elevate the consideration of an issue if you raise it the right way.

Picking and Preparing a Witness

The first step in supporting a witness is getting one on the radar of committee staff.

Witnesses get invitations from either the majority or minority party of a committee, with the majority having more of the witnesses on the panel.

What initially attracts a congressional staffer to a prospective witness?

It’s not just issue expertise, but a relevant connection to the committee’s political geography, dynamism, and typically a key “lane” to occupy.

Whether that be representing a key constituency, an essential issue, or a political wedge point

Not everyone is a good witness, even if they’re an incredible issue expert. It can be hard to look up at a dais of Senators or Representatives and speak clearly with good pacing, and unpracticed witnesses lose the room quickly.

Make your witnesses practice, and get them comfortable with communicating clearly and succinctly. The issue can be complicated, but the talking points and responses a witness has can’t be.

If you are going for the “good story” approach, particularly with witnesses who have lived experience, your witness should be comfortable sharing their story.

Child welfare, in particular, can involve traumatic experiences that are difficult for people to relate and relive.

A witness who is not ready to share their story in a high-pressure setting can be hurt by the experience, which can also undercut the message

The Window After the Gavel

The hearing is rarely the end of the play. Follow up with staff members who attended, including with those whose bosses did not.

There may be an exchange with your witness you can offer to discuss further, or state and district-specific data worth sharing.

When the hearing is tied to specific bills, the post-hearing period is when committee staff finalize legislative text and the accompanying report that lays out the intent of Congress.

If you didn’t get to weigh in on the language beforehand, this is the moment. Anything you don’t deliver gets locked in without you.

Even if you did, informing report language can shape future implementation efforts.

Hearings are inherently theatrical, but that’s not a reason to treat them as a mere play.

The witness prep, the staff briefings, and the post-hearing edits are where hearings translate into policy, and they keep momentum on your side

Engaging the Machinery

The appropriations process and the hearing room are both routine pieces of how Congress operates. Neither is hidden.

What separates organizations that use them strategically from organizations that don’t is a willingness to engage using the procedural machinery of Congress on its own terms.

What may seem like a small nuance substantially elevates the strategic impact of advocacy tactics in a challenging environment.

The next two installments turn to a different set of tools: oversight reports, report language, confirmations, and questions for the record.

Then to drafting, coalition architecture, and the long work of building champions.

Together they form the second-layer toolkit that converts motion into movement.

From the Wonk Briefing Room

The Administration for Children and Families’ A Home for Every Child lays out a numerically simple goal; have at least as many foster homes as there are children in care.

Our latest premium brief closes out a series from Senior Contributor Laura Radel, showing that gap numerically for every state for a sense of what closing it would take.

Wonk Briefing Room members get the full brief, with state-by-state data on multiple strategies that could unlock progress.

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.

Wonkatizer

Regulators, Mount Up

There are some significant new regulatory policy proposals to have on your radar.

OMB Proposes Government-Wide Grants Overhaul

What Happened: The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has proposed a significant policy change to grants, cooperative agreements, and other federal funding awards.

Framed as promotion of transparency and accountability, the proposed rule would overhaul government-wide regulations for disbursement of program funds.

Why it Matters: The proposed rule would codify the Trump Administration’s shift that has moved funding award decisions away from civil servants to political appointees.

This would entail taking ad hoc policy changes under DOGE and individual agencies and making them formal, government-wide regulatory policy, including:

• Eliminating the use of fixed amount funding based on achievement of negotiated milestones or deliverables, and instead reimbursing demonstrated costs incurred;

• Standardizing and authorizing political appointee termination of grants; and

• Restricting grant funding to exclude organizations over DEI policies or training, public discussion of issues impacting transgender people, or conducting voter registration drives.

Many of these approaches tested under DOGE have encountered legal obstacles. Encoding them in regulation would strengthen their defense in future court challenges.

What’s Next: OMB is accepting comments until July 13th.

Deeper Deregulation at ACF

What Happened: ACF announced a proposed rule purported to be the largest ever single removal of federal regulation sections.

This builds upon an earlier rollback of most ACF subregulatory policy guidance, which we unpacked here.

Why it Matters: Much of what ACF is proposing to delete appears to be proverbial deadwood; inactive rules for defunct programs, particularly Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

It would also eliminate the current rules for provisional payment of contingency funds under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which is active policy.

The question wonks will be parsing is unanticipated effects, such as whether any of what’s up for deletion is connected to current policy through reference.

What’s Next: ACF is accepting comments on the proposed rule through June 25th.

Predictive Analytics Pilot

What Happened

ACF announced a $6 million competitive grant to help state, territorial, and tribal child welfare agencies pilot predictive analytics, data-driven risk modeling.

Agencies that have joined the A Home for Every Child initiative will have priority preference.

Why it Matters

Proponents of the approach point to its ability to standardize analysis and elevate human judgment to better tailor intervention to safety risk.

Critiques center on questions about how to ensure humans are the ones making decisions and avoid amplifying biases in the models’ training data.

ACF’s issue brief from earlier this year weighs those benefits and risks and points to effective strategies for successful implementation.

What’s Next

Applications for the pilot are due by July 27th. The mix of states and variation in their approaches will be worth watching.

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’s often the case that our policy patchwork asks families to fit programs, rather than fitting programs to families.

That fragmentation extends to how we hold public sector systems and leaders accountable, optimizing for avoidance of visible failure even at the cost of coherence.

Today’s guest spends a lot of time thinking about and teaching principles for public sector leadership to promote policy innovation.

Kristi Putnam has over 25 years of experience working on child and family policy across human Services, early childhood, health policy, and workforce development.

Most recently, she was Secretary of the Arkansas Department of Human Services under Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders from January 2023 to July 2025.

She also held leadership roles in the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, and the Florida Department of Children and Families.

Today, she’s the Dean of the Human Flourishing Academy, which recruits, trains, and deploys professionals passionate about policy into public sector leadership.

We talked about what blocks or unlocks policy innovation, how family policy systems consider and balance risk, and the tension between state responsibility and family autonomy.

We also talked about how her thinking about policy innovation evolved after overseeing the first significant rollout of Medicaid work requirements in Arkansas.

I walked away with a deeper understanding of how agency leaders reason under constraint, and I am sure you will too.

Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk.

The stories we tell about policy are most powerful when reflecting evidence of underlying reality.

The decoupling of policy and the stories we tell about it creates drift, deracinating debate about policy impact from what the policy design actually does.

Financing is an essential part of public policy, creating incentives through investment.

For child welfare financing, the largest source of federal funds is Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, a program long synonymous with foster care.

But that’s no longer its primary focus.

In this week’s Deep Dive, Senior Contributor Laura Radel analyzes new Title IV-E expenditure data to show the continued shift from foster care to adoption assistance.

This isn’t about taking a position on the relative merits of either, but seeing how financing policy can create key changes in our field’s largest funding stream over time.

This also relates to last week’s Deep Dive on Family First financing, and our recent WonkCast with JooYeun Chang, who thinks extensively about financing policy.

Let’s get after it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

Title IV-E’s Quiet Makeover Continues

New expenditure data show shift continues from foster care to adoption assistance.

By Laura Radel, Senior Contributor

Title IV-E of the Social Security Act is the largest source of federal child welfare financing, and synonymous with foster care.

At one point that was the case, but the program’s focus drifted from the common understanding of what it finances.

Last June, we showed how Title IV-E transformed over several decades from a foster care program with a side investment in adoption support, to the inverse: an adoption program with a side investment in foster care.

It had also shifted from a primary focus on financing specific supports for children, to state capacity in the form of infrastructure support for state child welfare agencies.

The latest data on Title IV-E spending from the Administration of Children and Families confirm both trends continued into 2024.

Foster Care Keeps Shrinking. Now Adoption Is Too.

Overall, foster care’s share of the total IV-E caseload continued sliding, from 17 percent in 2023 to 16 percent in 2024, and down from 79 percent in 1990 (Figure 1).

These figures cover only children receiving foster care, adoption assistance and guardianship payments; prevention or kinship navigator caseloads are excluded but are comparatively small. If included, they would push foster care’s share lower still.

The foster care caseload continues its decline, driven largely by eroding Title IV-E eligibility.

This is the result of a lookback date that ties eligibility to the now-defunct Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program (AFDC) income and asset limits as they existed in 1996, without adjustment for inflation.

The Title IV-E guardianship caseload increased slightly by just under 1,000 children, continuing a long trend. The notable new development is adoption.

The Title IV-E adoption assistance caseload declined by about 5,500 children in 2024. That’s the first drop in the history of the program.

It reflects a straightforward dynamic: adoptions from foster care have fallen alongside the foster care population itself, from 50,717 in 2023 to 47,335 in 2024.

Two Eligibility Rates, Moving in Opposite Directions

The Title IV-E foster care eligibility rate (also sometimes referred to as the penetration rate) dropped from 35.82 percent in FY 2023 to 32.94 percent in FY 2024.

That drop of just under two percentage points is an 8 percent decline in a single year.

Meanwhile, the adoption assistance eligibility rate rose from 86.75 percent to 87.65 percent.

That’s for a very specific reason: 2024 marked the completion of the Fostering Connections phase-out of income eligibility criteria for adoption assistance.

Initiated in 2008, that phase-out expanded eligibility incrementally each year, starting with the oldest children and ending with the youngest. It is now fully in effect.

Where the Money Goes

The proportion of maintenance payments devoted to foster care also declined slightly, from 28 percent in 2023 to 27 percent in 2024 (Figure 2).

However, the proportion of total IV-E claims devoted to foster care increased slightly, from 53 percent to 54 percent, likely because administrative costs, which are higher in foster care than in other program components, continued growing as a share of total claims.

The pattern is consistent with prior years: foster care is shrinking as a share of who the program serves, but its administrative footprint keeps it anchored in the spending numbers.

This is what drives the “Entitlement to What?” dynamic inherent in Title IV-E.

What the 2024 Data Tell Us

Together, the caseload and spending data describe a program whose transformation went from reasonable projection to demonstrable fact.

Title IV-E now primarily subsidizes permanent placements and funds state administrative infrastructure, with foster care a shrinking portion of both caseload and federal dollars spent.

This is drift by design; without any deliberate policy decision, the focus of our field’s largest financing stream shifted significantly, largely without public debate.

This is not suggestive of inappropriate claims inconsistent with the law, or an unexpected loophole.

Over decades, incremental changes emerged from the underlying policy design.

What child welfare financing should focus on is a question no expenditure data can answer. But the shifts those data point to make the question impossible to ignore.

From the Wonk Briefing Room

Last week we unpacked key findings from the latest expenditure data for the 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act.

Wonk premium members are getting resources that dig deeper into those driving factors, and what leaders can do about them now and in future policy deliberations.

Most recently, Uma Ahluwalia’s brief identified three operational barriers to deploying evidence-based interventions, and a framework for leaders to move on them.

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.

Wonkatizer

Older Youth Policy On the Move in Congress

What Happened

Policy proposals for older youth in foster care are percolating across the Capitol.

On May 19 the U.S. House unanimously passed H.R. 7432, the Fostering the Future Act. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) also released a related discussion draft.

What it Means

Last amended as part of the Family First Prevention Services Act, the older youth-focused Chafee Program supports young people during and after transition from foster care.

The House bill combines six committee-passed bills that make bipartisan changes to Chafee targeting housing, education, and workforce preparation.

The discussion draft would also address Chafee reforms, including last-mile policy delivery concerns about the actual deployment of education and training vouchers.

Why it Matters

The advancement of bipartisan proposals maintains momentum on older youth policy, a priority for First Lady Melania Trump.

None of these bills will materially change the financial picture of Chafee, but incremental change can cultivate champions in a Congress with many retiring ones.

What to Watch

The process of finalizing details between Congressional chambers.

While the Senate could simply take up the House-passed bill, Senators often seek ways to emphasize their priorities.

A discussion draft is a common Congressional vehicle for floating reform ideas and gathering input to refine them before formally introducing it as a bill.

That Senator Grassley released one stakes a claim in shaping any final legislative product. That makes sense given his long-standing role as an issue champion.

This also offers an opening to engage Senator Grassley’s office with ideas for that proposal that could in turn shape what emerges.

Reconciling to Reconciliation

What Happened

Amid partisan opposition and differences within the GOP, Congress recessed without advancing a partisan proposal to fund the Department of Homeland Security via budget reconciliation.

Why it Matters

We’ve recently highlighted the ongoing negotiations to finalize this last aspect of unresolved funding for the current fiscal year.

That bill would not directly touch funding for broader child and family programs. But it matters for the timing of a potential effort that would.

House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-TX) continues to float the prospect of a third reconciliation bill, which would target alleged safety net fraud in closing a Pentagon budget gap from the Iran War.

Cuts to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) were originally part of discussions for reconciliation last year.

Changes to those programs, Medicaid, and more could be on the table.

What to Watch

The timing of DHS funding, which will in turn determine remaining time for advancing a partisan reconciliation bill.

Ongoing talks with Iran and the related spending rate will also drive budget urgency.

The closer midterm elections loom, the harder it will be to advance any partisan reconciliation effort that could complicate campaigns.

The conversation on last year’s Medicaid cuts and any future ones will come following new projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

Factoring in implementation of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, CBO suggests that from 2026-2036, Medicaid enrollment will drop by 9 million.

That includes 3 million fewer covered children, a 9 percent decline.

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.

Child and family policy is full of “everybody knows” problems.

Individually rational decisions can create policy outcomes nobody argues for, because knowing what to fix doesn’t mean knowing how to fix it.

Even the most senior decision makers depend upon and work to shape other leaders’ decisions; laws, regulations, investments, service provision, advocacy, and more.

Often the decisions we want other leaders to make can seem obvious to us.

Not because they’re simple, but because we’re missing the constraints they’re under and the tensions they’re balancing. Where you sit is where you stand.

Moving beyond that changes what we see, making a deeper kind of impact possible.

JooYeun Chang has a uniquely cross-cutting perspective on what shapes leadership roles across the child and family policy sector because she’s held so many of them.

She led at the federal level, running the Children’s Bureau and the Administration for Children and Families in the Obama and Biden Administrations, respectively.

As a state leader she ran Michigan’s child welfare agency.

She’s led across philanthropy, at Casey Family Programs, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and now as Managing Director at the Aviv Foundation.

And her formation came out of advocacy at the Children’s Defense Fund, with the career shaping mentorship that comes from the inimitable MaryLee Allen.

We sat down to talk about why financing is central to policy, how to understand what shapes decisions you care about influencing, and the future of child welfare policy.

If you’ve wondered what it will take for our field to do something at the scale of the Family First Prevention Services Act again, this is for you.

Bolder Horizon Fellowship Shoutout

In addition to running Child Welfare Wonk, I also founded a child and family policy nonprofit called Bolder Horizon, focused on incubating what comes next.

We just launched the engine of that work, a new Emerging Policy Leaders Fellowship.

Child and family policy frameworks built for another era are failing to meet the crises of ours. Do you or someone you know have bold ideas about how to replace them?

We’re accepting applications from now through May 25 to form our first cohort. Learn more at bolderhorizon.org/fellowships.

It’s no secret that child welfare financing is structurally stuck, with the federal share of investment fading and long prioritizing foster care over prevention.

The Family First Prevention Services Act embodies a clear ambition to address both of those factors, with a major expansion of open-ended funding to prevent foster care.

We now have five years of expenditure data from Family First. This week’s Deep Dive analyzes them, surfacing signals of bigger barriers to implementation than a time lag.

And for our premium members, we will have forthcoming complementary guidance on what you can actually do about these barriers in your work.

Our newsletter maps what matters in child and family policy, and our premium resources unpack what you can do about it.

Our latest premium brief from Sarah Catherine Williams is a great example, showing how leaders in our field can thoughtfully approach generative AI.

To go premium, individuals can sign up here, or get the team membership rate here.

Let’s get after it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

Family First, Light on Families

Persistently high administrative claiming and low caseloads point to real rate limits in Family First.

By Zach Laris, MPH

The Family First Prevention Services Act emerged from an architectural ambition; reorienting federal child welfare financing toward prevention.

Eight years after enactment, the first five years of expenditure data are in.

Across that span, the program supported 53,055 cases and spent nearly 60 cents of every dollar on administration.

Family First faces an implementation lag like any major federal financing change.

Beneath the typical growing pains, though, are signals of a structural pattern that raise hard questions about how Family First’s policy design shapes what it can deliver.

FFPSA At A Glance

Federal child welfare financing was primarily built around foster care.

Title IV-E of the Social Security Act is the core open-ended federal child welfare funding stream.

Even today, thirty years into the structural tension of income eligibility limits that don’t adjust for inflation, foster care is over half of Title IV-E spending.

For decades, federal financing focused on foster care and permanency through adoption and guardianship assistance.

Preventing foster required cobbling together capped federal funds and state resources.

The prevention that Title IV-E could fund was constrained by cost-neutrality requirements in waivers, or complex administrative financing with low match rates.

Family First aimed to fundamentally change that.

Enacted in 2018, it opened up Title IV-E for evidence-based prevention services.

Open-ended federal financing could support families on the edge of foster care entry through home visiting, mental health, and substance use treatment services.

The key change relative to foster care was prevention would have no income limit.

That meant no structural cap on what states could eventually claim beyond their ability to put up matching funds.

The theory was that the money would not just fund prevention, but increasingly emphasize it structurally.

That’s what happened with adoption assistance after ending the federal income test.

Looking at the latest data for FY 2024, that is not yet happening for prevention.

Prevention services were two percent of the $9.6B in federal spending, and prevention spending actually decreased nearly eight percent.

A caveat on that decrease; these ACF expenditure data are “as reported”.

An early signal is usually the grant “awards” that show up in HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) data.

For FY 2020 through FY 2023, expenditure and TAGGS awards data are very close, but for FY 2024 the difference between the two is 5 percent of reported expenditures.

Since claims are adjustable for eight quarters, it’s possible FY 2024 may rise over time with retroactive claims to catch up from delays or administrative barriers.

Let’s Run the Numbers

Thirty-one states have claimed funds at some point. Thirty1 did so in FY 2024.

Over five years, Family First prevention spending totaled $858 million, including $462 million in federal resources.

Those dollars supported a documented caseload of just over 53,000 families across the five-year period.

For comparison, Title IV-E foster care served over 665,000 children over that time, and adoption assistance covered over 2.7 million.

In FY 2024, 87 percent of Title IV-E services spending flowed to the highest evidence tier of “well-supported” interventions.

This reflects service array decisions that are rational for each individual decision maker, yet can become inefficient in aggregate.

The law requires half of spending to be on that top category, which serves as a real rate limit on what states can deploy.

Average per-caseload prevention spending was just over $10,000, though that figure masks enormous variability across states.

Sometimes financing changes grow logarithmically; initially slow, eventually exponential. That’s not what the pattern so far points to.

These data signal real structural tensions in the law, and suggest that what gains we see may reflect progression despite those limits, rather than compounding growth.

Why Administrative Claiming Drives Family First

Across five years, nearly 60 percent of Family First spending has gone to administrative claiming.

In FY 2024, the figure was 56 percent nationally, but that number is artificially low for two reasons.

First, Indiana, Nebraska, and Tennessee reported claiming services funding under Family First without claiming administrative funds.

Remove them, and the national average jumps to 68 percent.

Administrative claiming represents more than 90 percent of total computable claims for just under half of all claiming states. Five states claim only administration.

None of this is suggestive of something inappropriate.

Administrative claiming doesn’t mean waste or overhead. It’s federal investment in state capacity, staffing, and infrastructure, which are key for last-mile policy delivery.

And there are real barriers to services claiming that explain some of what’s happening here, which state leaders can easily identify.

But if implementation were progressing, we’d expect the services share to be growing.

Instead, other than early swings, the administrative share has been essentially flat since the program launched.

Caseload Variability Complicates Interpretation

Family First’s five-year caseload totals just over 53,000 families, with 22,809 of them in FY 2024.

That caseload is unevenly distributed, with just two states, Indiana and Michigan, providing half of it. Figure 3 displays states reporting a caseload greater than zero.

The per-caseload figure is where things get stranger.

Average Title IV-E prevention spending per caseload in FY 2024 was $13,951.

That average covers significant variation, including three states with per-caseload spending over $1 million.

Roughly five percent of all Title IV-E prevention spending in FY 2024 was the $17 million that went to seven states with a caseload of zero: CA, CT, HI, MT, NY, RI, and WI.

These are all states that recently began implementation, which means they may be leveraging administrative claiming to prepare for implementation.

These limits also may point not to a lack of serving families, but to structural limits within the law.

Key Structural Tensions

The surface story is a slow-scaling program. These expenditure data signal three distinct structural tensions within Family First beneath that surface story.

The “Prove-It” Problem: Evidence Tiers as Bottleneck

The law requires half of prevention services spending to meet the “well-supported” standard.

States are hitting 87 percent. That rigor is also a rate limit.

Only a handful of all the programs that meet any of the evidence tiers fit in that top category. Heavy concentration there narrows what states can actually deploy.

This also means it may make more sense for leaders to leverage administrative claiming, which doesn’t count toward that spending limit and risk an overage.

If You Can CAP it, You Can Claim it: Administrative Claiming

High admin rates could reflect several things at once.

To start, Title IV-E typically matches administrative claims at a rate of 50 percent and services at a state’s Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) rate.

For Family First, though, services are 50 percent match until rising to FMAP on October 1, 2026.

The rules for Title IV-E administrative claiming provide for a wide range of allowable activities, including case management, case planning, child care, transportation, peer navigation, and more.

The biggest limit to leveraging those is a sufficiently broad Cost Allocation Plan to parcel out expenses across federal financing streams.

It’s also possible that agencies may be delivering broadly-used interventions like motivational interviewing through in-house staff.

Given the equivalent match rate, there wouldn’t be a huge incentive to break it out.

We may also be seeing the use of community eligibility pathways, which leverage Title IV-E prevention financing without bringing families “into” the child welfare system.

What makes that hard to say with certainty is that it doesn’t map neatly to the data.

For example, Connecticut and Indiana are both using that community eligibility approach, but have admin claiming rates of 100% and 0%, respectively.

One possibility for states that have services claims that are relatively higher than administrative claims is the use of contracted service providers.

An added limitation here is that these expenditure data don’t differentiate child-specific and non-child-specific administrative claims.

That matters because a trend in early states has been claiming non-child-specific administrative funds first, then expanding to child-specific ones.

Early in implementation, it may also still be difficult to separate foster care and prevention services administrative claims, which could impact reported trends.

Who’s On First? The Medicaid Overlap and Payor of Last Resort

Family First is also the payor of last resort. That means that when Medicaid could cover something, it has to fully cover what it would first, before Family First kicks in.

That’s atypical; Medicaid is usually the payor of last resort for other programs.

This creates complications, because where Family First could pay for an intervention, it may not be able to. That’s where administrative funds come in again.

Family First administrative funds can pay for the wraparound supports that make an intervention possible, even when Medicaid is paying for the actual service.

Those prevention administration dollars can then cover what Medicaid doesn’t, with things like case management, childcare, peer support, and transportation.

States navigating that boundary carefully may have systematically high admin rates not as a workaround but as a structural consequence of coordination.

That can be pointing at both a bottleneck and an opportunity:

• Bottleneck: Ambiguity and perceived barriers could lead to under-claiming; and

• Opportunity: Since Title IV-E prevention administrative funds can pay for complementary services, there’s a major opportunity to leverage them together.

  • We have more in the works here for current/prospective premium members

Each explanation is plausible. Some are probably operating simultaneously.

Looking Ahead

Near-term, this all points to a practical problem for states: maximizing drawdown and use of available resources within the program’s existing constraints.

We’ll have upcoming analyses for premium members that examine exactly that.

Longer-term, there are harder questions that go beyond implementation mechanics and into policy design.

Evidentiary standards, payor of last resort requirements, and differential friction between administrative and services claiming are questions for those making, shaping, and influencing policy.

Grappling with those serious questions offers the opportunity to find plausible pathways to match the law’s scale trajectory to its original ambitions.

Wonkatizer

Fostering the Future Executive Order at 180 Days

What Happened

The White House Executive Order on Fostering the Future for American Children and Families hit a key milestone of 180 days since its signing, with key deadlines for action.

ACF released a comprehensive 180-day update and announced a new Home for Every Child competitive challenge with $7M in incentives for the top states.

Why it Matters

ACF is marking the Executive Order as both an organizing frame and show of accountability to a priority issue area for First Lady Melania Trump.

What to Watch

How durable these shifts proves to be, since they embody a big bet on policy durability as a function of buy-in.

Deregulation Comes to Child Care

What Happened

On May 11, ACF issued a package of policy changes that together represent a significant de-regulatory shift in federal child care financing and oversight.

Why it Matters

Elliot Haspel has covered multiple connections of child care and child welfare for us.

ACF has already made significant de-regulatory moves impacting child welfare.

Changes to ACF’s child care regulations have a higher likelihood of facing friction, as they cover topics familiar to all parents like health, safety, and staff-to-child ratios.

What to Watch

The package includes both final rules on child care and proposed ones for comment, like Head Start.

Wonks will be watching whether the child care rules face any opposition or legal challenges, and weighing in on Head Start rules until June 11.

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.

Child and family policy has a power problem.

Why is it that issues that reach into the lives of all Americans are so often an afterthought?

Families routinely say these issues really matter, without that translating into sustained political power and impact.

When every family faces caregiving needs that can strain their finances and stability, you’d think policymakers would be relentlessly focused on refining solutions.

It’s not that issues like child care and paid leave are simple. Far from it.

They face significant, legitimate policy differences that require resolving. But that doesn’t happen.

Counter-intuitively, issues that affect everyone can face the biggest obstacles to harnessing and leveraging power to shape policy decisions and outcomes.

Today’s guest focuses his work on that paradox to prioritize policy for families.

Elliot Haspel is a nationally recognized child and family policy expert specializing in child care, and a Senior Fellow at Capita, where he works in their Family Policy Lab.

He’s written multiple books on child care policy, including Raising a Nation: 10 Reasons Every American Has a Stake in Child Care for All and Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It.

He writes the excellent Family Frontier newsletter, and contributes to the Wonk, including on child care and maltreatment prevention, and domestic violence policy.

We talked about what prevents prioritization of family policy issues, how to build and sustain momentum to create change over time, and the deeper power of coalitions.

Rather than easy answers or policy prescriptions, Elliot lays out what it looks like to build the power to make an issue un-ignorable, and what it takes to get there.

Bolder Horizon Fellowship Shoutout

In addition to running Child Welfare Wonk, I also founded a child and family policy nonprofit called Bolder Horizon, focused on incubating what comes next.

We just launched the engine of that work, a new Emerging Policy Leaders Fellowship.

Child and family policy frameworks built for another era are failing to meet the crises of ours. Do you or someone you know have bold ideas about how to replace them?

We’re accepting applications from now through May 25 to form our first cohort. Learn more at bolderhorizon.org/fellowships.

The term child and family policy conjures an image of a coordinated and comprehensive structure of financing and law. What it refers to is a policy patchwork.

Instead of designing policy around families in their actual complexity, it’s designed around the programs intended to serve families.

Each program has its own goals, incentives, target population, and rules, all of which represent policy design choices.

Those choices can often be rational in the context of a single program, yet contradictory in aggregate.

That means we ask families to fit programs, instead of fitting programs to families.

The issue of domestic violence encapsulates this tension.

Separate programs focus on child safety, protecting survivors of intimate partner violence, and child care.

When the same family needs all three, their inconsistencies become unignorable.

In this week’s Deep Dive, child care policy expert and The Family Frontier author Elliot Haspel maps where these programs overlap, and how their contradictory designs can compound harm.

This is how a mother leaving an abusive partner can find that a system meant to protect her may not account for her children, while a system meant to protect her children may read her victimization as neglect.

Relatedly, our latest premium brief from Kimberly Martin unpacks the structural incentives in a topic whose complexity often gets flattened; mandated reporting.

In our latest WonkCast, I spoke with NE child welfare Director Dr. Alyssa Bish.

We talked about state capacity, Family First implementation, and what it takes to turn federal policy into operational reality.

Let’s get into it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

How Policy Compounds the Harm of Domestic Violence

A real risk of fragmentation across disconnected policy systems.

By Elliot Haspel, Guest Contributor

Economic dependency is often what keeps a mother in an abusive home. Affordable child care is often a tool that can help interrupt that dependency.

But our policy architecture doesn’t reflect that logic.

When a family in a domestic violence crisis reaches the point of intervention, it meets three separate systems without fitting neatly within them: CCDF, VAWA, and Title IV-E.

Each was designed around a different slice of a family’s situation.

When all three are involved, the gaps between them can make each system’s intervention harder, not easier.

Child Care as a Safety System

Let’s begin with child care.

Only 1 in 6 eligible families actually receive a subsidy under the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG).

That means the absence of viable child care frequently causes work disruptions and worse: nearly 20% of parents of children under five report being fired as a result of child care challenges, disproportionately concentrated among women and among low-income households.

Chronic financial stress can all too easily lead to chronic relationship stress, and there is a well-established finding that the risk of intimate partner violence (IPV) spikes in such situations.

A lack of child care also hurts mothers’ financial independence, and when mothers lack the means to leave an abusive relationship, they can often become trapped.

Those that do manage to leave may find themselves destitute and returning to their abusers.

As Congress has concluded in the statutory text of VAWA, “Abusers frequently seek to exert financial control over their partners by actively interfering with their ability to work, including ... sabotaging their partners’ child care arrangements.”

The research bears this out.

A recent study found an association between a one standard deviation increase in income eligibility levels for child care subsidy results and a 2.6% decrease in police reports for physical IPV.

This suggests that expanding childcare subsidies to more families with low income can be a promising strategy for preventing IPV among parents with young children.

Two Systems, One Family

When the worst happens and a mother is the victim of IPV and attempts to leave the situation, she and her children encounter two separate policy architectures.

One is built around domestic abuse, governed mainly by the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).

The other is built around child welfare, governed mainly by Title IV-E of the Social Security Act.

VAWA is primarily concerned with the woman herself: the provisions help with short-term housing, legal aid, and the like.

The words “child care” appear only three times in the 336-page VAWA legislation.

Title IV-E focuses more on the child. As the statute states, “a child’s health and safety must be the paramount consideration when any decision is made regarding a child in the Nation’s child welfare system.”

In practice, the tension between these systems can classify her experience of violence as harm to her child, risking allegations of neglect and foster care entry.

Although there has been a push in recent decades to maximize prevention and family reunification, there remains in place a doctrine of “failure to protect.”

Depending on state laws, this can lead to states taking custody of children exposed to domestic violence.

Nationally, domestic violence is listed as a contributing factor for 10 percent of foster care entries, with significant state variability.

Because those factors are not mutually exclusive, it’s both a likely undercount of the presence of violence in the home and an over-count of entries exclusively from it.

This policy tension simultaneously treats abused mothers as a victim and perpetrator of harm.

One piece of legislation attempts to bridge the parent/child divide: the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, which funds domestic violence shelters and related services, including child care.

However, the Act receives meager funding -- in FY26, just $245 million (by contrast, CCDBG gets nearly $9 billion, which is significant underfunding relative to demonstrated need).

What Alignment Requires

An abused mother having her child taken from her because a lack of child care led her to rely on an abusive partner is the kind of outcome that points to a deeper policy misalignment.

Protecting children from harm and protecting women from intimate partner violence are policy goals that seem obvious in isolation, but can conflict when they optimize in divergent directions.

Individual caseworkers cannot resolve that tension when they must follow contradictory rules from statutes anchoring on different parts of the family unit and with different organizing logics.

CCDBG, VAWA, and Title IV-E are all fulfilling vital policy functions, but were never designed to work in tandem for a scenario unfortunately common enough to merit a coordinated policy response.

The deeper difficulty is that our policy system looks at each of these crises and the responses to them in isolation rather than at the family as a whole.

That makes it harder right at a moment of crisis.

This is the kind of policy outcome that nobody would defend, yet is persistent enough to be the predictable output absent a redesign.

Expanded child care resources could reduce this precarity through near-term access.

Longer-term, the question for leaders is how to design policy and financing systems that recognize child care, domestic violence, and child welfare as interconnected, rather than responses to mutually exclusive populations of families.

Until then, our policy approach will encode a tension that makes domestic abuse more rather than less challenging, despite an array of laws aimed at the opposite.

From the Wonk Briefing Room

Where the Weekly Wonk gives you a map of the terrain child and family policy faces, our premium resources aim at how to navigate it.

This week’s premium brief from Kimberly Martin looks at the structure underneath debates around mandated reporting.

This debate is often over-simplified into critiques of families and the child welfare system. What’s missing is the role of policy design.

The evidence doesn’t offer a simple fix. Instead, Kimberly provides four pressure points any serious reform effort will have to address, and an honest account of why “mandated supporting” doesn’t resolve them without the infrastructure to back it up.

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

On Our Radar

Child Support Enforcement Leveraging Passports

On May 7th, the U.S. State Department announced it would begin revoking passports for parents with unpaid child support debts.

What it is: This is not new policy, but activation of enforcement of an existing one.

Like much of child and family policy, this authority is part of the 1996 welfare reform law, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.

Why it matters: Equally notable to the enforcement is what it points to.

This coordination is exemplary of the larger strategy of data & tech-driven leveraging of authorities across programs and agencies in service of coordinated goals.

We’ve seen this across immigration policy and accountability controls.

ACF Assistant Secretary Adams also mused on WonkCast about prioritizing federal funds to states that change policy on Social Security survivor benefits.

As AI and other emerging technologies expand the ease of this kind of coordination, it will only increase and become more central to policymaking.

The implications transcend any single policy or administration, and will widen.

What to watch: How far enforcement expands beyond this initial debt threshold.

The initial round of enforcement is beginning with the ~2,700 who owe over $100,000.

A relatively small number of significant debts is less likely to produce sympathetic edge cases.

The Trump Administration indicated plans to expand enforcement to those who owe over $2,500.

It’s worth watching if enforcement widens to that far lower threshold, with its higher probability for administrative errors and unintended consequences

Foster Care Expenditure Data

On May 6th, the Administration for Children and Families dropped the latest data for a key child welfare financing data set.

What it is: The Fiscal Year 2024 expenditure and caseload data for the Title IV-E program.

Why it matters: These figures track spending and children served by federal funds for foster care, adoption assistance, guardianship assistance, and prevention and kinship navigation through the Family First Prevention Services Act.

What’s next: The Wonk team will be digging in for a variety of analyses. If there’s something you’d like to see, drop us a line.

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.

Child welfare agency leaders naturally have to think in constraints and tradeoffs.

Since 2023, Dr. Alyssa Bish has served as Director of the Division of Children and Family Services in the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services.

In that role she leads an agency at the intersection of big-picture vision on prevention and kinship care, and operational reality on financing and accountability.

We talked about how state capacity is the critical factor determining whether federal policy changes like the Family First Prevention Services Act work as designed.

We discussed the way well-intentioned efforts to encode process into policy can lead to bad outcomes with unclear accountability, like undermining kinship care.

She also unpacked why Nebraska was a “quick yes” on ACF’s A Home For Every Child initiative, and how they shifted their approach on Social Security survivor benefits.

Her insights offer actionable takeaways for anyone who cares about shaping current and future child and family policy.

Bolder Horizon Fellowship Shoutout

In addition to running Child Welfare Wonk, I also founded a child and family policy nonprofit called Bolder Horizon, focused on incubating what comes next.

We just launched the engine of that work, a new Emerging Policy Leaders Fellowship.

Child and family policy frameworks built for another era are failing to meet the crises of ours. Do you or someone you know have bold ideas about how to replace them?

We’re accepting applications from now through May 25 to form our first cohort. Learn more at bolderhorizon.org/fellowships.

Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk.

We hear consistently from those working to develop, inform, and advance policy that it feels as though the ground has shifted beneath them.

Trusted tactics that consistently worked before don’t, or they produce less impact than expected.

This week’s Deep Dive from Senior Contributor Doug Steiger unpacks why, setting the stage for an upcoming premium series on ways to upgrade your strategy in response.

Our latest premium brief builds on last week’s exploration by Dr. Michael Cull of where our assumptions outpace evidence in child welfare.

Evidence was also the thread connecting my recent WonkCast with Dr. Jill Berrick, discussing where policy narratives drift from the evidence, and why it matters.

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

Subscribe now

We talk a lot about deeper trends pointing to the limits of current policy and advocacy frameworks, and the emerging next era to which they point.

Through a nonprofit I founded, Bolder Horizon, we’re launching a cross-partisan fellowship for leaders who want to build that next era. Learn more and apply here.

Let’s get into it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

How Advocacy is Evolving

Why what works is changing and what it means for moving child and family policy.

By Doug Steiger, Senior Contributor

Some aspects of policymaking, power, and persuasion are timeless.

Others are a function of their era, reflecting shifts in fundamental political coalitions and communication technology.

A consistent theme we hear from child and family policy advocates is a feeling that the ground has shifted beneath them.

Approaches that worked before don’t, or they produce less impact than expected.

This policy vertigo reflects structural changes in how Washington operates that our field’s strategy hasn’t fully caught up to yet.

This is the first in a three-part series on engaging Congress on child and family policy.

Here we will map what has changed and why it matters for your work.

The next two pieces will focus specifically on how to upgrade your strategies for engaging Congress based on those changes, and will be available exclusively to our premium Wonk Briefing Room members.

The Traditional Pathways Have Eroded

Historically, federal child and family policy has advanced through bipartisan committee work, evidence-based framing, and coalition credibility.

2018’s Family First Prevention Services Act was a key high water mark.

As fellow former Senate Finance Committee staffer Laura Berntsen laid out on WonkCast in March, it reflected significant negotiation and coalition building.

The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program’s 2022 reauthorization grew from Member relationships, advocacy efforts, and committee process, as Ways and Means Subcommittee Ranking Member Danny Davis described on WonkCast in January.

It was more than cosmetic; it doubled MIECHV funding.

Other recent bipartisan child welfare legislation might seem to suggest these pathways still hold.

2024 saw a Title IV-B reauthorization. The ongoing process to reauthorize the Chafee program has Hill momentum and a boost by First Lady Melania Trump.

But those are different in kind rather than degree. They make modest reforms while keeping the core structure and funding intact.

As Zach Laris has highlighted, that’s the tell: these vehicles persist but are increasingly underpowered relative to the problems they target.

That’s a deep challenge and a unique opportunity to leverage what will work.

How Power Changed

A dysfunctional and polarized Congress has not only ceded power to the White House and Supreme Court, but also redistributed it internally.

Where it has moved matters for your strategy.

The Chokepoint Congress

Thin margins used to reward bipartisanship; power flowed to members - especially Senators - willing to cut deals across the aisle

Polarization has inverted that, creating chokepoints.

Small blocs and individual members can block movement, which generates leverage for them and gridlock for everyone else.

We saw this in last year’s reconciliation process The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a partisan vehicle, so what mattered were the fault lines within the Republican caucus, not persuading the other side.

With fewer Senate “gangs” and House moderates, leadership tracks internal coalition dynamics like caucus blocs, White House positioning, and who holds veto power.

That reduces the importance of harmonizing priorities across committee chairs.

An election might result in slightly larger majorities, but polarization appears likely to remain a central feature of Congress for years to come.

That’s especially likely given the latest Supreme Court Voting Rights Act decision, which builds on prior jurisprudence that paves the path for partisan gerrymandering.

Committee Chairs Without a Wheel

Committee chairs retain influence, but rarely drive direction.

Thin margins and less bipartisan dealmaking favor big legislative packages and partisan budget reconciliation over the accretive committee process.

That horse trading, relationship building, and deliberate markup sequence historically moved child and family policy

Committee leaders instead now largely deliver action within containers that leadership has already shaped.

Formal committee process validates decisions made elsewhere, often through opaque internal caucus negotiations that advocates rarely see until positions have hardened.

The Vehicle Determines the Entry Point

The committee-driven bill still exists, but it is no longer the primary pathway for major policy change.

It is increasingly reserved for narrower, technical, or lower-stakes issues.

As Congress passes fewer standalone bills, the ones that do move are larger.

That doesn’t just change the policy content, but how and who gets to shape it.

Major policies are increasingly legislated through:

• Budget reconciliation

• Continuing resolutions

• Omnibus spending packages

• Debt limit negotiations

These vehicles are controlled by leadership, structured around deadlines, and governed by fast track procedures.

This invariably crowds out the deliberate cultivation that child and family policy has historically required.

And because these policy products often emerge from intraparty negotiations, the entry points are narrower and different from what advocates are used to.

This also determines to whom policymakers are responsive.

For example, during last year’s Medicaid reconciliation debates, advocacy constituencies more aligned with Democrats had little input regardless of the merits of their perspective.

What mattered was key constituencies with leverage on marginal decision makers.

That’s why the specific views of hospitals in North Carolina became critical as Tom Tillis moved to opposition, and why GOP-driven Medicaid expansion politics shaped what Senator Josh Hawley needed before he could move.

Changing Media Changes Minds

The channels that once reliably moved policy debates no longer consolidate influence the way they did.

That has real consequences for how advocates reach members, and also what reaches those Members before they hear from advocates.

Policy debates were shaped through core channels of concentrated influence; national media, committee briefings, reports, and formal reports and evaluations by trusted, credible institutions with widespread acknowledgement.

An advocate could reasonably track and influence the inputs shaping a member’s thinking. That’s no longer the case.

Our Information Buffet

Television news is no longer about Walter Cronkite or CNN; sources once trusted across the political spectrum.

Even an ideological mainstream communications channel like Fox News doesn’t consolidate conservative viewers anymore.

Social media platforms, podcasts, and YouTube are now filling that space , and they reach members directly, often before any policy briefing does.

One activist with a video camera can seed an “anti-fraud” narrative that reframes a program before advocates know it’s happening.

For many members, these non-traditional validators now carry more weight than editorial boards or think tanks.

Even when those validators matter, they’re now often downstream of these more niche influencers. That has major implications for messaging and policy strategy.

What Moves Members

Members are influenced by inputs that do not move through formal policy channels and are often not visible to advocates.

A niche media outlet followed by their base can shape their understanding of an issue before any policy briefing does, and outside the view of advocates confused by a sudden turn in their thinking.

Signals from trusted political allies or leadership can reset their position quickly.

Issue salience can shift quickly outside formal policy channels.

Messaging is also fully visible across audiences who share different contexts for what it means and how to “decode” it, meaning communications intended for one group are often interpreted by others.

This also means messaging containment is largely gone

Communications crafted for a progressive audience can receive reframing by conservative media and vice versa.

Language to activate a coalition partner can create resistance with another.

Members can shift position in response to signals that never pass through formal policy channels and aren’t visible to advocates until the damage is done.

What Hasn’t Changed, and What Needs an Upgrade

Although so much has changed, many core advocacy elements still matter.

It’s as important as ever to have strong issue framing that resonates with those making decisions.

Power flows from credible coalitions that can drive what Congress cares about.

Data and direct experience is still central to shaping arguments around policy. Enrolling the alignment of key influential messengers matters more than ever.

Building broad support, working through committees, refining policy through process, and winning floor votes all continue to be necessary steps.

They’re just no longer sufficient on their own.

What has to change is the strategy layered on top. Advocates need a working map of internal power centers.

This means planning your approach not just around committee chairs, but also taking into account caucus blocs, intraparty fault lines, and who holds veto power over the relevant vehicle.

The members worth engaging early are not necessarily the ones with the loudest public profiles.

They’re the ones with strategic leverage over marginal decisions, and their positions can harden quickly and without warning.

Engaging them early and often to build relationships and credibility before the hardening of positions is non-negotiable.

Putting it Into Practice

These dynamics apply differently across parties, requiring a tailored strategy.

Hill Republicans operate with a fragmented coalition with competing power centers, plus the dominant and at times unpredictable influence of President Trump.

Hill Democrats are shaped by constraints rather than control.

As the minority, they struggle to set the agenda, with a base eager for them to show resistance to the President but limited legislative tools for doing so.

Our upcoming premium pieces will map engagement strategies for each, with how you can most effectively engage with decision makers amid these changes.

From the Wonk Briefing Room

Child welfare’s accountability structures rest on a wobbly assumption: that the key to safety is reliably implementing evidence-based interventions.

This week’s premium brief by Dr. Michael Cull is a companion to his recent Weekly Wonk piece, going into why research on other high stakes safety fields says they key is cultures that learn faster than they fail.

This piece lays out questions you can use for discussions with your team as you work on policy and practice issues related to safety when uncertainty table stakes.

Wonk Briefing Room members get pieces like this every week — analytical depth calibrated for leaders who need to make decisions, not just understand issues.

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.

Wonkatizer

Bipartisan Chafee Bills Advance

The U.S. House Ways and Means Committee held a full committee markup, advancing six bipartisan bills to modify the Chafee program for older youth.

The bills emphasize housing, education, and workforce preparation.

While cost neutral, they would expand what the program can cover and how it supports young people.

Why it Matters

The unanimous votes follow the recent boost by First Lady Melania Trump, maintaining momentum for the bills.

Unanimous votes position the legislation as non-controversial and widely supported, opening pathways for inclusion in larger legislation or the suspension calendar.

What to Watch

The weekly floor calendar for House votes and how the Senate responds.

There’s also the “yes, and” support from policymakers and advocates backing reforms while staking a claim in longer-term talks tied to funding and policy structure.

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.

In child welfare, powerful narratives cite evidence to drive discussion of major issues.

Evidence can add rigor and authority to arguments over how to craft policy.

How we talk about policy can undermine the rigor and authority it rests upon.

This isn’t an academic exercise; it underpins ongoing debates as varied as whether neglect is just poverty, and whether to abolish the child welfare system.

To dig into that relationship between evidence and policy debate, I sat down with a leading researcher in this space, Dr. Jill Berrick.

She’s a Distinguished Professor and the Zellerbach Family Foundation Professor of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley.

Her book The Impossible Imperative brings to life the tensions and tradeoffs inherent in child welfare, from front-line work with families to the policy that shapes it.

Our conversation unpacks where policy narratives drift from the evidence, how that changes what’s possible, and why it matters for what’s next in child and family policy.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

Last week we explored where child welfare’s data gaps make it hard to see what’s happening in practice.

That surfaces a harder question: what does the evidence actually say works?

First-time contributor and child safety data expert Michael Cull takes that on in our Deep Dive.

He maps where the evidence is thin, why it got that way, and what it means for the leaders and policymakers building accountability structures on top of it.

His next piece will be available to our premium members, going into what leaders can actually do about it.

For our latest WonkCast I sat down with ACF Assistant Secretary Alex Adams to get his read on the big bet he’s making on what makes policy durable as he hits 6 months.

Let’s get into it.

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Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.


Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

Where We Go Off Course When We Assume Child Welfare Should Fly

Leading without certainty when our assumptions outpace the evidence.

By Michael Cull, PhD, MSN

Protecting children is not the responsibility of any single agency or profession.

It’s the product of decisions made across healthcare, housing, behavioral health, courts, education and social services, all operating under shared expectations of what systems can prevent and control.

Yet, when tragedies occur, accountability often collapses onto child welfare alone.

This reinforces a quiet assumption: that we largely know what works, and when things go wrong, it’s because we failed to apply that knowledge correctly.

This assumption is so central that it shapes policy, leadership accountability, and public critique. When tragedies occur, the search for error begins immediately.

But what if that assumption is wrong?

What if child welfare systems are being held accountable to a standard of certainty that the underlying evidence base cannot support?

This is the first in a two-part series.

Part I makes the diagnostic case — that child welfare’s accountability structures are built on a misreading of what the evidence can realistically support in complex, real-world conditions.

Part II examines what leading under those conditions actually requires of leaders.

What The Evidence Says

Start with substance use disorders (SUD). Roughly 19 million children in the U.S. live with at least one parent or caregiver with a SUD.

That statistic alone explains why treatment has become such a central feature of child welfare practice and policy.

When a parent is engaged in treatment, systems typically interpret that fact as proxy evidence that we’re addressing risk. The evidence does not support that.

Access to treatment matters, though in many communities it remains uneven or inadequate.

Even when treatment is available and engagement is high, the evidence on its effectiveness is limited.

Outcomes are modest and highly variable even under optimal conditions– stable housing, financial resources, social support, and consistent access to care.

A meta-analysis of 118 clinical trials found that the two best-supported drugs for alcohol use disorder require treating between 11 and 18 patients, respectively, to prevent one person from returning to any drinking at all.

That’s the ceiling under ideal conditions, without the other factors families face in child welfare.

Substance use disorders are widely understood to be chronic, recurring, and remitting. Relapse is not an exception but part of the clinical reality.

In practice, treatment offers population-level probabilities, not assurances, and those probabilities were generated under conditions that differ substantially from the lives of families involved with child welfare.

When One Gap Becomes Many

The evidence around the effectiveness of substance use disorder treatment is a window into a broader problem: the limits of the evidence underlying much of what child welfare systems rely on to ensure child safety.

The families child welfare serves aren’t navigating a single condition.

They’re navigating combinations — substance use, trauma, poverty, housing instability, domestic violence, mental health needs— that interact with each other and compound over time, often across generations.

Each added layer compounds uncertainty and further thins the evidence base guiding intervention (Mao, 2024).

It is neither ethical nor feasible to randomize families with complex needs into control groups that limit treatments.

Much of what child welfare is asked to do cannot be tested under the kinds of controlled conditions that produce certainty in other fields.

What we have instead are evaluations of discrete interventions in isolation.

Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT), for example, is effective for trauma. SSRIs reduce anxiety and depression.

Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) can improve parenting.

No study evaluates these treatments in combination, with families in the child welfare system, over the timeframes that actually matter for children’s lives.

Yet child welfare policy and practice are often built around the expectation that interventions can reliably resolve safety concerns in isolation, even when they struggle to produce durable outcomes even under the best circumstances.

This points to an uncomfortable truth: we do not have strong evidence for much of what child welfare systems are asked to do at scale, even though we act as if we do.

The Gaps in Our Flight Plan

The field’s response has been to standardize what it can, including through practice models and standardized assessment tools.

But the evidence there isn’t more reassuring.

Signs of Safety is perhaps the most widely implemented child welfare practice framework in the world.

One of the most rigorous program rating systems in the country, the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare, lists it as “Not Rated,” meaning it lacks the body of research required for even a preliminary evaluation.

The assessment tools structuring child welfare’s most consequential decisions were designed to support professional judgment, not replace it.

They were never designed to produce objective truth about risk (Lyons, 2022).

Like airlines and surgical teams, child welfare is being asked to predict low base-rate events that are as unacceptable as they are rare, like serious harm and fatalities.

We ask child welfare to do this across long timeframes, amid multiple chronic conditions.

That is an extraordinarily difficult prediction problem even with a strong evidence base. Child welfare doesn’t have one.

Mind The Accountability Gap

Child welfare leaders are asked to lead systems whose accountability structures are built around expectations that treatment science and social intervention cannot reliably support.

No system operating amid chronic conditions, layered adversity, and low-base-rate risk can guarantee that nothing ever goes wrong.

Even in highly controlled, well-resourced environments like hospitals, where risks like hospital-acquired infections are addressed over shorter timeframes, outcomes remain probabilistic rather than guaranteed.

Child welfare operates under far longer timelines, across multiple systems, and with far less control.

When the implicit expectation is perfection, the consequences are predictable.

Leaders manage to the expectation rather than the reality. Errors get concealed rather than examined.

Accountability becomes about finding who failed rather than understanding what conditions made failure more likely.

And institutional learning — the only mechanism that actually improves outcomes over time — becomes nearly impossible.

The accountability gap isn’t just unfair to leaders. It makes the system less safe.

None of this reduces the urgency of protecting children. It clarifies what it actually takes to protect them.

To Err is Human: A Workforce Already Past Its Limit

Even the modest gains evidence-based approaches can deliver depend on fidelity; the degree to which interventions are delivered as designed and tested.

The effect sizes reported in clinical trials are a ceiling of impact, generated under conditions of close supervision, adequate staffing, and practitioner competence.

When those conditions do not hold, the ceiling drops.

Over half of the U.S. population now lives in a mental health professional shortage area. 93 percent of behavioral health workers report having experienced burnout, with nearly half saying workforce shortages have prompted them to consider leaving the field entirely.

Annual departure rates in child welfare are estimated at 20 to 40 percent, with the average worker remaining in their position less than two years.

This is not a pipeline problem alone.

It is a structural condition of the systems being asked to deliver evidence-based practice.

The evidence base is already thin. The workforce needed to implement what evidence exists is in crisis.

The ceiling on what child welfare can reliably deliver is lower than the accountability structures governing it acknowledge — and it is getting lower.

The gap between what child welfare is expected to deliver and what the evidence can support isn’t a leadership problem.

It’s a structural one that we can actually do something about.

Until the field names it as such, the accountability structures governing child welfare will continue to make the system less capable of doing the very things they’re designed to ensure.

This is neither a dead-end nor destiny. There are shifts leaders can make that move the needle.

In Part II, we examine what leading under these conditions actually requires — and what it looks like when leaders build organizations capable of learning faster than they fail.

From the Wonk Briefing Room

Where the Weekly Wonk gives you a map of the terrain child and family policy faces, our premium resources aim at how to navigate it.

Last week, we held a member-only virtual roundtable, digging into the opportunities and challenges the Home for Every Child initiative pose for your work.

We also released a premium brief from Kurt Heisler, digging into what would create meaningful change in child welfare technology policy.

It’s an actionable guide to why prior federal efforts to modernize child welfare IT have stalled, and how to understand the new ACF Child Welfare Technology Incubator.

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

Wonkatizer

ACF Maps Prevention Push

What Happened

ACF has launched an interactive map and resource hub providing public access to Title IV-E Prevention Plans.

The tool shows whether each state’s plan is approved, under review, or not yet submitted, and which evidence-based services from the Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse it includes.

ACF is also signaling an expedited review process for states that adopt substantially similar language from an already-approved plan.Why it Matters

Why it Matters

Other sectors like Medicaid have long had public transparency for state plans and modifications to them.

This gives insight into patterns and trends, and makes it easier to adopt approved approaches. States can replicate them without starting from scratch.

The expedited review signal is consequential, and could accelerate uptake.

What to Watch

Whether the expedited review process produces measurably faster approvals in practice, and whether it accelerates adoption.

Of course, the real underlying rate limit is written into the law. ACF action can only go so far, so this also points to a longer-term deliberation as part of financing reform.

–

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.

ACF Assistant Secretary Alex Adams has moved quickly in six months on the job.

He’s rapidly advanced initiatives, reshaped oversight processes, and pushed on the edges of what’s permissible and possible in federal child welfare policy.

Our conversation dug into the tradeoffs underneath his decisions, exploring how they’ve shaped his actual understanding and use of federal power across ACF’s:

• Rollout of the A Home for Every Child initiative;

• Incentives, and looming pressure, for states over Social Security survivor benefits;

• Push to expand the reach of the Family First Prevention Services Act; and more.

At the center of his strategy is a big bet that policy durability comes not from encoding it into regulation but making it too hard to unwind through buy-in.

This is essential for understanding what the first six months signal for what’s ahead.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

Our field is navigating volatile terrain with incomplete maps.

That’s the problem our premium Wonk Intelligence Quarterly is built to solve.

This is forward guidance and what to do about it for leaders making real decisions under live conditions of constraint, not analysis for its own sake.

Our premium members received the full WIQ last week; our Deep Dive this week is an excerpt. To read it in full, join the Wonk Briefing Room.

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Our latest WonkCast was our first AMA — your questions on navigating policy and political reality, decisions under constraints, and what child welfare is actually for.

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Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

We Don’t Know Ourselves:
Child Welfare’s Knowledge Crisis

How solvable data, analysis, and measurement constraints limit policy decision quality.

By: Laura Radel, Senior Contributor

Every year, hundreds of thousands of children enter the child welfare system.

Caseworkers make decisions that will shape the rest of their lives: whether to remove a child, where to place them, when to reunite a family.

Those decisions depend on what the field knows.Yet the field does not know enough.

Decades of research, federal investment, and policy reform have not resolved the field’s most basic questions: what works, for whom, and under what conditions.

Many of the same debates that dominated child welfare thirty years ago still dominate it today.

At the heart of the field’s paralysis is a three-part knowledge problem:

1. A data infrastructure problem. Our core data sets do not tell us what we need to know and are in many aspects unreliable.

2. An interpretation problem. We do not make good use of the data we have and frequently misinterpret its signals.

3. An invisibility problem. Important subpopulations are excluded from our data, and inadequately reflected in our program and policy decisions as a result.

The Data Infrastructure Problem

The child welfare system’s national data derives primarily from three administrative systems:

• The National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) collects child-level data on every maltreatment report.

• The Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) covers every child in foster care or placed for adoption by a public child welfare agency.

• The National Youth in Transition Database (NYTD) surveys foster youth at 17 and follows a subset at 19 and 21.

NCANDS and AFCARS have been collecting data since the 1990s; NYTD since 2010.

These systems were built primarily to record measurable events: maltreatment investigations, foster care placements, and certain attributes of the events and the children and families involved.

They are most reliable for documenting what happened.

They are considerably less reliable for explaining why – the circumstances, decisions, and family factors that drove those events.

In addition, despite the Administration for Children and Families’ standardization efforts, reporting differences across states persist, and data are unavailable until more than a year after the period they describe.

AFCARS was updated in 2020, but many new or revised fields have not yet been reported publicly, and promised longitudinal functionality has not yet been fully realized.

These consequences show up in specific ways.

Neglect Definitions

Most children come to the attention of the child welfare system because of neglect. Yet state definitions of neglect vary widely, and circumstances deemed neglect may be very different from one another, calling for different responses.

Maltreatment Deaths

NCANDS captures only a portion of child deaths related to maltreatment, limiting our ability to analyze patterns and prevent future harm to other children.

Re-Entry

Tracking re-entry to foster care, particularly from adoption and guardianship placements, has been a perennial problem, hampering efforts to support children and families through post-permanency challenges.

Family Circumstances

Across both NCANDS and AFCARS, fields relating to the problems that led to the maltreatment report or foster care placement are used inconsistently by states.

For instance, with respect to substance use as a reason a child is removed and enters foster care, AFCARS estimates range from under 10 percent to over 60 percent.

Knowledgeable professionals do not believe this variation primarily represents actual differences in prevalence of that magnitude, but rather differences in reporting practices.

The Interpretation Problem

Unreliable data is only part of the problem. The field also misreads what it has.

Three patterns stand out.

National Averages Mask State-Level Variation

National-level analysis frequently obscures trends that differ substantially among states.

A line that may look flat nationally may obscure big gains in some places and losses in others. Or a statistic that may look small nationally may be large in some places.

For instance, TANF spending represents 8 percent of states’ federal child welfare funding nationally, but in three states it was more than half of such funding, while in other states it was zero.

Similarly, knowing that about half of terminations of parental rights occur within the Adoption and Safe Families Act timeline masks the fact that states ranged from 16 percent to nearly 90 percent.

Recognizing the range of variation can point to insights about the policy and practice drivers of differences and the differential impacts of policy changes for states.

For advocates, funders, and other national organizations who care about federal policy, these insights also point to explanatory factors driving the small-p politics policy lives by.

Published Reports Make Trend Analysis Difficult

Published analyses such as the annual AFCARS, Child Maltreatment and Child Welfare Outcomes Reports make it difficult to track progress on measures over time at the state level.

For instance, in the new AFCARS Dashboard, one can view a state’s figures for only a single year at a time and only a few national trends (like the total number of children in foster care) can be viewed over a several year period.

Looking at just a few years at a time we also overlook long-term trends, such as the transformation of title IV-E from what began primarily as a foster care program but now consists largely of children receiving adoption subsidies.

A lot of work goes into these reports, they sit atop a gold mine of data, and yet paradoxically their format makes inevitable a simplification that obscures signal.

Cross-Sectional Analysis Has Dominated Where Longitudinal Analysis is Needed

What matters for policy is a stable picture of trends over time. Longitudinal analysis provides that, but we have very little of it.

It’s much harder to make sustainable policy decisions with point-in-time data. That’s what we’re drowning in, since most of our collections are cross-sectional analyses.

Until the updated AFCARS 2020 (which began reporting data for 2023), tracking children longitudinally in federal foster care data was difficult.

Cross-sectional analysis has significant limitations, and as far back as 2004 the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care recommended outcomes be tracked using longitudinal rather than cross-sectional data.

Effective financing and policy decisions rely on an understanding of the most common experience, with guardrails to manage the edge cases.

Longitudinal analysis looks at a system’s flow, better capturing the trendline experience of the typical child, which is key for shaping policy.

Cross-sectional analysis looks at a system’s stock, what’s present right now.

That means cross-sectional analysis over-represents children in foster care for long periods, distorting our picture of the typical experience.

Conversely, it also obscures what we understand about exits from care; exit cohorts in such data are weighted to children who have short lengths of stay.

The field is only now beginning to have the data infrastructure to do it. It will also need interpretive infrastructure to make meaning from that and shape policy and financing.

The Invisibility Problem

Unreliable data and misinterpretation are problems with what the field collects.

The invisibility problem is different.

Entire populations and system actors are simply absent from the data, so policy decisions impacting them are made without them, leading to policy drift.

Four blind spots stand out.

Children Screened Out Before Investigation

NCANDS does not collect information on children whose maltreatment reports are screened out prior to investigation. This is not a small population, or an irrelevant one.

These 2 million children annually represent about half of all children referred to child protective services agencies each year.

Research shows that many families who are screened out are very much like those classified as higher risk, and many will be reported again.

Children in “Hidden” Foster Care

Many children – estimated at between 100,000 and 300,000 children per year – are diverted from formal foster care, typically to relative caregivers who may not receive financial or social support.

In addition, reunification services are generally not provided to parents in these circumstances.

These children are very like others who are formally placed in relative foster care but are invisible in the data of states that use this practice.

Foster care rates are declining. Does a shift to diverted “hidden” foster care explain part of that story? We can’t answer that question because we don’t have data on it.

Courts’ Roles

Child welfare outcomes depend not only on agencies’ actions, but also on the timeliness and quality of court decisions.

Yet little information on courts’ activities is available in federal child welfare data, despite their central role to decisions on placements and much more.

That means we’re lacking insight into a critical dependence that shapes accountability and oversight in child welfare financing and policy.

Foster Parents

While some information is collected about foster parents, this information is insufficient to understand the movement of children in and out of foster homes, or to calculate measures such as the Home for Every Child ratio that is currently an ACF priority.

At minimum, the collection of an identifier for the foster home would be necessary to track how many foster homes are active during the reporting period, how many children spent time in the home, and the patterns of children’s movement in and out of the home.

Consequences and Resolution

The lack of reliable data, the misinterpretation of the data we do collect, and the omission of some populations combine to prevent an adequate understanding of the activities and outcomes of the child welfare system.

The data are not well-suited for ensuring accountability or continuous improvement.

The data infrastructure problem is a federal responsibility.

ACF controls the data systems, sets the definitions, and determines what gets reported.

Leaders with federal relationships — whether through advocacy, oversight, or technical assistance — could emphasize accelerated implementation of AFCARS 2020’s longitudinal capacity and for expanding what the systems are designed to capture.

The architecture of federal data shapes what every state can know.

The interpretation problem is solvable now, with existing data.

State leaders and their philanthropic partners do not need to wait for better federal systems to begin analyzing trends longitudinally, disaggregating national findings, and interrogating what their own data actually shows.

The gap here is analytical capacity and will, not data availability. That’s a large reason for Child Welfare Wonk’s creation and approach.

The invisibility problem requires deliberate investment.

Screened-out families, hidden foster care, court behavior – none of these will become visible through administrative data reform alone.

Federal and state leaders will need to expand what the systems are designed to capture.

Philanthropic funders can support the research needed to document these populations in the interim, but the long-term solution is structural, not supplemental.

None of these are academic problems. They’re solvable constraints on the quality of policy decisions and how we track and refine them over time.

Leaders who understand that have a clearer sense of where to push.

Wonkatizer

Bipartisan Older Youth Roundtable Features FLOTUS

What Happened

First Lady Melania Trump made a rare Capitol Hill appearance Wednesday for a bipartisan roundtable with House Ways and Means Committee members and young people who have experienced foster care.

Discussions anchored to six legislative proposals that would modify the Chafee program for older youth, emphasizing housing, education, and workforce preparation.

While cost neutral, the proposals would expand what the program can cover and how it supports young people.

Why it Matters

A FLOTUS appearance like this is anything but pro forma. It generates momentum in an otherwise complex political environment.

Even without new funding or significant structural policy reforms, that momentum offers an opening to cultivate new champions and create conditions for future change.

What to Watch

Whether a consolidated legislative package comes together that can garner momentum. Watch for signals of negotiation and potential markup timing.

–

That’s it for this week, Wonks!

Z

Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible

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

This week, we’re doing something different.

We asked for your questions about what you’re grappling with right now, and some key themes emerged:

• Navigating the relationship between policy and political reality;

• Making decisions under real constraints; and

• Identifying and asserting what a system like child welfare is actually for.

Joining me to pose your questions is WonkCast team member Ivory Bennett.

Ivory sits in on and edits each week’s episode, and she also hosts her own podcast, the excellent Inner Views.

She not only prompts what you want to hear but brings her own perspective from time in foster care and as a foster and adoptive parent.

Your questions and the deeper tensions they point to sharpened my thinking, and I’m sure they’ll do the same for yours. If you have more, add them here for next time.

In addition, there’s a sneak preview excerpt of our forthcoming Wonk Intelligence Quarterly, which will drop for all premium members on Friday, April 17th.

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

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk.

This week’s Deep Dive is from yours truly, unpacking an unpopular yet persistent policy; parents relinquishing custody of children to access behavioral health services.

It’s an issue worth understanding in its own right, and as emblematic of how policy drift by design can reliably produce outcomes for which nobody argues.

Premium members are reading Laura Radel’s latest analysis, with state-by-state insights on what’s driving shifts in the number of children in care and available placements for them, and why it matters for strategy on A Home for Every Child.

Our latest WonkCast features Jeff Hild, SVP for Advocacy at the American Academy of Pediatrics and former head of ACF, with great insights on what policymakers and advocates each wish the other knew.

As an alum of the policy team he now leads, I enjoyed getting to sit down with him and hear how he thinks about policy, advocacy, and strategy.

Let’s get into it.

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.

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Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

Mental Health’s Shadow Ticket: When the Cost of Care is Custody

When everyone decries a persistent policy outcome, look for drift by design.

By Zach Laris, MPH, Wonk Founder & President

Pediatric mental health presents a persistent “everybody knows” policy problem.

The need for quality care continues to rise. Yet availability remains consistently constrained, especially for high acuity intensive services for kids in crisis.

A shadow ticket for services has existed for decades, despite lacking defenders.

When things get desperate enough, parents with no other options can relinquish their children to child welfare. This is despite not having abused or neglected them.

Relinquishment unlocks Medicaid-funded services. This is custody for care.

If you ask child welfare leaders, policymakers, service providers, front-line case workers, advocates, or families, they all agree it’s a lamentable last resort.

Yet it persists. A GAO report first flagged it as a national problem in 2003.

Recently, The Imprint launched an investigative series on it, anchored in new survey data and interviews with families.

This policy breakdown is worth seeing clearly, and so is the gap to which it points.

A policy doesn’t persist despite broad and strong opposition unless it’s what a system is designed to produce, even if unintentionally. Here’s how this one became inevitable.

All Aboard

No family’s first thought when facing a child’s mental health crisis is to turn to the child welfare system. They encounter a predictable pattern that drives them there:

• A child’s serious behavioral health needs progress beyond their capacity;

• Even with private coverage, available treatment doesn’t work, or is insufficient;

• Residential and intensive outpatient options are unavailable geographically, financially, or both;

• Crisis deepens, often reaching a point where safety can become a concern.

Parents find themselves talking to the child welfare system because no one else seems to have a ticket out of their situation.

The system offers one, but at the cost of custody.

In some jurisdictions, parents have to accept a charge of neglect or abandonment. In others, a voluntary agreement allows no charge of wrongdoing.

Once the system holds formal legal responsibility for the child, new options emerge.

Charting the Course

This practice is prevalent enough to show up as an explanatory factor for foster care entries.

A 2025 ASPE analysis estimated that from 2017 to 2019, this practice accounted for roughly 5 percent of foster care entries nationally, or 25,000 children.

State variation is significant, ranging from likely explaining less than 1 percent to nearly one-fifth of entries.

The Imprint has collected data from 21 states and DC, finding that over half of children in these arrangements return home.

Those who remain in care are less likely to achieve permanence than children who enter care for other reasons.

Nobody defends this on the merits. But when a system produces an outcome this reliably, you can be sure it’s a design feature.

Drift by Design

In 2021, a quarter of all children had a diagnosis for a mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder.

This creates pressures on the treatment system across income and insurance status.

Theoretically, private insurance covers behavioral health services.

In practice, a quarter of children’s mental health facilities are for-profit providers often unlikely to accept anything but cash.

Others operate at or near capacity with long wait times.

Privately insured, middle-income families hit these same walls.

Their coverage can’t offer what state custody often can. This emerges from the confluence of several policy realities, each seemingly innocuous.

Our health financing and treatment system defaults to optionality and flexibility, emphasizing coverage without guaranteeing access.

The intent is matching cost and coverage to a family’s choice and budget, even if the reality of rising costs complicate that.

Public coverage aims to buffer below an income threshold, but often has gaps.

The place where guarantees do emerge is within state obligations and responsibilities.

When the state takes parental responsibility, commensurate expectations of care reasonably follow.

The legal responsibilities also come with pressures and requirements on the state to secure access where any other arrangement other than personal wealth hits a wall.

Most children who enter care are categorically eligible for Medicaid, and it covers around 99 percent of those in care.

Medicaid is also a foundation of all U.S. behavioral health financing.

These threads synthesize into an uncomfortable reality; crisis-level mental health often requires private wealth or custody-obligated care financing.

This is also incredibly inefficient. By the time families choose this option, public resources finance it in the most costly way imaginable.

Structural reductions to federal Medicaid financing under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will only further compound these pressures.

Nobody chose this in a vote. Nobody advocated for this. But it’s what we designed for over time, and it will persist without a structural redesign.

Designing Differently

It would be easy if this policy problem had a villain, but drift like this almost never does. Structural incentives and inertia reinforce it.

Changing them will take more than condemnation. Intentional design takes tradeoffs.

When evaluating policy options, the risks, costs, and benefits seem clear. But this can obscure that the status quo is also a choice with its own risks, costs, and benefits.

The uncomfortable reality is that this isn’t the “least bad” option until we craft a policy; this is our policy, and will remain until it has an equally inevitable replacement.

The question for leaders and policymakers is whether there is a politically viable alternative: a shift in children’s behavioral health financing broad and cross-partisan enough to move.

Coming up with something different will require grappling with significant tensions and trade-offs beyond the understandable frustration such a breakdown generates:

• How to build and sustain a treatment system that can meet demand with quality;

• What the workforce to meet these needs would look like, and how to produce it;

• How to craft policy so public and private financing secure access affordably;

• What it would look like to create a backstop to ensure access without accelerating costs;

• Where to balance obligations for access, so care unlocks without custody;

• How Medicaid could kick in sooner, at lower cost, to avoid relinquishment;

Until then, this is the policy we have, and what it demands shouldn’t surprise us.

From the Wonk Briefing Room

Every Friday, members of our premium community, the Wonk Briefing Room, get our latest Wonk premium brief.

Where the Weekly Wonk gives you a map of the terrain child and family policy faces, our premium resources aim at how to navigate it.

This week’s brief is the third installment of Laura Radel’s series on ACF’s Home for Every Child initiative.

For state leaders, service providers, advocates, and others, it offers state-by-state data to kick off strategy and planning conversations.

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

From Our Radar to Yours

Reconciliation Redux?

What’s Happening

While far from guaranteed, the possibility is rising for another partisan reconciliation bill financed through cuts to health and human services programs.

Senate GOP leadership is looking at expediting a budget reconciliation bill this month, to end the ongoing 58-day shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

There is also discussion of a subsequent partisan reconciliation bill on restrictions to voter registration and expanded accountability controls in safety net programs.

A bipartisan path to reopening DHS broke down over intractable differences in talks on reforms to place limits on and accountability on ICE agents.

Senate Republican leaders are eyeing reconciliation to sidestep that issue. That could potentially move on an expedited timeline through the Senate as soon as this month.

Doing so comes with its own challenges.

While warming to the idea, House Republicans previously rejected this pathway for not also including the House-passed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.

The possibility of an additional reconciliation bill could defuse that opposition.

Why it Matters

Calls for additional partisan reconciliation touching on safety net programs have been percolating since earlier this year.

This would be on top of federal Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Policy discussions over alleged fraud and safety net programs, including ACF funding restrictions, have impacted programs including:

• Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)

• Social Services Block Grant (SSBG)

• Child Care Development Fund (CCDF)

Cuts to TANF and SSBG were originally part of discussions for reconciliation last year. Changes to those programs, Medicaid, and more could be on the table.

What to Watch

Reconciliation is never a safe bet. Watch for signal, not noise.

First to track is what is in the potential reconciliation instructions to reopen DHS.

That’s likely to be narrowly targeted to DHS funding unless there are insurmountable calls for spending offsets or other policy changes.

How that goes would be an early bellwether for future reconciliation efforts.

Timing is also everything; The closer midterm elections loom, the harder it will be to advance any partisan reconciliation effort that could complicate campaigns.

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.

I’m Zach Laris, and this is WonkCast—where we spotlight the people, ideas, and tensions shaping child and family policy.

The constraints leaders operate under vary by the type of institution they lead. That in turn shapes what they see as possible for the future of child and family policy.

Advocates and policymakers can talk past each other when they don’t see the constraints that their counterparts are operating within.

Today’s guest has a unique vantage point on that tension, as a senior child advocacy leader who previously ran the Administration for Children and Families.

Jeff Hild is the Senior Vice President for Advocacy at the American Academy of Pediatrics. Before that, he led ACF at the end of the Biden Administration.

He offers essential and actionable insights if you’re an advocate or policy expert wanting to better influence institutional processes.

He also unpacks what shapes how advocates work in a way critical to understand for anyone making decisions about policy, funding, or research.

He has an especially sharp insight into how the very design of administrative processes determines who can participate in them, shaping who gets heard.

As an AAP alum myself, it was a particular treat to get to sit down with Jeff and hear how his public sector leadership is informing their advocacy strategy.

Sponsorship Shoutout

Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.