Our debates often focus on what the statute says, how the program works, or what the top line data suggest. What we measure typically emphasizes the experiences of adults.

What gets lost is the fundamentally different way children experience the child welfare system; in time that passes more slowly, during disorienting experiences with strangers and disrupted family relationships.

That surfaces an uncomfortable question; how would we design policy differently if we defined its success by the actual impact it has on the children experiencing it?

This seemingly simple premise is an organizing principle across the work of today’s guest. Aly Rau Brodsky is a leader whose state and national safety net leadership changed what she sees as a serious policy idea.

She’s currently the Executive Vice President And Chief Strategy Officer at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREEOPP). In that role she also founded and leads the Center for Safe and Stable Futures.

Before that, she was Deputy Secretary of the Department of Children and Family Services and also Louisiana Works, where she oversaw the One Door to Work initiative.

We talked about why she sees the administrative design of policy as being equally important to its architecture, how she thinks about child-centric development of policy, and the way clarity creates capacity to scale a policy vision.

This one sharpened a lot of my thinking around the intersection of federal and state policy, and I know it will for yours too.

🎙️ We’re Hiring: WonkCast Production Assistants

As we produce more conversations like this, we’re expanding the team behind the microphone.

We’re looking for WonkCast Production Assistants to help transform conversations with the people shaping child and family policy into thoughtful, publish-ready episodes.

If that sounds like your kind of work, we’d love to hear from you. Email maria@childwelfarewonk.com with a brief introduction and any relevant experience.

Federal grant programs operate on their own esoteric language and serious standards.

They also have their own equivalent of pulling an all-nighter to submit a paper on time.

The federal fiscal year starts October 1, aligning with neither the calendar nor most state budgets.

Surely that places a premium on lots of lead time for coordinating investment?

Alas no, as you’ll see in Laura Radel’s newest Deep Dive, the second in her three-part look at Children’s Bureau discretionary grantmaking.

Her analysis points to a growing trend that you surely feel if your work has any touch point with those funds; like the proverbial all-nighter to wrap up the semester, these grant awards are increasingly piling up to the final weeks of the fiscal year.

That, in turn, has ripple effects that include:

• reduced predictability;

• less time for grantees to develop quality proposals and partnerships to execute them; and

• compression of the federal review and decision-making process.

On this week’s WonkCast, I sat down with one of the leading thinkers on child welfare financing policy, Dennis Blazey.

Over his 24 years as Ohio’s child welfare budget and fiscal officer and subsequent consulting career, he has shaped your work whether you know him or not.

A key takeaway; don’t sleep on the humble “bed day”, which may sound like a wonky foster care measurement but is his go-to strategic leverage point for financing prevention.

That also pairs well with the latest brief our premium members are reading, in which child welfare and Medicaid expert Uma Ahluwalia unpacks what gets in the way of using Family First and Medicaid together, and how to shift it from barrier to opportunity.

Let’s get after it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

Wait For It: The Children’s Bureau Grant Calendar Is Moving Toward September

A three-year review shows a sharp change in when discretionary awards are being made—and FY 2026 may follow the same pattern.

By Laura Radel, Senior Contributor

Federal grants do not only matter because of how much money is awarded or what it supports.

Timing matters too.

Grant recipients need time to hire, contract, establish partnerships, and begin work.

Federal agencies need enough runway to publish opportunities, review applications, resolve questions, and obligate funds before the fiscal year closes.

The Children’s Bureau’s award calendar has changed considerably over the past three years.

This analysis examines that shift, what may be driving it, and what the unfinished FY 2026 calendar signals as the September 30 deadline approaches.

It is the second in a three-part series on Children’s Bureau discretionary grantmaking.

Part I examined the changing composition of awards. Part III will map where grant funding is going geographically.

What Grants Are Included in This Analysis?

This analysis examines discretionary grants and cooperative agreements awarded by the Children’s Bureau in fiscal years 2023 through 2025.

The data come from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System, or TAGGS.

Cooperative agreements are a type of grant that involves more direct cooperation between the federal agency and the recipient than is possible with a regular grant.

The Children’s Bureau often uses cooperative agreements for technical-assistance activities and knowledge-building Quality Improvement Centers.

Only awards with positive dollar amounts in a fiscal year are included.

Entries with zero or negative amounts—often reflecting adjustments, cancellations, or revisions to prior awards—were excluded.

The Grant Calendar Shifted

The timing of Children’s Bureau awards changed substantially over the three-year period.

Table 1 shows when awards were made in each fiscal year and how many were new awards rather than continuations.

FY 2023 followed a relatively typical pattern.

A small number of awards were made during the first three quarters, while 87 percent of awards were spread across the 4th quarter. Nearly half were awarded in September, the last month of the fiscal year.

In FY 2024, the final year of a presidential administration, awards were made earlier.

Nearly 60 percent were issued before the fourth quarter, most of them continuations of existing awards.

The remaining awards trickled out over the fourth quarter with just 22 percent of awards made in September.

The number of new awards also fell sharply, from 38 in FY 2023 to 15 in FY 2024.

From a Fourth-Quarter Rush to a September Pileup

FY 2025 was markedly different: all 94 awards were made in September.

TAGGS data shows only one new award with a positive balance.

There were some awards listed in the data with zero dollar amounts, but those were excluded from this analysis.

The zero-dollar records may reflect awards made at the end of the fiscal year for which funding had not yet appeared in TAGGS.

That possibility makes the count of new FY 2025 awards less certain than the positive-dollar data alone suggest.

The timing pattern is clearer.

What had previously been a fourth-quarter-heavy process became concentrated entirely in the final month of the fiscal year.

FY 2026 Is Running Out of Runway

The FY 2026 grant calendar is again compressed. As of July 22, TAGGS showed no positive awards for the fiscal year, just several negative and zero dollar awards.

Three grant announcements have closed without awards (yet), eight were still open with applications due in August, and three have been forecast but as of this writing had not been published.

They may yet be published, but the proposal writing and review processes will necessarily be tight.

Funds lapse if awards are not made by September 30.

Together, the pending announcements covered kinship navigation, tribal courts, substance use, adoption, prevention, data systems, and other child welfare priorities.

A complete list of announced and forecast FY 2026 funding opportunities appears in the appendix.

That leaves little time for applications to be submitted, reviewed, and awarded before September 30, when the fiscal year ends and unobligated funds may lapse.

The pattern resembles FY 2025, when all 94 positive-dollar awards were recorded in September.

The late schedule does not necessarily mean the awards will not be made.

But it does mean that the review of grants will be rushed on a compressed schedule and there will be little time to negotiate any issues with applicants before grants are awarded.

It also increases the likelihood of another year in which grant decisions are concentrated in the final weeks of the fiscal year and may initially appear in federal data as zero-dollar or incomplete records.

Also unclear is whether more than usual political or other considerations will go into awards.

Typically grants are awarded to those applicants whose review scores are highest, with occasional exceptions to award to a high scoring (but not absolute top scoring) proposal that ensures reasonable geographic distribution and that an appropriate representation of high priority issues are covered (for instance when multiple priority topics are included in a single grant announcement).

What the Calendar Signals

Late awards are not necessarily lost awards.

The Children’s Bureau can still obligate funding through September 30, and federal data may take time to reflect the final form of awards made near the deadline.

But an increasingly back-loaded calendar changes how the grant process functions.

It gives applicants less predictability and less time to prepare quality proposals. It compresses federal review and decision-making.

And it leaves less room to resolve problems before unobligated funding lapses at the end of the fiscal year.

The key question for FY 2026 is therefore not simply whether the Children’s Bureau makes the awards.

It is whether another year of September-heavy grantmaking is becoming the new operating pattern.

Part III of this series will turn from what is funded and when awards are made to where the grants are going geographically.

Appendix: FY 2026 Children’s Bureau Funding Opportunities

From the Wonk Briefing Room

Splitting the Check: Who Pays When Child Welfare and Medicaid are Both at the Table?

BY UMA AHLUWALHIA, MSW, MHA

Every Friday, members of our premium community — the Wonk Briefing Room — get our latest brief. Where the Weekly Wonk maps the terrain, our premium resources are about how to navigate it.

This week, Uma Ahluwalia goes inside one of the most consequential financing puzzles in prevention policy: why Family First’s promise keeps stalling at the seam between Title IV-E and Medicaid.

We’ve all been there. You’re out at a meal with friends or colleagues, having a wonderful time when the check arrives. What do you do?

The most operationally smooth approach is an even split; clean, simple, and fast.

But often there’s resistance, whether it’s the colleague with a more restrictive expense policy, or that friend who ‘totally didn’t even eat any mozzarella sticks!”

At that point, everything moves at the speed of the person coordinating and spreading the costs appropriately. That’s what’s often happening with Family First and Medicaid.

Uma Ahluwalia’s expertise spans both child welfare and Medicaid, making her well positioned to explore the opportunity at their crossroads.

She lays out four structural barriers and gives leaders a sharper way to diagnose where their own system is quietly absorbing costs it could be claiming.

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.

Further Reading and Listening:

• Family First, Light on Families by Zach Laris

• Family First and the Limits of Policy First Reform by Lynne Tiede

• Is Family First Delivering on Its Promise? by Zach Laris

• WonkCast #19 An Insider View on Family First with Laura Bernsten

Wonkatizer

Reconciliation 3.0, Meet the Senate Stall

What Happened

After their own party had shut down the floor and effectively shut down business for days, House Republican leaders moved a budget resolution unlocking a third party-line reconciliation bill, “Reconciliation 3.0.”

The roughly $95 billion budget resolution centers on a Pentagon funding boost tied to the war with Iran, with $60 billion for Armed Services and $15 billion for Intelligence.

The bill would also provide $12 billion in relief to farmers facing rising fertilizer prices, largely resulting from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz resulting from the war.

The bill also has up to $10 billion for the SAVE America Act’s voter-ID provisions.

Don’t expect a steady march to enactment, though; Senate Majority Leader John Thune has signaled he won’t take up the House blueprint until the chamber resolves the September 30 government funding fight.

Why it Matters

This Senate stall pushes any reconciliation bill toward the post-election lame duck, the brief session before the new Congress is seated, if it moves at all.

That’s Senior Contributor Doug Steiger’s recent analysis playing out in real time; the fault line to watch is less about partisan differences and more about structural misalignment within the GOP right now.

What matters goes beyond the horse race. For child and family programs, the central question is whether any potential bill would use spending cuts to offset the new funds, which could mean more safety net cuts.

A slip to the lame duck expands rather than erases that exposure, by circumventing the political cost of touching safety-net programs.

What to Watch

Whether reconciliation survives to the lame duck at all will be a function of whether Congress can fund the government beyond September and how the midterms play out.

Also key to watch is the $12 billion in farm aid tucked into the House resolution.

Part of Senate GOP leadership’s reticence to revisit reconciliation is that this provision would open up a new front for simple-majority SNAP amendments aimed at reversing cuts to the food assistance program last year.

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.

Financing is the foundation of policy reform. Today’s guest thinks our conversations about it need to get more entrepreneurial, starting with a focus on “bed days”.

For 24 years, Dennis Blazey was the Budget & Fiscal Officer for the Office of Children and Family Services at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

He was integrated into the program office, developing and managing the budgets for Ohio’s child welfare, child care, social services, and adult protective services programs.

Whether you’ve met him or not, his ideas have shaped your conversations about child welfare financing policy; from his central role shaping the Title IV-E waiver program to his impact on state and federal discussions since retiring in 2007.

What stood out most is how his perspective on financing policy is fundamentally about visionary leadership.

Rather than asking what federal funding allows, he urges state leaders to experiment based on their vision for impact, without waiting for permission to innovate.

We talked about the limits of incentives, what he sees as the enemy of child welfare reform, and why the “bed day” is central to his prevention financing approach.

If the uncertainty and fiscal pressures of this moment seem to be impeding your space to think creatively about deeper reform, you won’t want to miss this.

Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk.

Last week we zoomed out, with Wonk Senior Contributor Doug Steiger walking through what the fraught politics of funding this fall mean for child and family policy.

This week, our Deep Dive zooms in, on discretionary grants at the Children’s Bureau.

Looking at three years of public data, Wonk Senior Contributor Laura Radel surfaces the discretion administrations can exercise on discretionary spending.

Spending related to kinship care and prevention declined the most, reflecting both changes in appropriations and programmatic decisions beyond those changes.

Discretion goes beyond a mere technical exercise, providing leeway to shape policy into a defined agenda. That matters because it’s taking on greater significance.

You can see it in the big bet ACF Assistant Secretary Adams has made, using incentives, including leveraging discretionary funds for competitive grant funding, to encourage states to voluntarily lock in on administration priorities.

For this week’s WonkCast, I sat down with renowned child welfare financing expert Don Winstead for a wide-ranging discussion on what actually shapes policy behavior.

Let’s get into it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

What Children’s Bureau Grantmaking Reveals About Federal Priorities

The agency has broad discretion over a small but strategically important pool of child welfare funding. A three-year review shows how it has been used.

By Laura Radel, Senior Contributor

Discretionary grants are where federal priorities become visible.

Unlike entitlement and formula funding, these awards give the Children’s Bureau meaningful control over what kinds of activities receive support—from direct services and tribal capacity building to technical assistance and national initiatives.

That makes the composition of the grant portfolio worth watching.

This analysis examines Children’s Bureau discretionary grants and cooperative agreements from fiscal years 2023 through 2025.

It looks at how much funding was awarded, how it was distributed across grant types, and what shaped the changing mix.

It is the first in a three-part series on Children’s Bureau grantmaking.

Part II will examine when awards are being made and the increasingly compressed federal grant calendar. Part III will map where the funding is going geographically.

Why This Small Pool of Money Matters

The Children’s Bureau distributes funding through three basic mechanisms.

Entitlement grants reimburse states for eligible spending according to matching rates set in the law.

Formula grants distribute funds using statutory formulas often based on a state’s share of the nation’s children or low-income children.

Discretionary grants work differently.

They are awarded through competition, with eligible applicants submitting proposals to carry out activities addressing priorities identified by Congress or the Children’s Bureau.

As the name suggests, discretionary grants are those over which the Children’s Bureau has most control.

Some are used to build knowledge and develop evidence in a particular area, while others aim to direct resources towards communities with a particular need and at a sub-state level.

They can also catalyze work on an administration’s priorities.

Because the agency has greater control over how discretionary funds are targeted, these grants can reveal changing federal priorities.

What We Counted

This analysis examines discretionary grants and cooperative agreements awarded by the Children’s Bureau in fiscal years 2023 through 2025.

The data come from the Department of Health and Human Services grants database, Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS).

Cooperative agreements are a type of grant that involves more direct cooperation between the federal agency and the recipient than is possible with a regular grant.

The Children’s Bureau often uses cooperative agreements for technical assistance activities and knowledge-building Quality Improvement Centers.

Only awards with positive dollar amounts in a fiscal year are included.

Entries with zero or negative amounts —often reflecting adjustments, cancellations, or revisions to prior awards—were excluded . Because several of these programs also support formula grants and other activities, the totals reported here do not represent the full amount appropriated to each program.

The Portfolio Got Smaller

The number of Children’s Bureau discretionary grants and cooperative agreements varied over the three-year period, while total funding declined steadily.

The agency made 101 positive-dollar awards in FY 2023, 86 in FY 2024, and 94 in 2025.

Total funding declined from $93.5 million in FY 2023 to $84.2 million in FY 2024, and $80.1 million in FY 2025—a 14 percent decline over three years.

Awards range widely in size. In FY 2025 the smallest award was less than $100,000 under the Tribal Court Improvement Program, while the largest was nearly $11,000,000 for AdoptUSKids, the national adoption photolisting service.

Technical assistance grants or cooperative agreements each generally ranged from $2 million and $5 million, while service grants were more typically between $200,000 and $750,000.

Figure 1 displays the dollar amounts of the awards in the following topical categories:

• Technical Assistance (TA) Centers and national initiatives.

  • This category includes national TA Centers such as the National Center for Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention, the Child Welfare Workforce Institute, and the National Child Welfare Capacity Building Center for the Courts, as well as national initiatives including AdoptUSKids and the National Electronic Interstate Compact Enterprise.

• Quality Improvement Centers.

  • These grants support organizations that test and evaluate service models on priority child welfare topics, often through partnerships with multiple subgrantees.

• Tribal Capacity Building Grants.

  • This category includes the Tribal Court Improvement Program grants and other awards to tribes focused on tribal child welfare, such as the Indian Child Welfare Act.

• Regional Partnership Grants.

  • These grants address parental substance use and co-occurring disorders. Tribal RPG awards are included in the tribal category above.

• Service Grants, Primarily on Prevention and Kinship Care Topics.

  • This category includes direct service grants focused primarily on prevention and kinship care.

  • The two topics are combined because grant titles did not always allow them to be separated reliably.

Figure 1 shows a clear shift away from prevention and kinship care.

Compared with FY 2023, funding for those grants was lower in FYs 2024 and 2025 while funding for grants to tribal entities increased somewhat.

Other grant categories remained roughly the same over the time span.

Where the Money Moved

Figures 2 and 3 show how the distribution of awards changed across those five categories.

Figure 2 shows each category’s share of the number of awards, while Figure 3 shows its share of total funding. Key takeaways here are:

TA Centers and National Grants accounted for a relatively small and stable share of the number of awards—between 10 to 12 percent each year.

However, because these awards are each relatively large, they represented the biggest share of funds, ranging from 42 and 49 percent of total dollars.

The clearest shift was in prevention and kinship care service grants.

Between FY 2023 and FY 2025 their share declined from 51 percent to 33 percent of all awards and from to 34 percent to 19 percent of total funding.

As discussed further below, part of this decline reflects changes in appropriations for the programs that support these grants.

It may also reflect the timing of multiyear grant cycles, since the number and mix of awards in any year depend partly on when earlier grants end and funding becomes available for new competitions.

Why the Mix Changed

Technical assistance and other national initiatives now make up nearly half of Children’s Bureau discretionary grant funding. Their share grew partly because funding for prevention and kinship care service grants declined.

Changes in appropriations help explain some of that shift:

Funding Decreases

• Funding for Kinship Navigator Grants decreased from $20 million in FY 2023 to $10 million in each of FYs 2024 and 2025.

• The discretionary portion of the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program (only some of which goes to the grants described here) decreased from $87 million in FY 2023 to $73 million in each of FYs 2024 and 2025.

• The CAPTA Discretionary Grants Program decreased from $38 million in FY 2024 to $36 million in each of FYs 2024 and 2025.

Funding Increases

• The Child Welfare Research, Demonstration and Training Program increased from $19 million in FY 2023 to $22 million in each of FYs 2024 and 2025.

• The Adoption Opportunities Program increased from $51 million in FY 2023 to $53 million in each of FYs 2024 and 2025.

Level Funding

• Regional Partnership Grants remained stable at $20 million per year.

• The Community Based Child Abuse Prevention Program was level at $71 million.

Appropriations are only part of the story.

Many discretionary grants last three to five years, so the number and mix of awards in any one year are shaped by decisions made several years earlier.

New competitions generally depend on either additional appropriations or the expiration of existing grants that frees money for new awards.

That helps explain why FYs 2024 and 2025 produced far fewer new awards than FY 2023.

What The Portfolio Signals

No single year of discretionary grantmaking provides a clean statement of federal priorities.

Appropriations, multiyear grant cycles, and the expiration of earlier awards all shape what money is available and when.

But the three-year pattern still matters.

The Children’s Bureau’s discretionary portfolio became smaller, while a greater share of the remaining funding flowed through relatively large technical-assistance centers and national initiatives.

At the same time, prevention and kinship care service grants accounted for a smaller share of both awards and dollars.

That does not necessarily reflect a single policy decision. It does show how funding mechanics can change the practical balance between building national infrastructure and financing services in communities.

Part II of this series will examine another dimension of the portfolio: when the awards are being made.

Part III will look at where they are going.

From the Wonk Briefing Room

When the Clock Runs Out

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.

Parental incarceration can lead to child welfare involvement even in the absence of abuse or neglect, especially when the incarcerated parent is a mother.

This week’s brief from Kimberly Martin, exploring the structural tension that exists between the criminal justice and child welfare systems.

It would be easy to turn this into a story with a villain. But instead, her brief unpacks what can happen when two public systems each pursue their own legitimate objectives, but without a design or timeline that accounts for their counterpart.

For anyone working reunification, permanency, or the criminal-legal interface, it maps where the gap actually opens and how to get conversations started that bridge it.

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.

Wonkatizer

Reconciliation, The Threequel

What Happened

House Republican leaders unveiled a framework for a third party-line reconciliation bill — “Reconciliation 3.0” — which the House Budget Committee marked up last Thursday.

The roughly $95 billion budget resolution centers on a Pentagon funding boost tied to the war with Iran, with $60 billion for Armed Services and $15 billion for Intelligence.

The bill would also provide $12 billion in relief to farmers facing rising fertilizer prices, largely resulting from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz resulting from the war.

The bill also has up to $10 billion for the SAVE America Act’s voter-ID provisions.

Why it Matters

Current deliberations suggest not offsetting the Pentagon funding the White House has requested. That is likely to encounter pushback from fiscal conservatives, though.

Offsets would raise the possibility of health and human services funding reductions.

What to Watch

Whether the framework survives its own coalition.​ The same intra-GOP factors thatare complicating end-of-year legislating will be present here.

The real thing to watch is timing. The closer this gets to the midterms, the harder it will be to secure support with a razor-thing majority in Congress.

ACF Formally Rescinds “Designated Placement” Rule

What Happened

Last week, ACF formally rescinded the Biden-era regulation Designated Placement Requirements Under Titles IV-E and IV-B for LGBTQI+ Children.

That rule had established requirements for child welfare agencies to provide “safe and appropriate” placements for LGBTQI+ children in foster care.

Why it Matters

While a court injunction had blocked the rule’s implementation and its repeal was expected, it was one of the centerpiece regulations of the Biden Administration.

What to Watch

Administration messaging has connected the rescission to its A Home for Every Child initiative.

While the net policy effect of repealing a never-implemented rule is de minimus, It’s worth watching whether further actions are forthcoming that do change policy related to LGBTQ children and families.

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.

Have you ever wondered why states may balk at seemingly obvious opportunities to draw down federal funding?

When Congress is so divided and polarized that renaming a post office is no small feat, it can feel like passing legislation is the biggest step.

But in federal financing, what matters more than the size, scope, or ambition of legislative change is the gap between existing capacity and what’s possible under new authority.

As one of the leading national thinkers on child welfare financing policy, today’s guest spends a lot of time exploring that gap.

Don Winstead has over four decades of state and federal experience in health and human services policy, including as Deputy Secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Services Policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under George W. Bush.

We discussed why a minor administrative change can shift spending as much as a landmark law, where our models for how financing changes incentives are inaccurate, and what the Title IV-E waivers can teach us about future child welfare financing reforms.

If you want to understand what actually matters for determining whether a new policy changes practice and makes an impact, this conversation is for you.

The factors that most shape what’s possible in child and family policy are often seemingly unrelated to it; political dynamics, media cycles, relationships, and more.

Political conflict is a great example. It drives what’s possible, opening and closing windows in which policy can move. Tracking and understanding it is essential.

A risk appears when that read gets sharpest. Seeing that conflict clearly makes it seem like there are ways to redirect it more favorably to move a policy priority.

Back when I was an advocate, I had a great mentor and boss whose uncanny read on the politics and psychology of power made him adept at avoiding that risk.

I’m reminded this week of his go-to refrain when discussing the possibility of entanglement in a conflict between rival policymakers:

It’s a trite truism that Republicans and Democrats can barely agree the sky is blue. The emerging dynamic that requires a fresh look is growing fissures within the GOP.

We’ve previously covered how intra-party policy differences created complications as far back as last summer’s reconciliation legislation. This is different.

Our Deep Dive this week unpacks where differences previously percolating in private are now driving open confrontation, flagging what to watch as you assess the risk of policy uncertainty and volatility for your priorities, and emerging openings for impact.

Our most recent premium brief looks at another key area of policy; the role of philanthropic investment in financing the infrastructure that makes advocacy possible.

For our latest WonkCast, I got to talk with Here Now Health founder Michelle Turner about Medicaid, child welfare, and what she’s seen firsthand of“custody for care”.

Let’s get into it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

Why Congress Won’t Do Much Before November

The core driver for Congress for the next four months is the election.

By Douglas Steiger, Senior Contributor

Every election year, Congress slows down. This year it may stop altogether.

The difference isn’t the election, but the diverging incentives it creates for Senate Republicans and President Trump, compounded by pressure on Democratic leadership to take a firm line.

Senate Republicans want November to be a referendum on the One Big Beautiful Bill’s tax cuts and on Democrats’ ascendant left flank.

President Trump wants tighter voting rules before Election Day, even if it means jettisoning the filibuster.

Those are not compatible asks, yet every must-pass bill this fall has to route around both of them.

Democrats, by contrast, have clear and significant internal divisions on strategy, but aligned incentives to not be a barrier to routine must-pass funding if it doesn’t contain extraneous policies.

That makes them a more predictable negotiating partner.

Republicans and the President are not predictable partners with each other, which is the core factor that should be driving your risk assessment this fall.

Why Can’t Congress Do Its Job?

The back half of an election year is always hard for legislating: partisan tension spikes and members would rather be back home campaigning than on the Hill.

Anything not finished by the August recess usually waits for the lame duck session…or dies.

The would-be third reconciliation bill is the first casualty, and it’s dying for familiar reasons. It was supposed to focus on defense spending, but Republicans can’t agree on what’s in it.

Key Senate Republicans are withholding support because it would fund defense items outside of the traditional appropriations process, while moderates are concerned by cuts conservatives would demand in exchange.

Different Theories for Winning the November Elections

This leaves the appropriations bills – or at least a CR – as the last major “must do” item before the election.

But the President has a different “must do” priority.

His strategy for winning in November centers on tightening voting rules, particularly through the SAVE America Act. He wants Senate Republicans to end the filibuster to pass it.

The Senate Republican strategy for November is to remind voters of the tax cuts in H.R. 1 and paint Democrats as too far left. They want to keep the filibuster for when they are back in the minority.

House Republicans, notably, don’t have a comparable unified strategy of their own,which is part of why they’re more of a follower in this negotiation thana party to it.

Meanwhile, Congressional Democrats want the election to be about the economy and the perceived corruption of the Trump Administration.

The Democratic base, still furious at the party leadership for failing to check Trump, has already cost incumbents their seats.

Primary losses in New York and Colorado this cycle are the clearest signal of discontent.

That anger points towards Democrats being tough negotiators this fall, which means a lower likelihood of providing crossover votes to pass a CR if Republicans insist on adding things to it without sufficient votes to move it on their own.

To Appropriate or Shutdown?

The appropriations process is already behind schedule.

Last year it was immigration enforcement funds that were the flashpoint in appropriations brinksmanship; this year it appears it will be defense spending

President Trump has requested a 42 percent increase in regular defense appropriations, plus a separate supplemental that includes $67 billion to cover the costs of the war with Iran— a war that nearly three in five Americans express opposing in aggregated polling

Democrats oppose both asks.

As of yet, Senate negotiators have not even agreed on an overall spending topline, largely because Republicans are proposing a much larger increase for defense than for non-defense programs, mirroring the Administration’s request.

The possibility of moving some military spending into a third reconciliation bill has complicated things further.

If that bill does not happen, it puts more pressure on Republicans to secure a large defense increase through appropriations instead.

Also slowing the process is that Congressional Democrats want to kill certain Trump priorities once and for all, like the “weaponization fund,” and the White House ballroom.

Many Republicans privately express a desire to block these projects, but fear the President’s wrath if they do so openly.

An October Surprise?

Usually, election years produce simple CRs that punt issues until November so members can go campaign.

This year’s tangle of defense spending, reconciliation uncertainty, and a President at odds with his own party’s strategy may produce something worse: a shutdown in October.

Democrats’ willingness to force last year’s shutdown over immigration policy, plus the anger inside their own base, suggests they will take a hard line again, further increasing chances of a repeat shutdown.

The President Trump-Senate Republican misalignment compounds the chances of a shutdown further; would the President refuse to sign a CR if it doesn’t include his election rules demands?

His abrupt refusal to sign the bipartisan housing bill unless the SAVE America Act passed first suggests he might.

Beyond October, expect a post-election negotiation on spending, with its own shutdown risk.

If Democrats do well in November, they will be emboldened to insist on changes that Trump will fight. If they don’t do well, their base will be furious and push them to fight him harder anyway.

Getting the President’s support for a post-election deal will likely mean putting his personal priorities ike the ballroom on the table, which Democrats will resist.

And his active buy-in will likely be necessary to get House Republicans to support any deal. Some open questions worth tracking for your own work:

Will retiring or defeated Senators, especially Republicans, act as free agents and form one of the Senate’s bipartisan dealmaking blocs to close things out?

Will 2028 Democratic presidential hopefuls stake out positions against compromise before the primary race even formally starts?

None of this resolves cleanly; expect persistent volatility.

What Decision Makers Need to Know

Even if a shutdown is looming, what gets into the current appropriations bills this summer and fall matters for the prospect of your priorities.

Whenever the window opens for a deal, that will be the raw material to build it; nothing substantial gets added from scratch later.

If your priority is not an appropriations item, it may still be in play as an add-on to a year-end deal.

Making that happen means lining up champions now, whether your goal is to get something attached or to keep something else off.

The Farm Bill is a live example of this mechanism: if it becomes part of a year-end negotiation, it’s a vehicle for changes to the H.R. 1 SNAP cuts— for those pushing to restore them and those defending them alike.

The vehicle matters regardless of which side is using it.

This is also a good moment for an advanced assessment of your exposure to extended shutdown risk this fall.

If a shutdown would hit key programs you care about, it helps to have a clear way of communicating those stakes in advance and as it happens.

House and Senate Democrats are already planning for a possible majority next year.

If you want a place in those conversations, that window is open now; those who help shape an agenda before power is certain have a far different standing than those who arrive after the election.

Republicans may very well hold one or both chambers. Have a plan for that, too

Smart advocates aren’t waiting to find out which playbook wins. They’re assessing risk and honing strategy now, while the politicians stay focused on November.

From the Wonk Briefing Room

If you work in philanthropy, you’re probably tired of receiving pitches for things that seem to clearly or nearly cross the lobbying line.

If you work in advocacy, you’re probably tired of seeing critical policy work sit seemingly just out of reach, and wondering how you can fund it.

Those are two sides of the same coin that point to a deeper inefficiency in our field.

In our latest premium brief, seasoned chief fundraiser Christine Bork digs into that deeper inefficiency and offers new ways for our field to think about and act on it.

She sees three constraints reinforcing each other to starve the specific infrastructure that makes later legislative wins possible, like policy research timed to live issues, coalitions built before a bill exists, relationships with Hill staff formed years in advance.

Then she maps out what’s actually fundable inside those constraints today, and specific moves you can make that sustain and expand that infrastructure.

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.

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.

Wonkatizer

50 for 50: A Home for Every Child Goes Nationwide

What Happened

Last week, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) announced that all 50 states plus D.C. and Puerto Rico have joined the A Home for Every Child initiative.

Participating states receive streamlined alternate data reporting and oversight in exchange for tracking key data related to the ratio of licensed foster homes to children in care, currently 57 per 100 nationally.

ACF is backing the push with a $7 million Innovation Challenge and a to-be-released monthly public data dashboard tracking each state’s ratio.

Technical instructions released June 17 show the pilot isn’t just the ratio: states must also report four monthly “chaser measures” related to kinship placement rates, use of congregate care, repeat maltreatment, and placement disruption.

Why it Matters

No state has ever hit full CFSR conformity in 25 years of reviews — every state, every cycle, has landed on a PIP.

Universal participation speaks to states’ desire to reduce reporting requirements.

It’s also central to ACF Assistant Secretary Alex Adams’ big bet on buy-in making policy reform more durable than formal regulatory change.

What to Watch

The chaser measures matter are ACF’s answer to the “mirage” problem Laura Radel’s series on A Home For Every Child flagged — that a rising ratio alone can’t tell you whether new homes are stable, well-matched, or just a raw supply number moving in the right direction.

With every state now in, it’s a great opportunity to revisit our four-part series on HFEC by Senior Contributor Laura Radel:

Part 1 (open-access) maps where every state stood on the ratio goal

Part 2 (premium-only) tracks how those ratios moved from 2020 to 2025

Part 3 (premium-only) breaks down what actually drove each state’s change, and

Part 4 (premium-only) models how far each state still has to go to hit 1:1.

That’s it for this week.

Stay sharp, Wonks.

~ Z

Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible

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

Something we’ve been exploring across our work is the issue of custody for care.

This is when children enter foster care not because of abuse or neglect, but because parents have no other way to access behavioral health services for their child.

We’ve previously analyzed how seemingly unrelated and rational policy design decisions combine to make this inevitable, and heard from child welfare agency leaders about it.

Today’s guest has a unique vantage point because she’s encountered this issue as a foster parent and as a telehealth company founder.

Michelle Turner is the founder and CEO of Here Now Health, which provides virtual mental health services for children and young people who experienced foster care.

We discussed the policy barriers that impede access, why there’s still so little collaboration across child health and child welfare policy, and how future health financing policy design could make the custody for care conundrum obsolete.

This conversation surfaces new ways to start thinking about the future of mental health policy for anyone who works in children’s health or child welfare.

Welcome back to the Weekly Wonk, and we hope you had a good July Fourth.

Here at the Wonk we’re fundamentally focused on the strategic capacity of the child and family policy field. It’s the difference between being at the table, and on the menu.

A clear and compelling vision for where to go is essential. Equally important is literacy in power; how politics and process shape what’s possible in policymaking.

The workings of Congress can seem like an arbitrary imposition that blocks obvious solutions when your expertise is research, pure policy, or direct impact.

Even when you're steeped in politics and process, an understandable cynicism can emerge that sees the whole thing as predetermined Kabuki theater.

But seeing the machinery of Capitol Hill from the perspective of someone who has operated part of it unlocks clarity around how to approach it strategically.

Wonk contributor Kristen Torres staffed Rep. Judy Chu, and in this week’s Deep Dive she pulls back the curtain on the important gatekeeping function of Congressional Committees, digging into:

• How they actually work;

• Why bills with bipartisan support can disappear into purgatory; and

• What you can do differently when you see this machinery.

Whether you’re a neophyte or a seasoned advocate who has left shoe leather all over the Capitol complex, these are important tactics for turning strategy into impact.

For our latest WonkCast, I sat down with Oklahoma Child Welfare Director Michael Williams. We talked about the role of data in decision-making, custody relinquishment for behavioral health access, and why Oklahoma was all in on A Home for Every Child.

Let’s get after it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

The Hidden Gatekeeper: How Committees Channel Congressional Power

What the Hidden Mechanics of Committee Gatekeeping and Mean for Influencing Policy

By Kristen Torres

If you’ve spent time around federal policy, you know the frustration.

A bill is introduced with bipartisan support and eclectic endorsements. Then … nothing happens.

The bill is referred to a committee and seemingly enters policy purgatory. Forget about a vote; it doesn’t even get a hearing or markup.

For advocates, it can feel like a failure of the system. If a proposal has support and solves a real problem, why wouldn’t Congress act?

The reality is that legislative success depends on timing, priorities, relationships, and political opportunity.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in committee.

Understanding how committees operate can help explain why some bills move while others stall.

More importantly, it can help advocates think differently about what meaningful policy progress actually looks like.

Committees Decide What Gets Attention

Members of Congress introduce legislation, but committees, especially their Chairs, decide which proposals receive serious consideration.

Every bill gets referred to a committee, but only a small percentage ever move beyond that point.

Committees hold hearings, debate legislation, make revisions, and determine whether a bill advances.

Those are the visible activities, which are the outcomes that commemorate decisions and negotiations behind the scenes.

Committee Chairs drive the work. They manage the input and particular views of their down dais members.

As the chair’s minority party counterpart, the ranking member has less direct power but can wield influence, especially when the vote margin is tight.

Committee work revolves around key questions that occur before a hearing notice ever drops:

• Does this fit within our jurisdiction?

• Does it align with current party priorities?

• Will leadership support it?

• How does it map to the priorities of down dais Members and their state politics?

• Is there a path to implementation?

What are the budget implications?

And committees rarely operate in isolation. Their work is shaped by broader party priorities, congressional leadership, and the agenda coming from the White House.

When an issue aligns with those larger conversations, committees can dedicate time and attention to it.

A proposal can be well-designed, widely supported, and urgently needed, yet still fail to gain traction if it does not fit within the committee’s current agenda or peculiar politics.

The Mistake Many Advocates Make

The biggest gap in advocacy is between what people want policymakers to do and what is politically possible at a given moment.

We’ve all heard the reactions: “That bill doesn’t include any new funding.” “It doesn’t go far enough.” “This is just a small fix.”

Those criticisms are often accurate, but hitting the wrong target; political feasibility and policy excellence are not always the same thing.

Most transformational reforms are not the result of a single legislative victory. They are the result of years of groundwork:

Relationships built, champions cultivated, new ideas gaining credibility, and policymakers becoming more comfortable engaging on an issue.

Ultimately, small policy wins create momentum for larger ones. What looks incremental today may be laying the foundation for something much bigger.

The strategic question is not about whether a bill achieves everything advocates want.

It’s about optionality; how many degrees of freedom does it open or foreclose for reaching long-term policy goals.

A Child Welfare Example: Chafee Takes the Stage

Consider the current package of Chafee-related bills designed to improve outcomes for young people transitioning from foster care.

None of these bills represents a sweeping overhaul of the child welfare system.

They work within the existing structures and funding streams of workforce participation, educational access, and administrative flexibility.

They also largely sidestep the question of whether older youth ultimately need greater federal investment not just policy refinement

From one angle, the package may seem modest or incomplete. From another, it may be creating more champions for future action.

Each proposal aligns with priorities that committees are already working on. Each connects foster care to broader conversations happening in Congress.

Each creates opportunities for members to become champions for older youth in foster care.

The issue has also drawn attention from the Office of the First Lady, adding visibility and momentum.

The value of the package may not lie in policies alone, but in its capacity to to elevate the issue, cultivate champions, and create an set up the future fight over investment that the current window won’t allow.

That doesn’t make their policy content irrelevant, but it does require advocacy analysis that can shift between different time horizons.

How Advocates Can Improve Their Chances

Get in the Room

Engage committee staff early.

Unlike personal office staff, they tend to have a narrower set of issues to work on, which means they often combine policy expertise with political acumen.

By the time legislation is formally moving, many key decisions have already been shaped by conversations happening behind the scenes.

If you’re responding to the Chairman’s mark, you missed the chance to inform what went into it in the first place.

Read the Room

Understand what committees are already working on and how your priorities relate.

Legislative opportunities are often connected to broader party priorities, leadership agendas, and administration initiatives.

If you don’t know the context your issue has to move through you won’t see risks or opportunities.

Clear the Room

Think carefully about how your issue fits into the committee’s lane if you want any chance to move on to the Floor.

Good policy is table stakes.

The strongest proposals are often those that clearly connect to existing priorities rather than asking policymakers to create entirely new ones.

The workings of Congress shape what policy windows open, and how wide.

Moving accordingly does not mean lowering expectations or settling for less. It means recognizing that policy change is often cumulative.

Each hearing, briefing, relationship, and legislative win creates additional opportunities for future progress.

Good ideas matter. Strong evidence matters. Bipartisan support matters.

But if an idea never becomes part of what a committee is working on, it may never get the opportunity to move.

Incremental advancement toward major change matters. Insisting on perfection perpetuates the “everybody knows” problems that stay stuck.

Kristen Torres is the Founder & CEO of Torres Consulting. She previously worked for U.S. Representative Judy Chu (D-CA).

From the Wonk Briefing Room

Do We Have a “Legal Orphan” Problem?

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.

The latest from Senior Contributor Laura Radel tackles a question that’s shadowed federal permanency policy since the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA):

Have the law’s timelines for terminating parental rights created a significant population of children who lose their legal family ties, then age out without gaining new ones?

The national data say that a feared buildup of that outcome hasn’t materialized — but that’s not the whole story.

At the end of FY 2025, about 46,300 children in foster care were legally free for adoption nationally, with significant concentration in a handful of states.

Laura explores why the variation across states can’t be explained by federal law alone, and unpacks what else can explain it.

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 also reach out to learn more about our partnerships that help you leverage and apply our intel in your strategy.

Wonkatizer

Medicaid Work Requirements Hit the Courts

What Happened

Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration over its interim final rule implementing reporting requirements on work for Medicaid.

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.

Why It Matters

We’re a year out from enactment of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that created this policy. Litigation over partisan reconciliation was practically inevitable.

Beyond the partisan atmospherics, there’s also a federalism fault line; states that planned based on a narrower understanding now have to shift their setup.

What to Watch

Whether the courts block anything before the January 1 implementation deadline, or if CMS issues any further guidance.

That’s it for this week.

Stay sharp, Wonks.

~ Z

Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible

Welcome back to the Weekly Wonk.

We’re taking a break from new publications this week in honor of the semiquincentennial.

For a Deep Dive this week, we’re sharing the full version of one of the pieces from our most recent member-only Wonk Intelligence Quarterly.

It’s about vision, purpose, and opportunity as we look at the future of child welfare policy.

For our latest WonkCast, I sat down with Oklahoma Child Welfare Director Michael Williams.

We talked about why custody relinquishment for behavioral health access persists even when everyone involved agrees it produces bad outcomes at high cost, why OK was the first state to join A Home for Every Child, and more.

We’ll be back with your regularly scheduled releases on July 6th.

Let’s get into it, and Happy 4th, Wonks.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

Child Welfare’s Artemis Moment: Where Are We Going & Why?

Debating the structure and apparatus of policy while deferring debate on purpose yields drift.

By Zach Laris, Founder & President, and Andrés Argüello, Founding Director of Narrative Intelligence

Policymaking and advocacy may not be rocket science, but they have more in common with rocketry than is apparent at first glance.

Launch day is the moment of maximal excitement, with sky-high stakes and rapt attention on what will be an awesome spectacle or colossal failure.

It also offers the least opportunity for influence.

On launch day, no amount of heroic effort will overcome poor design, inadequate fuel, or the choice of poor conditions for launch.

That’s what makes it stressful for those involved; it’s not a real-time performance, but a public test of the cumulative effort and prior performance that carried the work to that moment.

The real leverage and progress compounds in the unglamorous months and years before: designing, refining, stress-testing, and iterating in service of a bold, visionary goal.

Policymaking and advocacy follow a similar trajectory.

The big, visible moments – hearings, votes, executive actions – are not a performance of capacity and capability.

They’re a technical demonstration and test of what the work has built.

Now is an essential moment for surfacing the competing visions that can motivate an ambitious mission across the field.

Going Boldly Back, & Beyond: What is it For?

We have a serious and solvable design problem in child welfare policy.

Over the past few decades, policymakers have made significant reforms to child welfare policy and financing– Family First, IV-E Waivers, Fostering Connections. So, what’s the problem?

Much of the drift in child welfare policy today is an outgrowth of structural tensions that emerge when we focus on policy structure and apparatus over purpose.

That’s not for lack of trying. People are making serious purpose arguments right now.

There is genuine, substantive deliberation over whether child welfare should be first and foremost a child protective services system, or a broader child and family well-being system.

You see it in momentum around key ideas: ensure a home for every child in care, stabilize families before a crisis, prevent fatalities, achieve permanency.

Each of these is defensible. None of them is the same goal.

A problem emerges when these foundational arguments become equally weighted policy inputs.

They don’t get resolved, but translated, into policy structure fights over financing mechanics, eligibility rules, and administrative flexibility.

This is how we get the “Entitlement to what?” debate, missing that Title IV-E foster care is now overwhelmingly a state capacity-focused administrative financing tool while we argue over it as though it is focused on specific children and families.

This isn’t a knock on our field; it’s a surmountable design constraint. What’s missing is the infrastructural capacity to convert substantive deliberation into frame-setting momentum.

Launchpads Without Targets

When a field can’t agree on purpose, structural debates absorb energy.

The cumulative result is a system that is the encoding of compromises, each layer rational in its moment, yet incoherent as a whole.

That’s why child welfare policy conversations keep circling back to the same financing mechanics and eligibility rules instead of the outcomes those levers are supposed to produce.

And here’s the paradox: the overemphasis on structure without clarity on substance also makes the field worse at delivering structurally.

We get a process-oriented approach averse to risk, where it’s safer to deliver a bad outcome with a good process than a good outcome through a risky new process.

This is also how policy debates that could be about purpose start from the premise of making marginal modifications to existing structures.

Getting There: See You on the Dark Side of the Moon

Our field has abundant capabilities in domains that matter for policy.

Leaders and front-line staff across agencies, service providers, advocacy, and philanthropy are innovating and finding effective approaches.

What’s missing is the infrastructure connecting those domains at scale. This is not about building a better coalition or slightly sharpening a message. The key work ahead includes:

• Surfacing what’s working and what’s breaking at every level;

• Defining problems effectively through debate and deliberation;

• Identifying what works and testing whether it can successfully scale;

• Translating competing visions into novel, long-term, stress-tested policy frameworks;

• Converting novel ideas into strategic, multi-level campaigns that make momentum; and

• Creating capacity for concrete delivery of policy to people.

The lack of this infrastructure isn’t always immediately obvious. Good ideas and good work are able to percolate and generate some effective action.

The tell is that it’s not durably sustainable.

Meeting Our Artemis Moment

We don’t need a unifying theory of everything. We need several credible visions for the future that can compete and generate a consensus on what the next era should look like.

Importantly, those visions won’t work if they gloss over the tensions, constraints, and trade-offs policy makers face.

They have to surface those and make the case for how to address them.

Growing cross-partisan interest in financing reform and the structural tensions accumulating since PRWORA are creating real conditions for the purpose argument to gain traction.

Starting from structure will yield drift. Starting from purpose can lead us through deeper space to bigger goals.

This window is open. The moves you’re making now are what will determine where the rocket goes next time everyone gathers to watch the launch.

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.

Five percent of children entering foster care nationally do so not from abuse or neglect, but because it’s the only way to unlock Medicaid financing for behavioral health care.

Custody for care is not a quirk or conspiracy. Instead, that datapoint reflects the distortions of tacitly designing child welfare policy as a backstop system of last resort.

It also captures key tensions constraining child welfare leaders:

• What’s the appropriate role of data in decision-making, especially when it inherently collapses complexity?

• Where’s the boundary line between insufficient accountability controls and ineffective process theater?

• How can states upgrade their partnerships with the federal government amid simultaneously declining investment and rising expectations?

Today’s guest makes decisions shaped by these constraints every day.

Michael Williams currently serves as Oklahoma’s Child Welfare Director, and previously was Deputy Commissioner of Operations for Connecticut’s child welfare agency.

We talked about why Oklahoma was the first state to join the Administration for Children and Families’ A Home for Every Child initiative, and why he takes the approach of data informing and influencing decisions, rather than driving them.

If you wonder why a policy like custody for care persists when everyone involved decries its poor outcomes and clear cost inefficiency, this is a look behind the curtain.

Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk.

Hoping my fellow dads and everyone celebrating the dads in their life had an enjoyable Father’s Day.

If like us it had you thinking about child and family policy, our recent WonkCast with Michelle Feit kicked off an ongoing exploration we’re doing on the topic of paid leave.

It offers a window into why child and family policy has many issues that poll well with cross-cutting majorities, yet hit friction moving through the legislative process.

For our Deep Dive, first time Wonk contributor Dr. Jill Berrick expands on a conversation we had around the relationship between poverty and child welfare involvement.

There’s a lively and unsettled debate about the role economic precarity plays in who enters child welfare and what policy options work.

But focusing there skips past another question we breeze right by; what happens when the system itself becomes a source of further precarity after removal?

When nearly half of all children who enter foster care return home, that impact has important policy implications on family stability and reunification.

We’ve also got a Wonkatizer on the data around safety net program enrollment, and what it means for implementation of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Let’s get into it.

Weekly Wonk Deep Dive

Ante Up: The Cost of Reunification

The poverty connection policy largely ignores.

By Jill Duerr Berrick, Professor, School of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley

Since 1980, federal child welfare law has embraced the philosophy of family reunification.

Public policy promotes returning children in foster care safely to their parents over any other permanency option.

The system mostly behaves accordingly. Reunification has been the most common exit from care since the early 1990s.

Today, nearly half of children leaving foster care return home.

The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act is the foundational base of policy architecture obligating child welfare agencies to support parents in their efforts to safely reunite with their children.

For example, parents get a written case plan spelling out what they need to do before a child returns, including:

• Referral to community services to address safety concerns;

• Clear timelines;

• Provision of social workers’ reports for transparency about concerns and progress;

• Access to legal representation;

• Ongoing court reviews to determine readiness for permanency

Whether that structure is sufficient to help parents change is a long-running debate. It’s often intertwined with arguments about poverty, neglect, and financial support.

Rarely do we stop to grapple with the question of what the system takes away from parents while their children are in care.

Right at a moment of maximum family precarity, when economic stability matters most, we have state and federal policies that drain family finances further.

The evidence says those policies keep children in care longer and send fewer of them home at all.

Money at the Front Door

Decades of research link family poverty to child maltreatment, particularly neglect.

More recently, several studies have indicated that state policies increasing family financial security are associated with reduced rates of maltreatment reporting, investigations, and foster care entry.

The nature of the relationship between poverty and neglect is genuinely contested, and the often oversimplified versions of the argument in both directions don’t survive contact with the evidence.

But the directional finding is hard to ignore: money-in stabilizes families; money-out destabilizes them.

Which raises the question this piece is built on: If economic precarity shapes how families enter the system, what happens when the system itself becomes a source of precarity after a child is removed?

Charging Parents for Foster Care

For the past four decades, federal policy has compelled states to collect child support from parents during a child’s stay in care.

Not only is a non-custodial parent’s monthly payment redirected away from the custodial parent to the state, but the custodial parent is also served with a child support obligation to help pay for the cost of care.

Research shows that the effects on families are significant.

Parents carrying even a seemingly modest $100/month obligation see their children remain in care an average of 6.6 months longer than parents without one.

Child support collections reduce the odds of reunification by almost 20 percent. Some children never go home as a result of this policy.

Many of the families who do reunify carry child support debt with them, with interest that keeps growing every year, further compromising their ongoing economic security.

Families carrying that debt are twice as likely to see their children re-enter care.

In 2022, the federal government gave states flexibility to largely stop or narrow these collections.

Only about two dozen states have responded. The rest continue to bill parents for the cost of care.

The Meter Keeps Running

Child support is the largest of these extractions, but not the only one.

Some states require parents to pay for the services the system itself mandates, including health or mental health evaluations or treatment for both parents and children, legal representation, or other court-related costs.

Some of these policies adjust for a parent’s ability to pay, but the effect is directionally the same; deepening poverty for families the system widely regards as among its most financially insecure, right as the case plan clock ticks away.

Why Policies That Undercut the Goal Persist

If our policy principles privilege family reunification, why do policies that work against it persist?

Two structural forces are at the heart of many child welfare policy conundrums.

The first is a collision of principles.

Policymakers typically appreciate the principle of reunification, but they also honor the principle of parental responsibility.

These values clash when children are temporarily separated from parents.

The tension gets expressed in statute by honoring both at once: supporting the child’s return home while billing parents for the separation.

This results in a policy paradox where we require parents to demonstrate economic stability while simultaneously undermining it through fees and cost shifting.

The second structural force is revenue.

States increasingly fund the majority of child welfare expenditures. Facing declining federal investment, agency leaders rationally move to shore up tight budgets.

Collecting from parents looks like a revenue stream sitting in plain sight.

The Revenue That Isn’t

But is it?

Cash-strapped child welfare agencies may see parental fees as a source of revenue, but a cost-benefit analysis reveals something different; they generate a net loss.

In the case of child support, for example, five states conducted analyses showing that the costs of collections outstrip the revenue benefits by a ratio of over 3:1.

And the cost of an extended stay in foster care for even six months longer than necessary totals tens of thousands of dollars, compared to the few hundred dollars a state might collect in revenue from child support payments.

What might appear as a revenue stream may, in fact, be a revenue drain.

The principle collision has a similar structure once it’s examined. Responsibility and reunification compete only if responsibility is defined as cash payment.

But courts and caseworkers don’t recommend reunification because a parent paid their bill; they recommend it because the parent demonstrated safe, stable parenting.

Neglecting Poverty

The architecture of child welfare contains real structures built to support reunification. It also contains contradictory ones that make it much harder for parents to reunify with their children.

Our often oversimplified debate about poverty, neglect, and cash assistance needs real nuance to match the evidence.

In the meantime, our debate neglects an opportunity to discuss how we exacerbate poverty through the contradictions we leave unexamined.

From the Wonk Briefing Room

The Weekly Wonk hits your inbox each Monday to give you a map of the child and family policy landscape in which we find ourselves.

Instead of “more,” our premium members and partners get actionable intel on what you can do about it.

Earlier this year, we ran this analysis by Rebecca Robuck on how debt and deficit politics could impact child and family policy.

In her latest premium brief, she shows how to use a framework for systems change and government reform to approach the child and family policy stake in these debates.

This is a tool you can use if you were intrigued by her question “What if it worked?”

Principles For Navigating The Future Of Child And Family Policy In A Debt-Constrained Era

By Rebecca Robuck

The national debt is no longer a distant concern, and child and family policy leaders can’t treat it as one.

As of May, U.S. federal debt held by the public exceeds GDP — a threshold not crossed since World War II. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects it to keep growing.

Social Security trustees now project insolvency by 2032, increasing the urgency for entitlement reform.

The instinctive response is often defense: protect existing programs, preserve current funding, and prevent harmful cuts.

Some of that work will be essential. But focusing there will miss the mark.

The challenge ahead for child and family policy leaders is to navigate the looming disruption while actively shaping what comes next after it.

Some existing programs are working for families, and deserve rigorous defense.

Others, including significant parts of the child welfare system, are at a stage where incremental improvements are delaying a necessary transition.

The task is to hold both at once: defend what works, and use the opening to design, develop, and build what doesn’t yet exist.

What follows is a set of principles for doing that…

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.

Wonkatizer

Signals of Safety Net Strains

As state legislative and budget seasons peak, early signals suggest declining child enrollment in safety net programs.

That’s before full implementation of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

What Happened

We’ve talked about looming changes in Medicaid policy and how they may impact otherwise eligible children through administrative burden.

Even before those changes, the latest U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data suggest an ongoing decline.

There were 345,000 fewer children enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program in February of 2026 compared to February of 2020, a 1 percent decline.

On the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program front, a ProPublica analysis suggests 770,000 children are no longer receiving SNAP benefits following new eligibility and state cost sharing changes.

Why it Matters

These Medicaid enrollment figures control for the temporary expansion of children’s coverage resulting from pandemic-era policy changes.

Temporary continuous enrollment had increased Medicaid coverage by 7 million children by April 2023.

The unwinding of that policy has seen 7.4 million children lose coverage over the last three years, so this coverage loss of 345,000 is a net drop from pre-pandemic levels.

What to Watch

Implementation remains early, so these are likely signs of trend direction. Watch for state budget decisions that hedge against federal funding risk by preemptively tightening.

That’s it for this week.

Stay sharp, Wonks.

~ Z

Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible

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

There is often a significant gap between the way issues poll with the general public and how they move through policy-making institutions.

That often gets vaguely characterized as “political will”, obscuring its origins.

Child and family policy has many high-salience issues that are popular in general and encounter friction in moving through the legislative process.

The finite resource that matters is political capacity; the coalition power required to simultaneously align on a workable policy design and assemble the votes to move it.

Paid leave is emblematic of this dynamic, and we’re going to be exploring perspectives from an array of thinkers grappling with those questions of coalition and policy strategy.

Today’s guest has led advocacy campaigns on paid leave at every level of government, from a successful initiative in DC to a federal proposal that came quite close in 2021.

Michelle Feit is the Director of Congressional Relations for Economic Justice at the National Partnership for Women and Families, where she leads paid leave campaigns.

She previously worked on the Hill for Representative Jackie Speier and Senator Barbara Mikulski.

We talked about how unified government constrains coalitions, the tension between state and national policy development, and how family policy moves through Congress.

Amid cross-partisan deliberation over what comes next in child and family policy, this is a window into why popular ideas often struggle to become durable national policies.

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.