Signals: Big Bold Moves
CWW expands, plus three major contributor pieces
Welcome, Wonks!
We’ve got lots for your this week:
More big CWW News.
Doug Steiger forecasts a government shutdown.
Laura Radel illuminates IV-E surprising spending trends.
Kimberly Martin explores what “accountability” means.
Let’s get after it.
Partners Supporting This Week’s Work
Big CWW News
Child Welfare Wonk continues to grow. We’ve got big news about our expanding team and the newsletter.
CWW Scoops Child and Family Policy Leader
Child Welfare Wonk is thrilled to share that we’ve added Andrés Argüello to our team as Founding Director of Narrative Intelligence.
Andrés brings deep and cross-cutting expertise across child and family policy, including our core focuses of health, human services, and economic policy.
He most recently served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health Policy at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and before that as Senior Advisor to the Secretary of HHS on child and family policy.
Andrés Role at CWW: As Founding Director of Narrative Intelligence, Andrés is building our system for integrating the contributions of top-tier writers and strategists.
He is also growing and expanding the multitude of offerings we will provide to partners, giving you an ever more critical edge.
You don’t come to Child Welfare Wonk to read the news, but to get insight from our analysis of complex intelligence. His work will make that stronger through scale.
Expect to see more from high-caliber contributors, deeper insights to drive your work, plus even more through our premium partnerships.
More on Partnerships and Contributing:
New Newsletter Name: Signals
When we started, Child Welfare Wonk was a one-person weekly Substack. Now we’re a scaling strategic policy intelligence platform with a growing array of offerings.
Child Welfare Wonk is now more than the newsletter, which needs its own name. Our driving ethos is separating the signal from the noise, so this newsletter is now Signals.
The quality and approach of what we offer remains. But becoming Signals is the signal that this is just the tip of the iceberg of what we have to share with you.
Wonkatizers: Quick Hits
Reconciliation Rolls On
This is a key week for budget reconciliation in the U.S. Senate, where they are sorting what to do with the bill the U.S. House passed on a 215-214 margin.
Reminder on Reconciliation: Our reconciliation overview explains how this fast-track simple-majority legislative process works.
What’s New: The Congressional Budget Office released a detailed set of tables outlining the impact of the House bill.
What CBO Sees: $1T+ in health cuts over 10 years, including $864B for Medicaid. Over $2T+ added to the deficit over that time.
Why it Matters: This week the Senate Finance Committee will be working on their reconciliation bill language for health, with all the complexities we noted last week.
Worth Reading: AEI Piece Challenges Conversation
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has released a brief from researcher Brett Drake surfacing big questions for child welfare policy.
What it is: Child Welfare System Myths Vs. Facts
What it Does: Lifts up research to question core narrative trends in child welfare policy related to race, poverty, neglect, and the harms of foster care.
Why it Matters: It raises difficult questions about foundational framing, and influential decision makers are reading it.
NEW Contributor Policymaking Analysis
Government Shutdown Drama, Part 2
By Doug Steiger, MPP
Are you ready if the federal government shut down for weeks in the fall? But, you ask, didn’t we just avoid a shutdown?
We did – but only for the current fiscal year, ending September 30th. Congress still needs to keep the lights on for the next fiscal year. Odds are high for a sequel to that drama, and a long shutdown..
The Structural Tension
Each party faces different challenges in government funding negotiations. That’s not a partisan read, it’s a structural tension inherent in key party differences.
Most years, the key players are able to negotiate a compromise. But, as you may have noticed, this is not most years.
When Republicans run both chambers they face a two-fold challenge in funding the government:
Senate Democrats can filibuster a bill they oppose; and
House conservatives insist on sharp spending cuts.
In Congress, members may have to say “I’ll vote ‘no’ unless I get what I want,” to have leverage. When enough of them do that, the whole process can grind to a halt.
How it Usually Plays Out
A Republican House typically passes appropriations bills at low enough funding levels for the conservatives, which are then stopped by Senate Democrats.
Eventually, a deal is made that raises spending levels so enough Democrats support it to offset the loss of conservative votes, often at the expense of a stable speaker’s gavel.
What’s Different this Time
The advent of DOGE and OMB’s withholding of funding make it difficult for Democrats to agree to a deal along the usual lines.
OMB Director Vought has been clear in his belief that the executive branch is not required to spend the money that Congress appropriates. DOGE has dismantled whole agencies without explicit legal authority.
This development upends the usual dynamic; Democrats become far less willing to provide bridge votes when they can’t be sure the concessions they are extracting are real.
How March Played Out
In March, congressional Democrats were faced with a stark choice; oppose the continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government to seek concessions, risking a government shutdown, or vote for the CR to keep the government open.
When there were no negotiations to be had, Senator Schumer and a few other Senate Democrats supported the CR, fearing the damage from a shutdown.
Wake Me Up, When September Ends
Come September, the same dynamics will likely apply. A CR will be required since the appropriations bills will likely not be finished.1
In a normal year, Senate Democrats would consider agreeing to a CR that does little more than keep the government operating on autopilot. Doing so now would risk empowering DOGE and OMB further, eroding the likelihood of Democratic support.
Absent a bipartisan agreement, House Republicans can send the Senate a CR with lower spending levels, leaving Democrats with the same tough choice as in March.
Signals of a Shutdown Showdown
There’s a good chance that the next time, Senate Democrats will face stronger incentives to filibuster, especially in light of the blowback to the March vote.
Pressure from Democratic voters to oppose the President may also increase even further if Congress enacts large Medicaid and SNAP cuts before October.
Why it Matters for Child Welfare
What would a shutdown mean for child welfare? The good news is that programs with “mandatory” funding, such as Title IV-E foster care and Medicaid, would continue.
But agency staff managing these programs could face furloughs. That’s on top of prior major staff reductions, and would be compounded if they are also supposed to be implementing changes from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Programs that rely on appropriations, such as CAPTA, would not have federal funding until the shutdown ends. Ordinarily, this means a delay in funding, which can be painful if grants were expected in the fall.2
This year, though, those delays would occur in the context of an Administration already openly exploring the frontiers of their legal authority for unilateral cuts to programs.
That raises the risk that theAdministration might seek to end programs when they are “unfunded” even temporarily. Lawmakers know this and it impacts their negotiations.
If there is a shutdown, it may be an extended one. The Administration may see a shutdown as an opportunity for further cuts, while Democrats will be reluctant to accept any Republican-drafted bill to reopen the government without concessions from the White House.
This means that if the government shuts down on October 1st, it may not reopen until Thanksgiving or later. State and local leaders can plan ahead to avoid a cash crunch.
Ignore past-oriented prognostication that trades clarity for certainty. Assuming that the old dynamics will return is a good way to be surprised by a foreseeable shutdown.
Doug Steiger is a public policy consultant. He served as a Counselor to the HHS Secretary during the Obama Administration and was a Senate staffer for 12 years.
NEW Contributor Original Data Analysis Series
This week we are thrilled to launch Decoded: Spotting Systems’ Silent Signals, a new series from Laura Radel.
Decoded: Spotting Systems’ Silent Signals brings you the perspectives of a veteran policy analyst who can illuminate the stories hiding in plain sight.
Decoded: Spotting Systems’ Silent Signals
Title IV-E’s Quiet Makeover: From Foster Care to Permanency
By Laura Radel, MPP
Title IV-E of the Social Security Act provides the bulk of federal child welfare funding. But if you think it’s mostly funding foster care, you’re missing a structural shift.
Today, only about half of program funds are devoted to foster care and only about 1 in 5 children receiving program subsidies are in foster care. Instead, the vast majority of program beneficiaries are children in adoptive homes and guardianships.
Title IV-E spent approximately $10.2 billion in Federal Fiscal Year (FFY) 2023,3 reimbursing states for a portion of their costs for eligible expenditures in foster care, adoption, guardianship, and, in recent years, prevention services for eligible children. It also funds administrative and placement costs associated with these programs.
The program’s evolution began with an emphasis on permanency in the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 (P.L. 96-272), and was supercharged by the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA; P.L. 105-89).
In addition, as part of welfare reform in 1996, Congress restricted the program’s eligibility, over time decreasing the proportion of children in foster care eligible for federal reimbursement. As a result, what was a foster care program over time became largely an adoption program.
The Trends Behind the IV-E Transformation
ASFA in 1997 impelled states to increase adoptions from foster care. The 2008 Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act (P.L. 110-351) introduced federally subsidized guardianships, expanding options for permanency.
Because adoptions and guardianships typically last longer than foster care stays, the number of children receiving permanency payments to stay with adoptive parents or guardians grew quickly in relation to children in federally funded foster care.
Child welfare funding changes contained in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-193) restricted Title IV-E eligibility, contributing to the program’s transformation.
Congress tied Title IV-E eligibility to each state’s now-defunct Aid to Families with Dependent Children income limit, but with no inflation adjustment. It later phased out income limits for adoptions, but not foster care or guardianship, driving this structural shift.
As a result, the proportion of adopted children eligible for Title IV-E grew to 87% in 2023, while the proportion of eligible children in foster care declined to 34%.
There is considerable variation in these numbers among states, ranging from 5 states with IV-E foster care eligibility rates of less than 20% to 4 states with rates greater than 60%. States shoulder all foster care costs for children who are not IV-E eligible.
Two factors make the shift toward adoption (and, to a lesser extent, guardianship), less dramatic when you look at funding rather than at the population of participating children.
First, foster care has more administrative activity associated with it than do adoption and guardianship – the costs of court preparation, for example. Second, many states have sought to maximize claims for administrative costs, creating systems to document every possible claimable activity.
As a result, costs of administration, training, and data systems have grown as a proportion of overall program costs, representing 72% of foster care program claims in 2023. This compares to about 14% for adoption and 6% for guardianship.
While views of the system stayed fixed, we shifted from direct funding mostly for children’s care to supporting states’ child welfare system infrastructure. Missing that will focus you on the wrong cost and policy drivers.
In addition, this system tends to favor adoptive families, often with more resources and less prior connection to the child than kin or family-based caregivers.
Federal policy focus, as well as research, data collection and accountability systems, continue to focus on children in foster care. Even many knowledgeable observers still think of title IV-E as “mostly foster care.”
Lawmakers and advocates have also increasingly focused on the role of Title IV-E in financing prevention through Family First.
Meanwhile Title IV-E’s largest component shifted ever deeper into the child welfare system, focusing resources on those relatively few children permanently separated from their families of origin.
These changes have taken place largely under the policy radar, without attention, debate, or intentionality. But they’ve been right there in plain sight in the public data.
For 35 years Laura analyzed child welfare issues for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), a combination research and policy office within the Office of the Secretary of the U.S. Department Health and Human Services. She retired this May, amid ASPE’s near elimination during reorganization.
Contributor Series: Say Less
Say Less is our series from Kimberly Martin, exploring the contradictions and policy tensions contained in the seemingly simple words we take for granted.
Kimberly’s piece digs into accountability, one of the most loaded words in child welfare. It challenges the “reform” vs. “abolish” discussion, exposing structural contradictions that should concern leaders across the ideological spectrum.
It also points toward a deeper project; designing systems that are structurally accountable both upward and downward.
Say Less: What We Mean When We Say “Accountability” ”
By Kimberly J. Martin, JD.
Accountability is central to child welfare oversight, but its definition and application depend entirely on where you sit. That shapes system behavior and family experience.
At its best, accountability reflects transparency, ownership, and a willingness to answer for outcomes based on shared expectations. But in child welfare? What you’re accountable for, and who you’re accountable to, depends entirely on where you sit.
Systems account for federal monitors. Families account to the state. One submits metrics, the other surrenders children.
Differing Timelines for Accountability
I’ve witnessed families being told to change everything in 30 days, while states fail the same safety outcome for a decade. Parents meet every requirement in their case plan, only to be told they weren’t “engaged enough.” Accountability is a moving target for families, and a resting place for systems.
The Power Flows of Accountability
Accountability is about power; who has it, who doesn’t, and who defines the terms. Congress writes mandates, agencies create checklists, and parents are told, ‘We don’t trust you to know what your family needs.’ That dynamic reflects control more than support.
The most powerful forms of accountability are chosen. When an agency says, “No more warehousing kids in group homes,” or when a frontline worker returns every parent call within 24 hours, not because policy demands it, but because they deserve it, that’s when change sticks. The power there emerges from intentionality.
What We Want and What We Get
We claim to want authentic outcomes, but we chase them with coercive tools. We design accountability mechanisms rooted in mistrust, then act surprised when they don’t produce trust. That contradiction doesn’t just undermine families, it creates rigid, performative policy that makes systems less accountable to policymakers.
We ask parents for weekly proof of treatment, sobriety, and housing. Meanwhile, agencies fail the same Child and Family Services Review (CFSR) indicators for years without consequences. Since CSFRs began in 2000, no state has met all benchmarks. Yet this persistent failure has created neither urgency nor a public conversation about whether the benchmarks themselves are the right measure.. Instead, we turn up the pressure, just not on the system.
When Accountability is Flexible
Take the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA). It’s supposed to hold systems accountable by reducing group placements and funding prevention. But implementation has dragged. In FY2018 when Family First passed, 10 percent of children in care were in group homes or institutions.4 In FY 2023, 11 percent of children were in group homes, institutions, or residential care.5
The issue could be more kids in those settings, or better data quality reflecting the real rate. Either way, the pace of reform isn’t just slow, it’s optional, and we have ongoing policy discussions about how to help states implement it. Meanwhile, parents face hard 15-month timelines under the Adoption and Safe Families Act (P.L. 105-89, ASFA), with little flexibility for the challenges they face.
When a child dies under state supervision, public outrage is swift, but rarely upward. Maybe a director resigns. But when the same outcomes persist for decades, that’s not a fluke; it reflects how current accountability structures are designed and applied. Everyone passes the pressure downward until it lands on families, especially the ones with the fewest resources and advantages to deflect it.
What Accountability Measures Matter
Too often, systems say they’re being accountable when what they really mean is they’re being measured. And those measurements are shaped by federal law, state budgets, and media optics, not families. When those goals conflict, families lose.
A uniform approach to accountability would mean timelines for agencies or more flexibility for families. It would also mean tracking not just whether services were provided, but whether they worked, and for whom..
Would pulling funding change how systems respond? Maybe. But federal agencies already have that authority, yet rarely use it. When they do, it can backfire, so it doesn’t seem to be a viable option. Policymakers recognize this and have shifted increasingly to incentives for systems. Perhaps next we could offer families the kinds of incentives and flexibility we offer systems.
Accountability can’t be a mirror we hold up only to families. It must be a window into how systems function and a door to change when they don’t. If it doesn’t apply in both directions, it’s not a principle. It’s a weapon.
Say less.
Kimberly Martin is a policy strategist whose work spans justice reform, equity, and systems accountability. She brings both legal insight and lived experience to the child welfare conversation.
That risk rises with each passing legislative day focus on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act during what is typically prime appropriations season.
ACF FY 2024 Congressional Budget Justification. https://acf.gov/olab/budget/acf-congressional-justification-fy-2024