Title IV-B at a Glance
Title IV-B: Flexible Financing
December 2024 brought a huge bipartisan victory for children and families with enactment of Protecting America’s Children by Strengthening Families Act (P.L. 118-258). Woohoo!
But…what is Title IV-B anyway? Well, let’s wonk out together!
It’s hard to find a more objectively terrible name; it conjures memories of elementary school Roman numerals lessons and that most quintessentially 80s of Rocky movies.
Like so much law pertaining to health and human services, we find ourselves in the Social Security Act, which includes the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant (Title V), Medicaid (Title XIX), the Social Services Block Grant (Title XX), and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (Title XXI). Wonks like to refer to things as “Title _____”.
Title IV of the Social Security Act is a major bedrock of federal child welfare law and financing, in particular, Parts A (the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families/TANF program), B (AKA our friend Title IV-B), and E (the BIG child welfare $).
Title IV-B has two key parts:
Subpart 1: Stephanie Tubbs Jones Child Welfare Services Program. This provides a flexible discretionary investment each year (authorized at $325 million annually, but most recently appropriated at $269 million in FY24) for states and tribes.
These funds come with an array of expectations for policy and practice which states and tribes must demonstrate through plans they update every five years.
These are the plans that under PACSFA will now require input from people who have experienced the child welfare system. PACSFA also requires the plans to be publicly available.
The challenge is that the ability to implement a plan with fidelity is often a function of available resources, so we can charitably describe those plans as… aspirational.
Subpart 2: MaryLee Allen1 Promoting Safe and Stable Families (PSSF) Program.
PSSF is flexible and has two flavors of funding:
Mandatory:
$345 million annually, until enactment of this latest reauthorization.
Because it’s mandatory, it comes each year without Congressional action
Discretionary:
Authorized at $200 million annually.
As it implies, funding is at Congress’ discretion, which must act annually.
Most recently they provided $73 million in FY2024.
It focuses on the key priorities of:
Family support (help families before they experience a crisis);
Family preservation (help families in crisis avoid foster care);
Family reunification (support families in healing after foster care); and
Adoption promotion and support (make adoption easier and help adoptive families).
It also funds the Court Improvement Program (the only federal program for nearly 600,000 children’s cases annually) and the Regional Partnership Grants (RPG) that address how parental substance use drives child welfare involvement.
PACSFA emphasizes the role of PSSF in keeping families together, both before maltreatment occurs, to avoid unnecessary foster care, and to support kin when it is necessary.
Jurisdictions also use public-private partnerships with PSSF. That can make it easier to engage families suspicious of help from the agency that can take their children.
Why Wonky Words Matter for Funding
Last week we talked about the marquee takeaway of the Protecting America’s Children by Strengthening Families Act (P.L. 118-258)- $75 million more in annual mandatory funding for IV-B. Why does that matter?
In inflation-adjusted terms, funding for IV-B reached over $1 billion in FY 2004 and has been decreasing steadily since, most recently to $710 million in FY 2024.2 The bipartisan willingness to make these new investments is significant.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is the non-partisan scorekeeper of federal legislation. Congress typically “offsets” spending by cutting elsewhere or raising revenue, what we DC nerds call a “pay-for”.
CBO thinks in 10-year windows. Once Congress provides 10 full years of funding, it’s permanent. It becomes part of the CBO “baseline”, which projects assumed spending. It then becomes permanent, so you don’t need to pay for it ever again.
Congress not only reauthorized IV-B with new funding, but spread it over a 10-year window so it got into the baseline, so that new funding is permanent!3
RIP to one of the most incredible child welfare policy experts, advocates, and mentors many of us had the privilege to learn from.
You can also see more about how jurisdictions use IV-B funds in this ChildTrends resource on IV-B.
If you really want to nerd out, here’s the CBO score of the original IV-B reauthorization as it was making its way through the U.S. House, and the CBO score of the child-support enforcement reforms that ultimately became the “pay-for”. Congress eventually combined them into one bill.
That’s also why you usually see me refer to the Protecting America’s Children by Strengthening Families Act; the combined bill is technically the Supporting America’s Children and Families Act, but I find it narratively clearer and more accurate to keep the name when talking IV-B, since most of the time I am talking about child welfare services and not the arcana of taxpayer information access rules for child support enforcement.