Weekly Wonk: How Grants Are Shifting at the Children’s Bureau
When discretion is more than just the better part of valor, plus reconciliation and rescinding designated placements
From the Founder’s Desk
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
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