Weekly Wonk- Rounding up Research That Matters
Plus our inaugural Research Roundup, and Wonkatizers on the MAHA health blueprint, HHS budget cuts, and the Administration’s new regulatory agenda.
Welcome to the Weekly Wonk.
Signal Drop: Have something that should be on our radar? Drop us a signal here.
Curated by Founder Zach Laris. Contributions by the Wonk Team.
From the Founder’s Desk
This Weekly Wonk offers you new tools for navigating power, policy, and the policymaking process, on whatever issues matter for you.
Your Map: An insider look at the Senate Finance Committee — that powerful and idiosyncratic body holding the child and family policy purse strings.
Your Compass: Our inaugural Children & Family Research Roundup — a new Wonk offering that distills evidence into actionable intel to guide your work.
Future editions will live in the Wonk Briefing Room, our premium membership community for sharper, decision-ready intel. This one’s on the house.
Our Wonkatizers pick up signals at the intersection of power and policy, where you can put tools like these into action.
Let’s get into it.
~Z
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Wonk’s Inaugural Research Roundup
By Robin Ghertner, MPP
Robin here, the Wonk’s Director of Strategic Policy Intelligence.
You’ve probably heard the refrain that it takes 17 years for research to shape policy. Whether that’s myth or math, it’s too slow.
That’s why we’re launching the Children & Family Research Roundup—a new monthly feature for premium subscribers.
My team is scanning the latest studies across child and family policy, stripping out the jargon, and translating what the research actually tells us (and sometimes what it can’t).
The first edition covers July and August’s biggest findings, and it’s built for you: clear, decision-ready intel, not an annotated bibliography.
This is about making research meaningful to practice and policy now.
See the latest on substance use and child welfare system involvement, how housing assistance impacts reunification and the need for foster care, and much more.
Check out the first Roundup here — and join the Wonk Briefing Room to get every edition going forward.
Weekly Wonk Deep Dive
The Senate Finance Committee, De-Mystified
By Doug Steiger, MPP, Senior Contributor
If you work in child and family policy, you can’t ignore the Senate Finance Committee.
It’s one of the most powerful, most peculiar committees in Congress — and it holds the purse strings for most federal child welfare funding.
Here is a quick guide, from a recovering committee staffer, to understanding and engaging with this important, and quirky, entity.
What’s on its Plate?
The Finance Committee runs on tax and health policy. Child and family policy mostly breaks through when it intersects with those priorities – most often through Medicaid.
Its jurisdiction includes:
Taxes
Medicare
Social Security
Medicaid
Trade
Unemployment Insurance
And less visibly, but critically:
Most federal child welfare funding, including IV-E, Family First, the Chafee program, and adoption assistance
TANF
Mandatory child care funding
Child support
MIECHV (home visiting)
Who Wants a Seat on the Committee?
Almost every Senator wants in on Finance.
Why? Taxes and health care touch every state, every campaign, every donor list.
Republicans usually come for the tax code
Democrats usually come for health policy
Everyone wants the campaign cash that flows from overseeing tax, trade, and health.
Senators focused on appropriations or national security are the main exceptions– they tend to prioritize other committees.
The bottom line: Finance is a prestige committee that builds policy power and war chests.
What Makes Finance Different
Finance doesn’t behave like most Committees.
Subcommittees of the Finance Committee do not mark up legislation and are often inactive.
This differs from most other committees, including Ways and Means, its House counterpart.
Lower-profile issues get less attention than at Ways and Means, absent an individual member’s interest, since they rarely gain a full committee hearing over tax and health issues.
The Finance Committee also votes on “conceptual” language for legislation, and sometimes the legislative text is finalized by staff afterwards.
This contrasts with the standard practice of other committees, which vote on the actual text of legislation during mark-ups.
Winning an amendment vote during a Finance markup does not guarantee the legislative text is written how you want it.
How Finance Works
Finance runs on two parallel staffs.
Majority staff: work for the Chair.
Minority staff: work for the Ranking Member.
They may help other Senators from their party on the committee, but loyalty to their boss comes first. The staffers usually have narrower portfolios and deeper expertise than a Senator’s personal office staff .
Finance Committee members have staff that focus on the busiest parts of the committee’s jurisdiction – tax, health, and trade.
Child and family policy is often the responsibility of the health staffer.
If Medicaid is involved this can be helpful, but often means they have less time and expertise for other programs that serve families.
And because health expertise is prized in the private sector, staff churn is frequent.
With tax and health issues occupying the Committee’s leadership, space opens for rank-and-file members to leave a mark on child and family policy.
For example, the Chafee program is named for the late Senator John Chafee (R-RI), a leader on child welfare who never served as the Finance chairman or ranking member.
Finance’s Levers of Power
Why Finance matters more than most:
Tax Code
As the “tax” committee, Finance often legislates policies through the tax code.
That’s how it shapes everything from family tax credits to nonprofit incentives.
Mandatory Money
It also oversees the largest amount of mandatory – or “entitlement” – funding in the Senate.
This means it can “spend” without relying on the Appropriations Committee and the increasingly challenged annual spending bills.
Mandatory funding can continue for years, absent further legislation.
Nominations
Treasury and HHS Secretaries– plus critical child and family policy roles like Assistant Secretary for ACF–need committee approval before heading to the full Senate.
Members on Finance can extract commitments from nominees early, long before most Senators get a vote.
Oversight Muscle
The Finance Committee can launch oversight investigations into agencies within its jurisdiction, which includes much of HHS, the IRS, and the Social Security Administration.
One recent example is Finance’s investigation – conducted with the HELP Committee – of youth residential treatment facilities.
The Democratic staff has an ongoing investigation into the finances of Jeffery Epstein.
Should Democrats regain control of the Senate in 2026, expect oversight investigations into the Trump Administration in 2027.
How to Engage Finance
Start where the power is: majority and minority committee staff.
They know the issues cold and work directly for the Chair and Ranking Member.
If you’ve got a connection – or can generate one – to another member of the Committee that can also be a good place to start.
The Chairman or the Ranking Member may be especially likely to help Committee members of their party with an issue when those members are up for re-election.
As always, effective advocacy relies on understanding the perspective of those you are talking to and benefits from an ability to make an issue tangible through data or personal stories.
This is particularly true when you can tie it to the state a Senator represents, such as impact on constituents or state budgets.
What Decision Makers Need to Know
Finance controls the mandatory dollars (IV-E, TANF, Medicaid) that drive your budget.
Having a Senator on Finance can mean faster problem-solving — or bigger risks if they’re disengaged.
Child and family policy won’t rise on its own; you need a member champion and a sharp state-level case.
Nomination hearings are underused leverage points to get issues on the radar.
Committee staff are the real gatekeepers; build those relationships first.
Health staff also carry most child and family issues, but they’re stretched thin — clarity and brevity win.
Closing
The Senate Finance Committee is a powerhouse — controlling the flow of entitlement dollars, shaping the tax code, and vetting top HHS and Treasury officials.
For child and family policy, it’s where durable funding and real leverage sit.
But here’s the catch: tax and Medicare crowd out almost everything else.
Child welfare issues don’t surface unless someone makes them unavoidable.
Understanding how Finance works — and where the hidden levers are — is the first step to making that happen.
Doug Steiger is a Child Welfare Wonk Senior Contributor and public policy consultant.
He served as a Counselor to the HHS Secretary during the Obama Administration and was a Senate staffer for 12 years
Wonkatizer
Signals to watch, distilled down for you
From the White House to the Hill to the agencies, major moves are reshaping the child and family policy landscape.
MAHA Child Health Report Drops
The Trump Administration has finally unveiled the long-awaited Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) report and strategy, a sweeping strategy with 128 recommendations to address childhood chronic disease.
The report zeroes in on poor diet, chemical exposures, physical inactivity, chronic stress—and what it frames as the “overmedicalization” of children.
Recommendations of interest for child and family policy
Nutrition and labeling rules could reshape school meals and SNAP choices.
Vaccine recommendations will reignite debate on science, safety, and trust in public health.
Prior authorization and prescribing safeguards that would reduce prescribing of psychotropic medication for kids, especially ADHD.
ACF would be tasked with reviewing psychotropic prescribing patterns in foster care services, targeting overmedication risks.
HHS and USDA would tighten nutrition standards in Head Start and child care, while promoting more physical activity in afterschool programs.
Takeaway
The report is a sprawling blueprint; implementation requires sustained discipline.
This isn’t a straight-to-Federal-Register-release, but the full waterfront.
The signal to track is which recommendations agencies actually move on, and which remain rhetoric.
Savvy actors are already engaging relevant agencies and partners to prioritize.
HHS Funding Markup Moves, Cuts Loom
On September 9, the House Appropriations Committee advanced a party-line Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies spending bill for FY26.
It would make a 6% or $7B cut from ‘25, far short of President Trump’s proposed $31B reduction, but with $100M for the Make America Healthy Again initiative.
Why it Matters
Partisan appropriations bills are always aspirational.
This bill is not on its way to becoming law; it’s a signal of the direction the House majority wants health funding to go starting in October.
What’s not yet clear is whether and when a comprehensive FY26 bill comes together.
With funding expiring Sept. 30, shutdown risk is very much back in play.
Trump Administration’s Regulatory Agenda Update
The White House Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has updated its regulatory agenda.
The Unified Agenda outlines key regulatory priorities in the near and long-term. It’s a key and oft-overlooked tool for policy engagement.
Key to Track
Several priorities in child and family policy, including the Administration’s plans to:
Rescind the 2024 rule Designated Placements Requirements Under Titles IV-E and IV-B for LQBTQ+ Children, also known as the “Safe and Appropriate Placements Rule”
Implementation of the child support data changes made as part of last year’s Supporting America’s Children and Families Act
Implement anticipated changes to the TANF Work Participation Rate calculation, as outlined in the bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act
New flexibilities in Head Start and child care
How to Use It
The agenda doesn’t give the full details of any particular regulatory action.
But it’s a useful forecasting tool for tracking new developments to be ready for them.
That’s it for this week.
Stay sharp, Wonks.
~Z