Weekly Wonk: Our Artemis Moment
Happy 250th from the Wonk
From the Founder’s Desk
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
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