A new path to help states with program improvement plans succeed
President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump’s Fostering the Future for American Children and Families executive order marks a major step toward meaningful reform of our nation’s child welfare system. A key provision of it directs the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) — the agency I lead — to streamline regulations and cut through decades of accumulated red tape while also improving the utility and timeliness of state-level child welfare data.
The message is simple: the system must serve children, not bureaucracy. ACF is now cataloging its regulations, policies, and practices to identify “high-cost and low-value” administrative burdens, as directed by the executive order.
We were given 180 days to deliver this review, but it took only 180 hours to identify the first and most obvious candidate for reform: the Child and Family Services Reviews (CFSR).
These reviews were designed to assess state compliance with federal child welfare laws. Yet a new evaluation of 25 years of CFSR results evokes Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result.
Here are the outcomes:
- Round 1 (2001–2004): 0 states achieved substantial conformity on all seven outcomes and all seven systemic factors.
- Round 2 (2007–2010): 0 states.
- Round 3 (2015–2018): 0 states.
- Round 4 (2023–present): again, 0 states to date.
Every state fails every round. And when they fail, every state is placed on a Program Improvement Plan (PIP), negotiated under the threat of financial penalty. One might assume that 25 years of universal PIPs have improved outcomes.
They have not.
The same report shows declining performance: states met an average of 5.4 outcomes/systemic factors in Round 1, 4.4 in Round 2, 2.8 in Round 3, and just 2.6 so far in Round 4.
Meanwhile, the administrative burden has ballooned:
- $443,000–$620,000 in federal costs per state for each Round 4 review (not including state costs);
- Up to 1,989 federal staff hours per review
- PIPs averaging 44 pages covering up to 14 mandated measures.
This is busywork — expensive, repetitive, punitive busywork — and it has not improved child or family outcomes.
When every state “fails” every time, the problem isn’t the states. It’s the test. Accountability matters, but the current system does not deliver it.
ACF is restoring integrity to a system in desperate need of it. In short, we are putting the PIP on a PIP.
How the New PIP Can Help Achieve A Home for Every Child
This week, ACF issued CFSR Technical Bulletin #14, giving states a choice:
- Remain in the traditional PIP model, which has yielded 25 years of universal failure; or
- Opt into a new PIP approach designed to generate meaningful data and inform a comprehensive modernization of the CFSR.
Consistent with the president’s executive order, states choosing the new PIP will help expand and accelerate child welfare data publication—laser-focused on our ambitious goal: A Home for Every Child.
Our central outcome metric is straightforward: a foster-home-to-child ratio greater than 1:1 in every state.
When this ratio is healthy — when available foster homes exceed the number of children who need them — opportunities flourish. Caseworkers can make decisions based on children’s best interests, not limited options. Children avoid sleeping in offices or cycling through short-term rentals. Siblings are more likely to stay together. More youth remain in family-based settings.
States can improve this ratio in two ways: strengthening the numerator to increase the number of foster homes, and/or reducing the denominator to safely keep children out of foster care.
States can grow the number of safe, loving foster homes in any number of ways, including through streamlined kinship licensure, better identification of kin and fictive kin, improved recruitment of new foster homes, and retaining families who have already volunteered as foster parents.
States can reduce the denominator and safely keep children from entering foster care through evidence-based prevention addressing mental health and substance use, achieving faster permanency outcomes, strengthening legal advocacy and representation for parents and youth, and the strategic deployment of innovative technological solutions like predictive risk modeling.
Most states will pursue both sides of the equation. Importantly, the new PIP empowers them to design locally tailored solutions rather than forcing one-size-fits-all requirements from Washington.
Under the new PIP, states can concentrate their efforts on a handful of high-priority interventions grounded in their CFSR results.
I saw firsthand the power of this ratio when I ran Idaho’s child welfare system. In just one year, Idaho increased from 74 to 104 foster homes per 100 children—eliminating emergency short-term placements, expanding kinship care, augmenting prevention services, improving licensing timeliness, reducing congregate care, lowering costs, and restoring public trust.
A single unifying metric didn’t solve every challenge in Idaho. But it created clarity, urgency, and measurable progress—something the traditional PIP never achieved.
What the New PIP Option Delivers
National data on foster homes is surprisingly scarce. Using the best available source, The Imprint’s collection of state-reported foster care capacity data, we estimate the current national average at 57 foster homes per 100 foster children.
Under the redesigned PIP, states will report monthly ratio data to ACF, enabling real-time comparisons across states and stronger accountability. The ratio will be supported by 7 to 10 “chaser” measures drawn from automated data systems, ensuring states improve their ratio in ways that enhance child safety and well-being rather than cutting corners.
This enables them to focus on implementing a small set of strategies directly tied to improving their foster-home-to-child ratio, not on sprawling checklists. They are no longer penalized for missing arbitrary PIP metrics; instead, they are accountable for implementing clear, locally calibrated strategies that increase their ratio.
These measures will help shape the next generation of CFSR reforms.
Above all, the new PIP respects what has always been true: state child welfare agencies and their partners, informed by individuals with lived experience, are best positioned to determine what their communities need most.
Technical Bulletin #14 is the first step in a broader modernization of federal oversight—one that reduces administrative burden and focuses on what truly drives safety, permanency, and well-being.
Our aim is a federal accountability system that works: one that supports performance improvement, measures what matters, and earns public confidence. That is why we have put the PIP on a PIP—and why we’ve aligned it with A Home for Every Child. States joining this effort will help us move closer to a future in which homes wait for children, rather than children waiting for homes.
