In November, the Trump administration announced that “A Home for Every Child” would be its driving child welfare goal for the president’s second term. The idea: getting a 1:1 ratio of homes available to youth in foster care. The goal to achieve this ratio will come through some combination of reduced removals of children into the foster care system and an increased number of foster homes..
Just before the holidays, the Administration for Children and Families dangled an incentive for states to opt in on this initiative while halting work related to the much maligned Child and Family Services Review (CFSR) process. Essentially, states could forgo the fairly laborious and paperwork-heavy program improvement plans connected to CFSR failures, and instead choose a simpler plan aimed at moving toward the 1:1 ratio.
Youth Services Insider had a chance to briefly discuss the early going for A Home for Every Child with Alex Adams, Trump’s assistant secretary for family support. Here’s what we learned.
How many?
So far, four states have taken the Trump administration up on A Home for Every Child, all central Republican states: Oklahoma, Missouri, Louisiana and Tennessee. Each of these states held a public event to announce its early adoption of the Trump initiative, with governors signing proclamations and executive orders attesting to the new relationship.
Adams said he expects to have a full “cohort” of first adopters on board by the end of March, somewhere on the order of ten states. He said that cohort will include blue states, which was definitely something Youth Services Insider was wondering about. Surely the option of a less regulated and burdensome PIP is attractive, but the optics of appearing aligned with the Trump administration on family and child welfare policy might be too much. For instance, it is entirely possible that the administration will advance or at least endorse policies around the presence of faith-based groups in child welfare — specifically, their ability to discriminate based on religious ideology — that those governors will detest. There is also the ongoing standoff between ACF and several blue states over child care spending.
What Exactly Are States Committing To?
It is obvious what states are getting out of this exchange: a CFSR process that has close to zero percent approval ratings in the field at this point. But what exactly are they committing to?
Adams said that all participants would be sharing virtually real-time information about their foster home-to-youth ratio, along with a handful of “chaser” metrics off a large menu of options. Those metrics would pertain to the specific plans they mapped out in negotiations with ACF.
So far, there aren’t any public details about what the four states that have opted in already A are homing in on. Our guess is that this might be something ACF makes public for every state in this first cohort, all at once.
So how does Adams intend to hold states accountable for actually working to improve? He suggested that the “radical transparency” of the initiative will be the key there. Expect a public dashboard to be up soon that tracks each state’s progress
“We’ll be publicly posting all the data,” Adams said, “so if out of 10 states, nine are improving and one is not…we believe the media can be partners there.”
What’s the “True” Ratio?
Most of the media coverage on the first four states in have referenced home-to-child ratios that are predicated entirely on two things: The Imprint’s tally of licensed foster homes, collected last year from each state, and the number of youth in foster care per the most recent federal collection from fiscal 2024.
In some states, that might be very close to the true ratio. But The Imprint has long relied on each state’s interpretation of what a licensed home is, and state reporting to the federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System is not entirely consistent.
Adams said ACF is providing a methodology for how participating states should calculate both the numerator and denominator, so that there is no discrepancy in measuring progress.