Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon delivered a strongly worded letter to President Trump’s top child welfare appointee this week, arguing that the Trump administration’s actions this year are “corrupting the nation’s premier child welfare agency and distorting its core mission.” The result has “put our nation’s most vulnerable children at grave risk,” he states.
In the letter addressed to Alex Adams, assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, Wyden asks that Adams pay “urgent attention” to current threats to the child welfare system, the early education program Head Start and unaccompanied migrant kids in federal custody.
The Administration for Children and Families did not respond to calls and e-mails Wednesday seeking Adams’ response to the letter.
Wyden — an architect of several major child welfare bills — lists four policy priorities he wants Adams to focus on: Strengthening oversight and reducing reliance on congregate care for children; boosting federal funding for kinship caregivers; standing up for LGBTQ+ youth in foster care and guaranteeing consistent funding for Head Start. The letter also demands that Adams’ agency “immediately cease coercive efforts to terrorize, pressure, or deport unaccompanied children and sponsors” through the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Republicans in the U.S. Senate confirmed Adams on Oct. 7 to oversee the $70 billion federal agency that has responsibility for a wide range of social services for low income children and families. The Administration for Children and Families (ACF), located in the Department of Health and Human Services, also includes the Children’s Bureau, which funds and oversees the nation’s state-run child welfare systems. The Trump administration’s changes this year to ACF’s Office of Head Start and Office of Refugee Resettlement – prior to Adams’ appointment – have faced intense pushback and lawsuits.
Adams, a former Idaho child welfare director, has yet to say much publicly since the 43-day government shutdown ended last week. But at his Senate confirmation hearing in July, he pledged to put foster care and adoption first on his list of priorities: “If past is prologue, where I intend to spend disproportionate time and my energy, and a disproportionate amount of my effort is improving child welfare, specifically the foster care and adoption systems,” Adams said.
In a late October introductory letter to state directors, he said he aimed to “reduce the regulatory burden” on states, tribes and territories’ federal funding, and give them “as much discretion as allowable” to realize priorities like expanding foster care prevention, recruitment of foster families and speeding up adoptions.
But in letters to some state child welfare directors obtained by the Imprint, Adams communicated another early priority that prompted a sharp rebuke from Wyden: He notified at least five states that they are under investigation for having requirements that he says rule out the possibility of licensing foster and adoptive caregivers who, for example, don’t want to use preferred pronouns for trans youth. Adams said gender identity-affirming policies “deny qualified foster and adoptive parents the opportunity to provide children a loving home solely because they cannot, in good conscience, commit to affirming a hypothetical child’s gender identity.”
Last week, Adams stood with President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump during the President’s signing of a new executive order outlining priorities for modernizing technology in the child welfare system, and boosting support for transition-age foster youth.
Wyden is the ranking leader for Democrats in the minority on the powerful Senate Finance Committee, and has long been an active lawmaker on child welfare matters.