A month into the second term of Donald Trump, the top jobs at the Department of Justice and Health and Human Services have been filled by Pam Bondi and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Soon enough, we will start to see names announced for the leadership positions more specific to child welfare and youth justice.
For now, here’s a quick roundup of who is at least temporarily in charge of some of the key agencies and divisions on youth and family policy, all of whom have “acting” status and are thus limited in the amount of time they can spend in the position.
Administration for Children and Families (ACF): The administration has put Andrew Gradison in as the acting assistant secretary at ACF, a large division of Health and Human Services that oversees a range of family supports and services that includes welfare, Head Start and foster care and adoption. Gradison is certainly familiar with the issues: he spent nine years working for the House Ways and Means Committee, which wields considerable influence on child welfare legislation. He spent the past two years on the Senate side as a policy advisor for the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Gradison’s bio on the ACF website mentions that he deepened his policy expertise working for U.S. Representative Jason Smith on Ways and Means. Smith just helped push through a consequential reauthorization of the Title IV-B program, which opened the federal program up to funding concrete family supports like housing and financial help in addition to services.
While ACF presides largely over domestic policy and funding, perhaps its most hot-button operation at the moment is the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which among other things handles the response when unaccompanied children arrive at the border in search of asylum. A decade ago this was about a $250 million operation, and with several surges of minors arriving in the past ten years, it has ballooned into the billions.
Youth Services Insider expects that the Unaccompanied Children program, as it is known, will emerge as part of the Trump administration’s agenda for major reforms of immigration policy. Last week the administration abruptly halted legal aid to children in this pipeline, before changing its mind and reinstating the contract for now. The funding is up for renewal in March.
Also last week, the New York Post reported on an internal memo it had obtained showing that HHS would launch an investigation into the program’s vetting of adult sponsors for asylum-seeking children inside the United States. From the Post:
“An internal memo viewed by The Post details how the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) ignored obvious safety risks and prioritized quickly releasing the youths under the Unaccompanied Children Program (UAC), creating a situation that made vulnerable kids easy targets.”
The Office of Refugee Resettlement’s director is Mellissa Harper, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. But Gradison will certainly play a role in what happens to the program, and the Post story credits him directly with providing several photos that have HHS concerned about the sponsor vetting process.
Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACYF): Cheri Hoffman, who was the director of the children and youth policy division for Health and Human Services for five years, served as the deputy commissioner at ACYF under Biden leader Rebecca Jones Gaston. This job requires Senate confirmation, so Hoffman could be there awhile; Jones Gaston wasn’t confirmed during the Biden administration until the very end of 2022.
Children’s Bureau (CB): The bureau, which is housed within ACYF and directly oversees spending and policy in the child welfare arena, is led by an associate commissioner appointed by the president but does not require Senate confirmation. During the first Trump term this office was held by Jerry Milner, and during Biden it was Aysha Schomburg.
After Schomburg departed the Biden administration, and not long before the inauguration of President Trump, Krista Thomas was brought in to serve as the acting association commissioner and she remains in that role today. Thomas is well known in the child welfare space, having worked for 10 years at the Children’s Bureau before spending that past decade at well-known research and policy shop Chapin Hall.
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP): This small corner of the Justice Department oversees compliance with federal standards on juvenile justice and administering a modest amount of grants to courts, mentoring programs and more. Led by Liz Ryan during the Biden administration, career Justice Department official Eileen Garry will head the office until the Trump team appoints someone. Last time around, it was former Arkansas prosecutor Caren Harp. This job used to require Senate confirmation, but has not for more than a decade at this point.