The Trump administration did not waste any time rolling back a whole bunch of executive actions and rulemaking done by the Biden administration, which is in line with the first day of his first term.
Youth Services Insider will have an eye out for more information to add on items relevant to child welfare and youth justice observers, but here are a few that jumped out right away.
Rules
In addition to halting progress on any Biden-era rule that is in the pipeline and not announced yet, Trump issued an order to federal agencies to “consider postponing for 60 days from the date of this memorandum the effective date for any rules that have been published in the Federal Register, or any rules that have been issued in any manner but have not taken effect, for the purpose of reviewing any questions of fact, law, and policy that the rules may raise.”
As The Imprint has covered in detail, there was quite a bit of rulemaking done on child welfare in the last years of the Biden administration. The two biggest — one on kinship licensing and payments, the other on legal counsel for parents and children involved in child welfare cases — have already taken effect.
A rule establishing a requirement for child welfare agencies to develop “designated placements” that would be supportive of LGBTQ+ youth has taken effect, but gives systems until 2026 to actually implement the requirement. Either way, YSI expects that this requirement will be rescinded even if it isn’t subject to this specific rule freeze.
The last big child welfare rule finalized by the Biden administration dealt with the inclusion of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) into annual federal data collection on child welfare. This rule is set to take effect on February 3, so this could be frozen and fall back under review.
If that happens, it is yet another ride on the bureaucratic roller coaster for efforts to have ICWA information captured every year. The Obama administration set plans for its inclusion, which were then frozen and rewritten by Trump. That rewrite became the subject of a lawsuit to restore the pre-Trump rule and ultimately, the Biden administration just reissued rules of its own that mirrored the Obama version.
Use of Private Prisons
This is a pure rerun of 2017. Obama announced in his last year that the Bureau of Prisons would move away from contracting with privately run correctional facilities. This was rolled back one month into the Trump administration.
Just a few days into his tenure, Biden returned to an elimination of private contracts. And now the Bureau of Prisons has freedom to do so again.
For youth and their advocates in the justice world, this is a largely symbolic back-and-forth. There are plenty of state and local systems that outsource juvenile justice facility operations to private entities, but the federal Bureau of Prisons does not incarcerate anyone under the age of 18 in its matrix of adult prisons. Most of the youth in the bureau’s orbit hail from the District of Columbia and are held in publicly run facilities until they turn 18.
Regulating Artificial Intelligence
An October 2023 executive order set some expectations for the executive branch around the ethical and appropriate use of AI. It instructed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to develop guidance around the use of this technology, including:
Incorporation of equity principles in AI-enabled technologies used in the health and human services sector, using disaggregated data on affected populations and representative population data sets when developing new models, monitoring algorithmic performance against discrimination and bias in existing models, and helping to identify and mitigate discrimination and bias in current systems.
The deployment of predictive analytics and other AI tools to help guide decision-making in child welfare and youth justice has been fraught with concerns about the possibility that race- and disability-based biases getting baked into opaque algorithms that would then perpetuate existing disproportionality in these systems.
On its way out the door, the Biden leadership team at HHS did publish its strategic plan for the use of AI, though it is worth noting that the Affordable Care Act already prohibited any discrimination in the use of algorithms by entities (including child welfare agencies) that receive federal funds from HHS.