Alex Adams, who leads the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) for the Trump administration, promised a “bonfire” of deregulation at the agency, lamenting the buildup of dated material for states seeking clarity on federal policy and funding.
“We need to barbecue this stuff so that people know what they are actually expected to do,” he said from his Washington, D.C., headquarters. “You’re going to see a bonfire next year. And I would be stunned if anyone misses it because it’s program instructions for yesteryear. It’s grants that haven’t been funded since I was in diapers.”
He made good on that vow today.
ACF has rescinded 35,781 pages of sub-regulatory guidance, representing 74% of such material. A press release announcing the move outlined the process that ACF said was used to arrive at this culling.
It began with the Office of Legislation and Budget compiling a complete list of sub-regulations, which ended up totaling more than 4,000 documents and 55,776 pages going back 50 years.
ACF program offices were then tasked with reviewing the ones that applied to their corner of the agency, and marking them as obsolete unless at least one of the following was true:
- It was current and essential for grant compliance
- It clarified complex requirements “in ways not available elsewhere”
- It addressed ongoing program operations
- It could not be easily incorporated into other ACF guidance
The review was entirely done by humans without the assistance of any AI tools, according to an ACF reply to Youth Services Insider today. It did not respond to a question about whether there was a specific path for the public to challenge any individual rescinded document.
At the Children’s Bureau, which oversees most child welfare funding and policy within ACF, nearly two-thirds of guidance documents were rescinded — a total of 8,923 pages.
All of ACF’s continuing guidance is still easily searchable at HHS.gov/guidance. The agency did not remove the rescinded pages, but instead has marked them: “You are viewing content from the ACF Archives that is no longer current but remains on our site for reference.”
That archive is searchable at: https://acf.gov/archive.