WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services has gathered a group of states across the nation committed to increasing the number of licensed foster homes, battling an alarming ratio of foster homes to foster children through increased reporting of data and less red tape.
Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have joined “A Home for Every Child,” The Daily Wire can first report, a bipartisan initiative of HHS’ Administration for Children and Families. The program seeks to rectify the massive gap in licensed foster homes for children in the United States — for every 100 children in care, there are only 57 licensed foster homes. HHS has been working to close that gap.
The District of Columbia, Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Nebraska, Rhode Island, and Iowa have each committed to organizing their child welfare systems around this 57 to 100 metric, to change the national metric to a one to one ratio.
Oklahoma joined first, in February, and was the first state to have its “Program Improvement Plan” approved by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF). Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Kentucky quickly followed and already have their “Program Improvement Plans” both negotiated and approved, ACF said.
“When we don’t have enough homes for those children, they get placed in non-traditional settings that are not conducive to long-term growth and development of the child,” explained Assistant Secretary Alex Adams in a phone interview with The Daily Wire. The kids get placed in hotels, Airbnbs, or other care settings which are known to be locations of vulnerability. “So we need to increase nationally the ratio of homes to kids.”
The Home Every Child Campaign will reduce red tape and paperwork and other onerous requirements, but a major part of the endeavor is that the states involved will report back to HHS with data much more frequently, Adams explained. That will help HHS understand which states are taking action to help foster kids in an appropriate and safe way.
The move builds on the executive order that President Donald Trump signed in November. First Lady Melania Trump’s Fostering the Future Executive Order focused on improving foster care outcomes.
“This is the manifestation of that,” Adams said. He described an “unbelievable, bipartisan response [from] both red and blue states.”
“I think that’s a testament to the executive order, the vision that First Lady Melania Trump had in particular, the concrete objectives of both improving data transparency as well as reducing administrative burdens since a lot of the federal requirements in the past just zap time and energy from productive activities.”
The Administration for Children and Families will be releasing public scorecards displaying each state’s metrics in the coming months, HHS shared with The Daily Wire. That will include the foster home to child ratio, meaning that for the first time, this data will be available at the national level.
One aspect that has impacted homes for foster care children, particularly under President Joe Biden’s administration, was ideological requirements for foster parents. In Vermont, for example, parents who espoused Christian views on gender ideology were blocked from fostering children in need, even though the state desperately needed foster parents.
“I’ve never talked to a state child welfare director who said their biggest issue was they had too many families going to foster, and in fact it’s the exact opposite,” Adams said, asked about this point. “Like I said, we’ve got a nationwide shortage of foster families, so the message that we send to prospective foster parents is so critical.”
Statistically, he pointed out, members of houses of worship are the “most likely to raise their hands and volunteer and want to pursue license as a foster family.” The message that is sent to Christian families willing to be foster parents is extremely important, he noted, as it can either attract or detract from that goal of a one to one ratio.
“The policy certainly does play a role, and I think what excites us about this is we’re gonna get monthly data on each of these states that’s participating, what the ratio of homes to kids is, and I think we’ll separate the wheat from the chaff pretty quickly,” he added. “We’ll see some states doing well, we’ll see some states not doing well, and I think by bringing some transparency to it, increasing the frequency of the data will help inform which policies either facilitate or indeed foster family recruitment and retention.”
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