Trump EO Seeks Changes for Those Transitioning From Foster Care

We can expect to see changes in the federal foster care program in the coming year in response to a recent White House executive order that calls for more community supports and greater participation by faith-based organizations.

President Trump has issued Executive Order (EO) 14359, Fostering the Future for American Children and Families, which aims to develop better support systems that offer “educational, career and relational success” for those transitioning out of foster care. The EO calls for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to take the following actions over the next six months:

• update applicable regulations, policies and practices to improve the collection, publication and transparency of state-level child-welfare data, including eliminating the need for duplicative or unnecessary high-cost and low-value reporting requirements;
• promote the modernization of state child-welfare information systems using effective foster care management and outcome-tracking platforms;
• expand states’ use of technological solutions, including predictive analytics and tools powered by artificial intelligence, to increase caregiver recruitment and retention rates, improve caregiver and child matching, and deploy federal child-welfare funding to maximally effective purposes and recipients; and
• publish annually a scorecard to evaluate state-level achievement of key outcomes and metrics that reduce unnecessary entries into foster care, decrease the time between reports of child maltreatment and investigations, reduce child injuries and fatalities caused by caregiver neglect and abuse, increase caregiver recruitment and retention, improve caregiver and child matching, reduce placement disruptions, decrease the average time that children spend in foster care, accelerate permanent placement for children, and increase partnerships and collaboration with appropriate nongovernmental entities, including faith-based organizations.

The EO also establishes a “Fostering the Future” initiative, under which HHS and other federal agencies, within the next six months, are called on to:

• develop partnerships with agencies and leading private sector organizations, academic institutions, and nonprofit entities to create new educational and employment opportunities for individuals who are in or are transitioning out of the foster care system;
• work with the National Design Studio to develop a ‘‘Fostering the Future’’ online platform to help individuals who have been in foster care by assessing their current needs, providing guidance regarding accessing federal, state and local programs and services for which they are eligible, including housing, education, employment, healthcare and mentoring services offering a searchable database of those and other available resources, and generating customized plans that support their needs;
• develop a strategy to reallocate funds returned by states from federal programs designed to assist individuals transitioning out of foster care so that such returned funds are used to promote educational success, occupational advancement and financial literacy and self-sufficiency for individuals transitioning out of foster care;
• increase flexibility in education and training vouchers to expand access for individuals transitioning out of foster care; and
• enable states to use educational scholarships created through tax-credited donations to scholarship-granting organizations for children in foster care.

The EO also requires HHS to “take appropriate action” — although this is not defined — to (1) address state and local policies and practices that prohibit participation in federally-funded child-welfare programs by qualified individuals or organizations based upon their sincerely-held religious beliefs or moral convictions, and (2) increase partnerships between agencies and faith-based organizations and houses of worship to serve families whose children have been placed in foster care or are at risk of being placed in foster care.

While the order has received general support from the child welfare community, some expressed concerns that it directs assistance to those currently in foster care without providing federal funding to the reasons children are in foster care in the first place, such as to prevent substance abuse and neglect by parents. “Prevention is never funded the way it should be funded,” said Johanna Greeson, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and managing faculty director of the Field Center for Children’s Policy, Practice and Research. And while the nonprofit Youth Law Center also approved of the aims of the order, it did note that partnerships with faith-based and other community organizations “must be voluntary, youth-affirming and respectful of youth’s identities and lived experiences.”

It will be interesting to see what develops out of this order.

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