The findings released by Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff were quickly rebuffed by state officials, who called the conclusions “political gamesmanship.”
A United States Senator released a scathing report today on the state of foster care in Georgia, the results of an expansive yearlong investigation that could well describe child welfare systems across the country.
A panel within the Senate’s judiciary committee found “systemic” failures in keeping children safe from physical and sexual abuse at home; hundreds of foster children falling prey to human trafficking and an excessive use of mind-numbing medications in response to misbehavior. The state’s child welfare agency has hobbled along despite chronic staffing shortages, according to the investigation released on social media by U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff. Meanwhile, the agency has provided insufficient training to staff, mismanaged abuse and neglect investigations and retaliated against employees who reported internal wrongdoing, the inquiry found.
Investigators noted far-reaching impacts that confirmed earlier findings by Georgia’s independent Office of the Child Advocate, stating that “systemic failures to keep children safe from physical and sexual abuse have contributed to the deaths of children.”
Juvenile court judges provided rare testimony. They stated that the Division of Family and Children’s Services (DFCS) — which operates under the state’s Department of Human Services — “improperly prolonged children’s time in juvenile detention.” The incarceration was allowed despite the children’s eligibility for release, the report stated, simply because state officials had not located another more appropriate placement. The wrongfully jailed included children with special needs, judges testified.
The Senate’s inquiry described basic health care as woefully inadequate.
“As a result,” it stated, “children with routine medical needs have been left with painful, protracted symptoms.”
State agency pushes back
The investigation began 13 months ago after a joint letter sent to Georgia officials by Democratic Sen. Ossoff and Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn.
But the state’s child welfare agency immediately pushed back against the 64-page findings, calling it “political gamesmanship.” The Georgia Department of Human Services is part of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s administration.
In response to a request for comment from The Imprint, a spokesperson for the department rejected the report as unfounded, partisan, and produced without adequate feedback from the state agency. In an 11-page rebuttal to many of the claims in the Senate report, state officials highlighted many metrics where Georgia’s performance exceeds that of other states nationwide — including maltreatment rates and placement changes within the foster care system that are well below national averages.
The spokesperson said in an email that while the subcommittee took months to produce the report, it provided the state’s children and family services leadership “only two days to respond to a heavily redacted version of the final report.” The email also noted that the report was “written and supported solely by staff of the majority party,” a reference to the Democratic leadership of the Senate Judiciary’s Human Rights and the Law subcommittee.
“Highlighting Senator Ossoff’s staff’s obvious lack of subject matter expertise regarding complex child welfare issues, the subcommittee’s report omits key context, ignores relevant data that undermine the report’s primary assertions,” the lengthy message sent to The Imprint states. It added that the report “takes great lengths to misrepresent DFCS actions, facts about various cases, and outcomes for many children in the state’s care.”
For example: The Senate report stated that after judges testified about the wrongful jailing of foster children, three additional judges corroborated that testimony. But the state child welfare agency noted that a representative of the Council of Juvenile Court Judges of Georgia said the testimony may not be representative of all its members.
The Georgia state spokesperson added a message to the senator behind the inquiry, who is chair of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law: “We encourage Sen. Ossoff to focus his efforts on putting the welfare of children above political gamesmanship.”
Gov. Kemp has been widely discussed as a potential challenger to Sen. Ossoff’s bid for re-election in 2026. Blackburn’s office — Ossoff’s Republican partner at the start of the child welfare inquiry — did not respond to a request for comment by press time. Hours after its release, her website and social media accounts had no mention of the Georgia child welfare investigation.
The ‘worst part’ of being in care
The Senate report follows years of press and independent watchdog reports focused on Georgia’s foster care system, including stories published in 2022 and 2023 by The Atlanta Journal Constitution that focused on the state system’s failure to keep children safe from physical and sexual abuse at home, and foster youth left sleeping in hotels.
To conduct its inquiry, Senate staff reviewed thousands of pages of confidential documents, reviewed years of audits and interviewed 100 witnesses, including leaders at both the Department of Human Services and Office of the Child Advocate. Four public hearings in Washington D.C. and Georgia included testimony from juvenile court judges, former foster youth, representatives of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the former ombudsperson of Georgia’s child welfare system and members of the FBI.
Far-reaching testimony on a range of issues marked the public hearings.
“Seeing all this assembled should take our breath away…definite red flags and reason for deeper inquiry.”
Melissa carter, executive director, barton child law and policy center
In October, Rachel Aldridge testified that her 2-year-old daughter Brooklyn might still be alive if child welfare authorities heard her pleas to keep the toddler away from her father. In 2018, Brooklyn was murdered by her father’s girlfriend, and later sentenced to life in prison.
At the same Senate hearing, a survivor of the system, Mon’a Houston, described moving through more than a dozen foster and group homes, and ending up in a facility encased in barbed wire.
“One of the worst parts about being in care is that I was overmedicated,” she said through tears. Staff at the child welfare agency “kept telling my doctors to up my dosage because I was not behaving.”
The authors of the Senate report stated that Georgia’s Department of Human Services participated in initial interviews, but after the subcommittee held its public hearings, declined follow-up requests.
Still, their findings open with an acknowledgement of the tough nature of child protective services work. The subcommittee “recognizes and honors” the daily efforts of the frontline workforce, they stated, “the overwhelming majority of whom work hard in good faith to serve Georgia’s vulnerable children. The report noted the “inherent difficulty” of the work, given chronic underfunding and a shortage of foster care placements — problems not unique to Georgia.
“Indeed, a purpose of this case study is to yield insights that can inform reform of foster care systems nationwide,” the investigative report stated, “many of which face similar or even deeper challenges.”
But in its review of federal audits, the investigation found that the Division of Family and Children’s Services “consistently fails to assess and address safety threats to children, including by failing to adequately investigate reports of physical abuse.” Senate staffers attributed mismanagement in the state’s handling of child abuse and neglect investigations as “a key contributor to child deaths and serious injuries.”
Politics at play?
In an interesting twist not often found in critical reports on foster care systems, the Senate subcommittee described sharp-elbowed behavior within the Department of Human Services. The department is headed by Commissioner Candice Broce, who is also director of its 7,000-employee Division of Family and Children Services. Prior to her current post, Broce served as chief operating officer in Gov. Kemp’s office, and as communications director and chief deputy executive counsel in his administration.
The Senate report describes her agency’s attempt to “undermine accountability and oversight,” by taking over hiring for a citizen review panel that has been “harshly critical” of the child welfare agency. And in 2022, according to emails noted in the recent investigation, Broce asked the inspector general’s office at the Department of Human Services to produce as “strong of a rebuttal as possible” to a critical report produced by the Office of the Child Advocate.
A department spokesperson denies these claims, noting that Commissioner Broce never asked for “a particular outcome” from her office’s inspector general, and that changes at the citizen review panel “will not lessen oversight.”
‘Definite red flags’
After reviewing the final report, one leading Georgia child advocate called for state leaders to take heed.
“Seeing all this assembled should take our breath away,” said Melissa Carter, executive director of the Barton Child Law and Policy Center at the Emory University School of Law. Noting “definite red flags and reason for deeper inquiry,” she said the findings warrant a “less defensive and dismissal” response, and instead a “resolve to understand these problems and commitment to working together on solutions and improvements.”
Other system insiders applauded Sen. Ossoff for elevating key issues. But some noted the final report’s inadequate discussion of foster children’s parents, who are disproportionately poor people of color, most of whom are eventually reunified with their children.
“I know they had child attorneys testify, they had judges testify, but I don’t know why they didn’t have parents’ attorneys testify,” said Amber Walden, a family law attorney in the Atlanta area. “I don’t know how people think about the child welfare system without thinking about the parent – it’s just baffling to me.”
April 11 correction: This article has been updated to correct Amber Walden’s last name.
