Senators from both parties sought answers from the Biden administration Wednesday, pressing a top health and human services official in a hearing on the slow rollout of a landmark foster care prevention law. They also demanded a response to a months-old letter they sent to the executive branch on that same law, the Family First Prevention Services Act.
“It’s distressing that [letter] had to go out six months ago, and now we’re going to get some help to finally get an answers from one of the branches of the federal government,” said Wyoming Republican Senator John Barrasso, referencing his congressional colleagues’ Dec. 5 letter to Xavier Becerra, the Biden Administration cabinet official who oversees health and human services — including Family First implementation.
The 2018 law created new permission for federal dollars to go toward services that can prevent removals of children for foster care after abuse or neglect allegations. At Wednesday’s Senate Finance Committee hearing, senators and expert panelists celebrated that historic shift: the Social Security Act’s multibillion-dollar Title IV-E program had primarily funded foster care for decades. Under Family First, IV-E dollars can now support mental health or substance use programs to help families avoid that outcome.
One former federal policy maker speaking at Wednesday’s hearing said the reform “helped change the tone and tenor of the child welfare field.”
But states and tribal child welfare leaders have said they are struggling to build IV-E-eligible programs — particularly for rural areas where there are few providers — and to get approval under Family First’s detailed requirements for scientific evidence of effectiveness. In their December letter to Becerra, four Republican and Democratic congressional committee leaders urged his Department of Health and Human Services to approve prevention programs for federal funding “in a more transparent, timely, and efficient manner.”
On Wednesday, Barrasso noted his state has had to delay Family First plans. Instead, Wyoming has had to partner with other states so it can include enough families for a scientific evaluation that passes federal muster.
He and his colleagues repeatedly emphasized Becerra’s lack of reply a half a year later.
“Somehow it takes a hearing and it takes a letter, but I’ll take it any way we can get the reforms,” said Senator and Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), one of the architects of the Family First bill in the last decade.
One of Becerra’s deputies, Commissioner Rebecca Jones Gaston of the Administration for Children and Families, pledged to provide a response, and urged patience.
“It’s important to emphasize that Family First is still a relatively new, optional program compared to the foster care program,” she said, speaking in a panel with three other experts and officials. “Child welfare agencies continue to manage unprecedented workforce and leadership challenges and changes.”
It wasn’t all bad news at the hearing titled “The Family First Prevention Services Act: Successes, Roadblocks, and Opportunities for Improvement”: One grandmother on the panel described taking in her infant grandson after her daughter abandoned them and becoming a community leader in Rhode Island’s support system for so-called kinship caregivers like her.
“How much better today is it for a grandparent who is faced with a situation like that?” asked Wyden, in reference to changes implemented since Family First went into effect.
“I would say that within the child welfare system, things are much better. Kinship families, they do receive support — for example, paid childcare. They receive a monthly stipend,” said Laurie Tapozada, noting that there’s also many kinship families who never come into contact with the child welfare system, and need easier paths to state support.
David Reed, a deputy director from Indiana’s state child welfare agency, said his agency had seen a steep decline in both child removals and the racial disparity among removals since Family First was approved — including a 67% decrease in the disparity between Black and white children removed from home for foster care.
“For the first time we have a glimpse of what we aspire to be — a society that acts proactively to prevent foster care, and equally important prevents abuse and neglect in the first instance,” said JooYeun Chang, a former state and federal child welfare administrator and a current program director at the Doris Duke Foundation, who also testified.
But, she noted, roughly 7.5 million children are still reported to CPS hotlines each year, with the vast majority never receiving any services — whether or not they need help.
She offered two suggestions for Congress:
- Expand who is eligible for Family First to include any family at risk of “child welfare involvement,” not just families already on the verge of losing their kids to foster care.
- Expand what services are eligible for IV-E prevention dollars to include anti-poverty programs, particularly for “moments of acute stress” in at-risk households.
As of May, Jones Gaston said, the Family First Prevention Services clearinghouse — which approves programs for funding under the law — has reviewed 177 programs, with 85 rated as “promising, supported, or well-supported.”
She acknowledged the law has limitations, including for Native American tribes. Some clearinghouse requirements prescribe “methods of evaluation” that have never been used for some tribe-specific interventions, she said.
To address the challenges with Family First implementation, Jones Gaston urged congress to approve several of the administration’s 2024 budget proposals, including:
- Increasing funding and amending the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Act
- Increasing funding for the Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention Program
- Increasing federal reimbursement rates for the Title IV-E Prevention Services Program and Title IV-E Kinship Navigator Program
- Expanding flexibility for the use of prevention plan funding
The committee also briefly discussed a suite of new federal regulations the administration proposed or finalized in recent months, which Jones Gaston said could have a “profound impact.” Two will boost funding for kinship families and families’ legal representation, and a third aimed to increase protections for LGBTQ+ foster youth.
Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford raised concerns about the latter policy, which requires child welfare agencies to have some foster care placements tailored to the needs of LGBTQ+ youth.
“What I don’t want to have is a message being sent to faith-based organizations or families that believe in a traditional marriage situation that ‘you’re no longer welcome to participate,’” he said. “That’s not the message they should receive, but my fear is some of them are receiving the message, based on this rule.”
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