One year ago at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), I walked through the doors of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) with a simple conviction: Government should spend less time measuring activity and more time improving outcomes for children and families.
That sounds obvious. But in human services, process has a way of becoming the product. Forms multiply. Guidance documents accumulate. Review processes get longer. Requirements created for good reasons outlive those reasons by years, and sometimes decades.
Over the past 12 months, my team and I have worked to reverse this common pattern. We have focused ACF on a handful of clear outcomes, given states and grantees more room to solve problems, and stripped away work that consumes time without helping a child or family.
I’m proud to say we have made real progress.
A home for every child
In November, we launched A Home for Every Child, our organizing goal for child welfare and a central part of ACF’s work under President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump’s Fostering the Future for American Children and Families executive order.
The goal is straightforward: Foster homes should be waiting for children, not children waiting for homes. That means increasing the supply of safe, loving foster and kinship homes while, even more importantly, safely reducing the number of children who need foster care in the first place.
All 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have now joined A Home for Every Child. Thirty jurisdictions have completed streamlined Program Improvement Plans (PIPs) built around measurable outcomes. And a public dashboard is on the brink of launching, so states, practitioners, and the public can see if states really are improving their ratio of available homes relative to children in need of care.
While this is meaningful progress, in football terms, we are in the red zone, but we are not spiking the football — yet.
A PIP does not improve a child’s life. Neither does a dashboard. We score when states report the data and, more importantly, act on what is working.
The data must lead to concrete action. If a child needs foster care on a Friday night, a safe, prepared family should be ready to welcome that child. If a parent can safely keep a child at home with timely treatment or other support, the system in place should make that help easier to reach. These are the outcomes the ratio is meant to drive, which is why A Home for Every Child is not a single program. It is an organizing principle for a series of targeted actions. We are making prevention dollars easier to use; accelerating policies that help states keep families safely together; funding responsible predictive risk modeling so existing data can become useful information; streamlining licensing for foster families; and making technology available to simplify licensing, especially for relatives and kin who too often encounter unnecessary barriers when they want to care for their own family.
Each effort attacks a different part of the same problem. Together, the various programs and strategies give states more tools to make sure a child has the right home at the right time.
Ending the Orphan Tax
From the moment I received the call to join the Trump administration, I knew ending the orphan tax would be a primary mission. In fact, I so believed in this aim that one of the first pieces of décor in my office was a big U.S. map I could color in when states acted to end the orphan tax.
When a foster child loses a parent and receives Social Security survivor benefits, some states have historically used those benefits to reimburse themselves for foster care costs. My team and I (and most Americans when you ask them) believe those dollars belong to the child and should help that child build a future.
When we began asking governors to consider changing their state’s policy on the Social Security survivor benefits, only 11 states had acted. Today, 37 have ended or substantially reformed the orphan tax. Only thirteen remain.
This progress did not come because Washington issued a memo. It came because governors, legislators, advocates, former foster youth, and state child welfare leaders took the issue seriously. I am grateful to them, and we will keep pushing until the map is complete.
A parallel effort is creating Fostering the Future Accounts for foster youth so that they have access to resources — like survivor’s benefits — that can change their long-term trajectory. To date, 26 states have committed to creating these accounts, and we will work until the remaining ones do so as well.
Cutting red tape to give time back
Time has been called the great equalizer — everyone has the same amount, yet bureaucracy has found a way to tax the time of child welfare providers. That’s why ACF is working hard to give time back to the people who serve children and families.
ACF works with thousands of state, tribal, territorial, local, and nonprofit partners. Every unnecessary hour they spend satisfying Washington’s paperwork requirements is an hour they cannot spend serving children and families.
So, the ACF team has been systematically reducing administrative burden in all its forms. We shrunk ACF’s regulatory footprint by roughly 30% and counting. We identified 74% of accumulated subregulatory guidance documents for elimination and promptly cut them. And when Paperwork Reduction Act packages are renewed, our goal is to reduce the paperwork burden by 30% each time.
The example of Annual Progress and Services Report (APSR) comes to mind. These reports historically averaged about 256 pages. We got it down to five.
Five is not a magic number. The discipline is what matters: ask what information the federal government actually needs, collect that, and stop demanding the rest.
Permissionless innovation
Similarly, at ACF, we have implemented a philosophy that we call “permissionless innovation.” If the law gives a state, tribe, or grantee discretion, they should be able to exercise that discretion responsibly without first asking Washington for permission. ACF’s job is to enforce the rules that actually exist, not turn preferences, old emails, inherited checklists, or “the way we have always done it” into new federal requirements.
This is about clear accountability. Grantees should be responsible for following the law and delivering results. The federal government should be responsible for explaining the rules it is enforcing and getting out of the way when the law leaves room for local judgment.
What comes next
None of ACF’s victories or ongoing goals belong to one person or agency.
I am grateful to Donald and Melania Trump for putting foster youth and families at the center of Fostering the Future. I am grateful to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., our partners across HHS, governors and legislators from both parties, tribal leaders, state and local human services officials, advocates, researchers, community and faith-based organizations, foster and kinship families, and people with lived experience who continue to tell us what is working and what is getting in the way.
I am especially grateful to ACF’s career staff. They have taken on substantial change while continuing to administer programs that millions of Americans depend on. Reform is easy to announce; it is much harder to implement, and they are doing that work every day.
One year is in the books, but we have a great deal left to do.
The next phase is focused on converting activity into outcomes. States will report A Home for Every Child data, and we will see what practices moves the ratio of available homes to children in need of care. We will modify what needs to be changed, expand what works, and make durable the reforms that prove themselves. We will keep pressing the remaining 13 states to end the orphan tax. And we will continue to eliminate unnecessary paperwork, guidance, regulation, and permission-seeking so more resources reach children and families.
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Year one was about moving the ball down the field.
Next is about putting points on the board.
Alex Adams is Assistant Secretary of the Administration for Children and Families.