It’s not every day that President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump hold a joint press conference to launch new policy initiatives. But last week they appeared together to announce a new executive order on foster care. Some parts of the order simply represent a consensus of bipartisan pablum that will change nothing. But others hint at the possibility of real innovation in our child welfare system and a sense that the president is clearly rejecting some of the bad ideas that have infected this sector.
The part of the executive order that has gotten the most attention has been a focus on foster youth “aging out” of the system. So much of the public worries about these young people because they are the most visible. They are struggling with substance use, homelessness, unemployment and criminality. But the truth is that creating more educational and occupational opportunities for these young people as the order suggests is well-meaning but will likely have little impact. We already have plenty of such programs, but a group suffering from all of the problems listed above is unlikely to be able to successfully take advantage of them. Many of these young people have been left in abusive and neglectful homes for so many years that their high levels of trauma and mental health challenges have made the transition to independent adulthood all but impossible.
The most important changes in our child welfare systems need to happen early — for instance, creating effective policies for ensuring the safety of substance-exposed infants. Sadly, these reforms did not make it into this action.
Nevertheless, there are some useful parts of this executive order. The most innovative sections will not sound very sexy to the general public. The section on modernizing the child welfare system, for instance, is important and long overdue. The secretary of Health and Human Services has been instructed within 180 days to “update applicable regulations, policies, and practices to improve the collection, publication, utility, and transparency of State-level child-welfare data.. including … eliminating duplicative or unnecessary high-cost and low-value reporting requirements, and expanding and expediting child-welfare data publication.” State child welfare agencies are bogged down with reporting data that is barely relevant, let alone helpful for improving the lives of our most vulnerable children.
It is promising that the White House wants to encourage states’ use of technological solutions to improve the recruitment and retention of foster and adoptive parents as well, and not just because the administration wants to use “predictive analytics and tools powered by artificial intelligence” to accomplish this. The use of predictive risk modeling has been the subject of hit jobs by progressive advocates and their helpers in the media, who have suggested, mystifyingly, that the organizations that help to recruit more adoptive families are somehow responsible for racial disparities in the child welfare system. So, it is a positive development that the White House is instructing states to be open to using this technology.
Moreover, the administration’s commitment to ensuring that foster parents are not excluded because of their religious commitments from helping is long overdue. Not only did the last administration encourage this kind of unlawful discrimination, but states continue to act in unconstitutional ways, keeping great foster parents from serving because they will not, say, support hormone therapies or surgery for kids who think they have been born into the wrong bodies.
But it is even more important that the president and first lady officially recognize the shortage of foster caregivers and why it is vital to fix that. The shortage is not new, but it has been exacerbated in recent years by agencies that have come under the influence of people who think that we needlessly remove children to foster care and that (especially nonrelative) foster care is mostly unnecessary.
This idea of radically shrinking the child welfare system began on the left but it has also been embraced by libertarians and some religious conservatives as well. On the left, “abolish the child welfare system” has become the logical corollary to “defund the police.” On the right, the cry to get government out of the lives of ordinary Americans now seems to include a call to minimize or ignore the plight of children who are being abused and neglected.
In a country where more than 2,000 children are killed by abuse or neglect at the hands of their caregivers, this idea is absurd and dangerous. It is one that is tragically espoused by the American First Policy Institute, the think tank that likes to imagine itself the Trump administration’s brain trust. A recent AFPI post says that of children in foster care, the “majority [are] removed not for abuse but for conditions of poverty, parenting choices that differ from current bureaucratic standards, or the subjective judgment of government agents.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Up to 90% of families involved in the child welfare system are suffering from substance use disorders. Children who are found to be victims of neglect and removed from their homes are often living with parents who have severe mental illness or engage in domestic violence. It is true that a disproportionate number are living in poverty, but that poverty is usually a symptom of parents who are unwilling or unable to ask for help.
During his tenure, Trump has periodically rejected the ideas of his supporters — from helping Israel and Ukraine to (in what seems like a prescient move) throwing the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 under a bus during his 2024 campaign. The fact that the president’s executive order on foster care focuses on things like children’s safety and the recruitment of and retention of foster parents is a sign that the White House is ignoring misinformed advocates with dangerous agendas and charting a courageous path to help vulnerable children.