Diane Sawyer is hardly a movement conservative, so it is illuminating to find the ABC anchor agreeing with the Bush administration’s assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, Wade Horn, who is one of the big names on the right. The pair both believe that American foster care needs to change, and adoption should replace foster care more often.

Foster care is something we tend to think about with the soft part of our brain, but it is also a business, as an ABC mini-series featuring Ms. Sawyer airing tonight and tomorrow points out. Every year the federal government spends some $5 billion on foster care. Dollars are not hard for states, or agencies, or families to get if they promise to deliver traditional foster care. Only states that want to experiment confront problems: they must go to the extra trouble of obtaining a waiver. On any given day some 500,000, or 1%, of children are in the foster system.

Yet the business is perverse. Once in foster care, American children spend an average of two years there. Many change homes numerous times – the dread multiple placement. The negative experience tends to shape the rest of life, according to a collaborative study cited by ABC and conducted by Harvard Medical School, the University of Michigan and a foundation called Casey Family Programs. The study found that one third of foster children changed schools ten times or more before the end of high school. More than half of foster care alumni, those over 18, have one mental health problem or the other, compared to a quarter of the general population. One in five gets a degree beyond a high school diploma. In some states, lawyers have sued on children’s behalf to stop the damaging multiple placements; but the moving around of children continues.

Wary of making decisive or controversial steps, authorities buy time with an interim answer that ruins the child’s life. Even when illegal drugs are involved, which is most of the time. They ignore a truth that has become bitterly clear in recent years: a parent who is on meth is probably never going to be a good parent. The result is a default system with an emphasis on process. When no individual carries the responsibility of parenting, children fall between cracks. Nixzmary Brown, the seven year old whose stepfather bashed her head into a tub faucet in Brooklyn in January, was not with foster parents at the time of her death. Still, she too was caught between agencies. School authorities and officials from New York City had staked out different positions on Nixzmary’s school absences, instead of concentrating on the proximate danger in her own bathroom.

The adoption solution has been out of fashion in recent decades. But many people like the idea. An ABC NEWS/Time poll on foster care that accompanies the show suggests that about half of citizens think that their state is not doing enough to identify at risk children. Some eight in ten of those polled believed that government ought to provide special tax incentives for those who take on the challenge of adopting older children. In Fiscal 2005, Washington spent about three times as much on foster care as it did on adoption. Reversing the ratio seems too dramatic. But why not make the spending one to one?

On the ABC Web site, Mr. Horn bridles at the current perversity: “Where else in America would we go to fund a system that is fundamentally designed to pay for the worst outcomes – keeping children in foster care?” For several years he has pushed for new legislation allowing states more leeway – but failed to secure it. Congress might want to listen. After all, who can say no to both Wade Horn and Diane Sawyer?