Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA overhaul of everything from food safety practices to vaccine protocols at the Department of Health and Human Services promises to transform health outcomes for the entire country. Let’s hope he applies similar disruptive energies to the “human services” programs administered by the department he now oversees as well — they need them. 

The Children’s Bureau, as an example, sits within the Office of the Administration for Children & Families at HHS and provides funding and federal guidelines for several child welfare programs around the country including foster care. How is the foster care system faring in the United States?

One place to look for answers is in the data, but according to Naomi Schaefer-Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has written extensively about the foster care system, the numbers don’t tell the real story. 

The ACF office’s Adoption and Foster Care Analysis Reporting System reported 368,000 children in foster care in 2022 (the latest year for which numbers are listed), down from 437,000 in 2018 — which sounds like success. “The problem is that the number of kids in foster care is an artificial number that anyone can make go up or down depending on policy,” Ms. Schaefer-Riley says. 

The policy in recent years has been Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In the March 2022 issue of the Children’s Bureau Express, a CB associate commissioner, Aysha Schomburg, published an article in which she claimed racism in America leads to “oversurveillance” of Black Americans that results in both “mass incarceration” and “mass family separation.” She lamented that “Black children are disproportionately investigated and separated from their families,” and asked readers to: “Save Black children from that knock on the door and that tunnel of child welfare.” 

According to Ms. Schaefer-Riley, what Ms. Schomburg failed to acknowledge is that Black children are also three times more likely to die of maltreatment in the home than are white children, and that often that knock on the door will save their lives. 

“This conversation about everything being driven by racial disparities has actually pushed a lot of states to leave kids in homes when they should not be left in homes,” Ms. Schaefer-Riley says. The effect has been to lower the overall number of children in the system and decrease the racial gap, but at the expense of what should be the real goal: child safety. 

The pursuit of racial “equity” in the data has also influenced policy around “kinship care” rules that favor relatives as caregivers over other foster parent options. On the surface this sounds like a common-sense approach, but according to Ms. Schaefer-Riley standards around criminal background checks and substance abuse were relaxed to allow relatives to qualify for foster positions in greater numbers, taking into consideration the assumed racial components of incarceration records or substance abuse histories.

“The messaging around kinship care was we need to make it easier for relatives to take care of kids even if these relatives maybe have drug problems … and we should just understand that it’s better for the child to be with grandma, even if grandma has a little bit of a drug problem,” Ms. Schaefer-Riley says.

About 2,000 children are estimated to die each year because of abuse or neglect by a caregiver — about as many who die from car accidents and drownings combined. Often, Child Protective Services is found to have already investigated the family and to have made the decision to leave the child in the home. 

The number of child maltreatment fatalities may be much higher. Each state is required by the Child Abuse and Prevention Treatment Act to publicly disclose information about child fatalities or near fatalities due to abuse or neglect, but vague language in the law has made access to consistent and clear data nearly impossible. Ms. Schaefer-Riley works with a project called Lives Cut Short that urges HHS to help Congress clarify the CAPTA language and require states to produce more precise data so we know the scope of the problem. 

DEI-driven policies at HHS focused on more than racial disparities in the prior administration. They were also concentrated on “protecting” children with “gender identity” differences from being placed in the homes of religious, and specifically Christian, foster parents, as well as on attempting to require faith-based agencies to register same-sex couples as foster parents to qualify for federal funding. 

“Every state in the country is experiencing a shortage of foster parents,” Ms. Schaefer-Riley says. “The idea that we are trying to drive anyone out of the space is lunacy.” 

Secretary Kennedy has the opportunity to be a change agent, not just for the nation’s health, but for its “human services” as well. Naomi Schaefer-Riley offers the new HHS director some advice: Get rid of DEI and reprioritize child safety for American kids in foster care — or perhaps: Make Foster Care Great for Children Again.

Watch for Naomi Schaefer-Riley’s interview on the Sun’s “Sanity” podcast starting Sunday on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.