Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, I am pleased today to introduce the Promoting Accountability and Excellence in Child Welfare Act, a bill that would pave the way for new innovations that improve the lives and well-being of vulnerable children and their families.

The Federal government spends roughly ten times as much money on foster care as it does on preventative services, when foster care is, in nearly every case, the worst possible outcome for a child. The Promoting Accountability and Excellence in Child Welfare Act would establish a 5-year grant program to give States and localities greater flexibility to implement comprehensive reforms to existing child welfare programs provided they can demonstrate success in improving child well-being. This flexibility would allow States to use early-intervention techniques to prevent youth from entering foster care, heightened reunification or adoption practices to decrease a child's time in care, and strengthened support services to ensure that children and youth do not fall behind their peers while they remain in foster care. Importantly, this act establishes strong performance measures that allow successful practices to serve as scalable models.

Children and families that come into contact with the child welfare system are often served through multiple local, State, and Federal agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, the Department of Labor and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Too often, these agencies operate in silos, with the effects playing out at the State, local, and even individual level. This act promotes collaboration by requiring an inter-agency working group to identify existing Federal resources and streamline them to reduce duplication and allow grantees to access additional services and funding streams.

States and localities have proven their ability to save money through innovation while also working to promote the best interest of children and families and the Federal government often turns to state best practices to improve national laws. The history of subsidized guardianship serves as one such example. Due to an all-time high in the number of children in State foster care, in 1996 Illinois was granted the authority to allow grandparents, aunts, uncles and other adult relatives to receive Federal foster care payments if they opened their homes permanently to their relative children in foster care. Raising a child is expensive and these modest payments gave relatives the financial means to care for their kin.

Allowing children and youth to remain with relatives is not only a compassionate way to prevent unnecessary disruptions in a child's life and keep families together, it also saves money. The Illinois demonstration proved that children and youth did better living with relative caregivers than they did when they remained in foster care. In addition, offering guardianship assistance to relatives actually increased the odds that they would be adopted. Due to the success of kinship care in Illinois and other States, the Federal government now realizes a cost savings by reimbursing States for a portion of the cost of offering guardianship assistance. The Promoting Accountability and Excellence in Child Welfare Act would further enable such innovations and savings while improving child well-being.

Furthermore, the legislation directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to report to Congress with recommendations on how to update Federal foster care financing. Under current law, eligibility for Federal foster care assistance remains tied to the obsolete AFDC program, meaning each year fewer children in foster care are eligible for Federal funding. As a result, States are required to take on an ever-increasing share of foster care financing. This structure forces States to compensate by drawing funds from other programs such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, TANF, and the Social Security Block Grant, SSBG, to provide for children in care.

As a country, we cannot afford to let children fall through the cracks of the many systems that exist to serve them. By targeting our resources, improving collaboration, spurring innovation, and, above all, holding ourselves accountable, we can systemically serve the best interest of at-risk children, their families and communities, and the Nation as a whole.

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