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Summary:
Child welfare services seek to protect children who have been abused or neglected or are at risk of maltreatment. These services take many forms, ranging from counseling and other supports for parents -- intended to prevent child abuse and neglect and improve child well-being -- to removal of the children from home. At the most extreme, these services include termination of parental rights and placement of the children for adoption. States have the primary responsibility for designing and administering child welfare services. However, the federal government supports the services with significant funds and requires states to comply with federal standards. An estimated 903,000 children were the victims of child abuse or neglect in the year 2001. The majority of these children (59%) experienced neglect (alone or in combination with another form of maltreatment). Some children who experience maltreatment are removed from their homes with protective custody given to the state. On the last day of FY2001, an estimated 542,000 children were living in foster care (foster family, group, residential or other kind of home or placement setting). In June 2003, Congress passed and the President signed the Keeping Children and Families Safe Act of 2003 (P.L. 108-36, S. 342), which reauthorized the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), and several related programs. On February 13, the House passed welfare reform legislation, H.R. 4, which includes provisions to extend and expand the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to approve child welfare demonstration projects. In his FY2004 budget, President Bush proposed an "alternative financing system for child welfare," under which participating states would "face fewer administrative burdens and would receive funds in the form of flexible grants." The House Ways and Means Human Resources Subcommittee held a hearing on the Administration's proposal, and additional proposals related to child welfare financing have been introduced. Proposals include allowing states to use TANF income and resource requirements to determine a child's eligibility for federal foster care and adoption assistance or removing income eligibility criteria entirely for these programs. Other proposals would offer states new federal funds to make program improvements, enhance workforce quality, offer substance abuse treatment to families needing child welfare services, and reimburse states for kinship guardianship payments. The Administration has also proposed to extend Adoption Incentive funding (now set to expire with FY2003) and to amend the program to especially reward adoptions of children age 9 or older; this was introduced on July 22 as S. 1439. Additional child welfare related proposals have been introduced that would offer grants to support mentoring of children in foster care, provide student loan forgiveness for court personnel and social workers who work in the child welfare field, grant tribes new authority to operate foster care and adoption assistance programs under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, seek to improve state foster care and adoption data collection, repeal the current "sunset" provision related to the adoption tax credit; and allow penalty-free withdrawal of Individual Retirement Account (IRA) funds for some qualified adoption expenses. This report describes child welfare legislative issues in the 108th Congress and will be updated as needed.
