Sponsors (5)
The bill increases transparency and seeks to place more children with relatives and culturally appropriate families through required recruitment plans and reporting, but it creates ongoing administrative costs, implementation burdens for some states, and privacy risks that must be managed.
Children in foster care will have higher chances of placement with relatives or permanent families because states must develop and use child-specific recruitment and kinship engagement plans.
Policymakers, communities, and families gain much greater transparency because state child welfare agencies must collect and publish State-by-State counts and characteristics of foster and adoptive families and foster-family capacity data, enabling targeted improvements and local accountability.
Children of color and minority families may experience fewer placement mismatches and reduced disparities because the bill requires annual analysis and reporting on racial/ethnic recruitment barriers and on matching children with families of similar backgrounds.
State governments and taxpayers will face new and ongoing administrative and reporting costs to develop, update, collect, and publish required plans and data, which could divert funds from frontline services.
Foster and adoptive families and the children they care for face increased privacy and confidentiality risks because the bill requires collecting and publishing detailed demographic and survey information unless strong de-identification and security safeguards are applied.
Smaller states or local agencies may need state-law changes or additional capacity to comply, causing implementation delays, uneven compliance, and short-term confusion about timelines.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Requires State child welfare plans to include data-driven Family Partnership Plans and expands HHS reporting on foster/adoptive family counts, characteristics, and recruitment barriers.
Official title: Amend parts B and E of title IV of the Social Security Act to improve foster and adoptive parent recruitment and retention, and for other purposes.
Introduced January 21, 2025 by Charles Ernest Grassley · Last progress June 15, 2026
Requires State child welfare plans to add a Family Partnership Plan that explains how states will recruit, engage, support, and track foster, adoptive, kinship, and relative caregivers using data and family input. It also requires new annual data collection and reporting by states and expands the HHS Secretary’s annual report to Congress to include detailed, State-by-State counts, demographics, reasons families aren’t used, and survey summaries of barriers to recruiting and retaining families, with an effective date of October 1, 2027 (with limited delay options for states needing legislative changes).