To strengthen child welfare and keep families together, we need structural change

For decades, policymakers have built federal child welfare policy brick by brick, relying on outdated assumptions about what the government should do when children and families struggle. They have designed programs and prescribed resources, while rigid funding structures have bound these layers together.

Over time, this structure has hardened in place, despite overwhelming data that challenges the child welfare financing institution and its corresponding incentives. Today, more than 2 million American families are investigated by Child Protective Services each year.

In 84 percent of those cases , there is no substantiated finding of abuse or neglect. Yet every year, approximately 175,000 children enter foster care , despite decades of outcomes that show the harm the intervention itself causes, and even when we now know there is no association between foster care entries and child maltreatment fatalities.

For Nate Bustamente, family separation was an inescapable throughline in his life. Bustamente entered foster care as a child, and years later, after becoming a parent himself, he and his wife faced a child welfare case involving their own children. He worked long hours to meet the requirements imposed on his family while navigating the possibility of losing his children. After a second removal, the state pursued termination of his and his wife’s parental rights. Despite months of compliance, they still had to defend their right to remain a family in court.

Bustamente credits his attorney and the family-time supervisor who observed his family’s visits with helping the court understand what was happening in their lives. The judge denied the termination petition, and the case eventually closed. Reflecting on that moment, Bustamente described how he could finally breathe without carrying the weight of what might happen to his family — an experience facing too many families caught in the crosshairs of an unforgiving system.

United Family Advocates, a bipartisan group of child welfare advocates, attorneys, researchers and nonprofit leaders, recently released a framework to shed light on how federal child welfare financing is structured in ways that too often make family separations like Bustamente’s the path of least resistance, when it should be the last resort.

As federal policymakers increasingly examine whether existing child welfare funding mechanisms adequately support child safety, family stability, and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars, it is clear that the patchwork that created the fundamental financing structure we have today needs significant reform. The current structure is an entitlement program, and functions as a $10 billion entitlement to separate families.

States need greater flexibility to invest in the community-based supports families actually need to address housing, food, mental health, substance use, or other challenges, while preserving a clear role for protecting children facing imminent danger. Funding should also include resources families can access without having to enter the child welfare system, and access to high-quality legal representation to help ensure families have fair processes when such highly consequential decisions about their children and family are being made.

Federal policymakers have important debates ahead of them about what proportion of federal resources should go toward maintaining a system that responds to family crises versus building the infrastructure that helps families avoid those crises in the first place.

For Bustamente, a continuum of community support to address his family’s needs without making separation the default response could have changed the trajectory of his life. His question is simple: How many more families have to go through what he went through? The constant fear and the lost time with his children are not inevitable.

For decades, policymakers have added brick after brick to sustain a system that relies on separation as its primary intervention. It is time to stop reinforcing the status quo and start rebuilding a foundation that gives families the support they need before crisis becomes separation.