This bill changes federal child-welfare law to push states toward systematic, data-informed approaches for finding and keeping foster and adoptive families. It creates a new statutory framework that asks states to produce a recurring, stakeholder-informed plan focused on identifying appropriate relatives and nonrelative families, targeting recruitment for children with specific needs, and diagnosing gaps in capacity.
The measure also forces greater transparency at the federal level by requiring new State-by-State information in the annual child-welfare outcomes report. For practitioners, the practical effect is twofold: agencies will need to build or upgrade data-collection and analysis processes, and advocates and oversight bodies will get recurring, comparable information about unused licensed families, congregate-care use, and why placements fail.
At a Glance
What It Does
Establishes a required 'family partnership plan' with prescribed elements that each State must develop and update annually, and adds new State-level data requirements to the federal child-welfare outcomes report. The plan must include data collection, analysis, and stakeholder feedback used to recruit and retain foster and adoptive families.
Who It Affects
State child welfare agencies (including licensing and recruitment units), child-placing agencies, foster/adoptive family support programs, HHS Children's Bureau staff who collect and publish outcomes, and vendors that supply case-management or reporting systems.
Why It Matters
Creates a statutory lever to align recruitment with the actual needs of children (teens, sibling groups, kinship placements, and children from specific racial/ethnic backgrounds) and to expose gaps in capacity and utilization that have been difficult to measure consistently across States.
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What This Bill Actually Does
The bill adds a new requirement to the State plan portion of Title IV-B: each State must prepare a recurring 'family partnership plan' that is both built with stakeholder input and driven by program data. The law specifies several discrete contents the plan must cover: how the State will identify and engage relatives and other connected adults as placement resources; how it will create child-specific recruitment plans for any child who needs a family placement; and how it will include children and youth in recruitment decisions that affect them.
In addition to those placement- and engagement-focused elements, the plan must use data to set goals and measure progress on several operational outcomes: reducing unnecessary congregate-care placements, increasing permanency and placement stability, increasing kinship placements, recruiting families for teens and sibling groups, and aligning the pool of licensed families with the demographic needs of children in care. States must also describe how they will form or support foster family advisory boards to improve recruitment and retention.Practically, the statute makes these plans living documents: States must collect and report annually on foster-family capacity and congregate-care utilization.
That reporting requires counts and demographic breakdowns of licensed foster and prospective adoptive families; identification of licensed families that are not being used or are underutilized, with explanations; and counts and characteristics of children placed in congregate care both in-State and out-of-State. The plan must also include an annual summarization of feedback from foster and adoptive parents and youth about licensure, training, supports, reasons parents stop fostering, and why adoptions or guardianship placements dissolve or struggle.On the federal reporting side, the bill amends the Child Welfare Outcomes reporting statute so the Secretary must include the State-by-State information described above in the annual report to Congress.
The Secretary retains authority to require additional data elements beyond those enumerated. The bill sets an effective date for the State-plan changes and builds in a limited delay mechanism for States whose laws would need legislative change to comply, so that State legislative calendars can be accommodated.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The bill requires each State to develop and maintain a 'family partnership plan' that documents how it will identify, recruit, screen, license, support, and retain foster and adoptive families.
States must collect and report annually on foster-family capacity and congregate-care utilization, including numbers, demographics, and the identities of licensed families not being used and reasons they are underutilized.
Plans must include child-specific recruitment strategies and steps to recruit for hard-to-place groups such as teens, sibling groups, and families that match children's racial and ethnic backgrounds.
Each State must summarize, at least annually, feedback from foster and adoptive parents and youth about licensure, training, supports, and the causes of placement disruption or guardianship/adoption failures.
The amendment expands the annual federal Child Welfare Outcomes report to include State-by-State data and summaries on foster/adoptive family supply, barriers to recruitment/licensure, and States' efforts to address racial/ethnic mismatches.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
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Short title
Sets the Act's popular name as the "Recruiting Families Using Data Act of 2025." This is cosmetic but signals the bill's framing: recruitment grounded in measurable information.
State plan: required family partnership plan
Adds subsection (d) to the State-plan provisions in part B of title IV. The new subsection prescribes that a State plan must include a 'family partnership plan' developed with input from birth, kinship, foster and adoptive families, community-based providers, technical assistance providers, and youth with lived experience. It then lists required plan components: strategies for identifying and engaging relatives and other connected adults, mechanisms for creating child-specific recruitment plans, and protocols to involve youth in recruitment. This is the operational core—States must translate these descriptions into actionable policies and procedures within their licensing, recruitment, and placement workflows.
Data collection, analysis, and advisory boards
The subsection requires States to use data to set goals and measure outcomes related to use of congregate care, permanency, placement stability, kinship placements, recruitment and retention for specific populations, and alignment between family supply and child needs. It also compels States to stand up or support foster family advisory boards. Crucially, the law mandates annual reporting on foster family capacity and congregate-care utilization, and an annual update summarizing feedback from parents and youth about licensure, training, supports, and causes of placement or adoption failure. That pushes States to build or enhance data systems and to institute recurring feedback collection (surveys or instruments) from families and youth.
Effective date and state legislation delay
Sets the default effective date for the new State-plan requirements as October 1, 2026. The provision includes a safety valve: if a State requires new legislation (other than appropriations) to comply, the State will not be deemed noncompliant until the first calendar quarter after the close of its first regular legislative session that begins after enactment—treating each year of a two-year session as a separate session. That creates staggered compliance timelines tied to State legislative calendars.
Expanded federal child-welfare outcomes reporting
Amends the Child Welfare Outcomes reporting statute to require the Secretary's annual report to Congress to include State-by-State data mirroring the plan-level reporting: counts and demographics of foster and adoptive families, numbers of potential families not being utilized and reasons, a summary of barriers reported by States based on parent surveys, and a summary of States' efforts to recruit families that reflect children’s racial and ethnic backgrounds. This creates a federal transparency mechanism designed to make State-level capacity and barriers visible to Congress and the public.
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Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Children in foster care who are harder to place (teens, sibling groups, children from underrepresented racial/ethnic backgrounds): the bill requires child-specific recruitment and explicit attention to these groups, increasing chances of timely, appropriate family placements.
- Relatives and kin caregivers: the plan must describe how States will identify and engage relatives and others connected to the child, which can increase kinship placements and family-based care.
- Foster and adoptive families (prospective and existing): clearer reporting on underutilized licensed families and formalized advisory boards give families a stronger voice and may lead to better-targeted supports and training.
- Policymakers, oversight bodies, and advocates: access to State-by-State comparative data will make it easier to identify systemic gaps and to evaluate which recruitment or support strategies are working.
Who Bears the Cost
- State child welfare agencies: they must establish or expand data collection, analytics, survey instruments, reporting workflows, and potentially staffing to produce and update the family partnership plan and the required annual reports.
- Smaller or resource-constrained States: States with limited IT systems or staffing will face proportionally higher implementation costs and legislative coordination burdens if law changes are required.
- Private child-placing agencies and vendors: agencies that license or place foster/adoptive families may need to alter intake, documentation, and reporting practices and may face contractual or operational adjustments.
- HHS Children's Bureau: federal staff will need to receive, validate, synthesize, and publish more granular State-level data, likely increasing administrative workload and requiring investment in data quality controls.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The bill pits two legitimate goals against each other: the public-policy imperative to expose and remedy gaps in family-based care through standardized data and the practical need to avoid imposing unfunded, administratively heavy mandates on States whose systems and legal frameworks differ markedly—forcing a trade-off between national comparability and state flexibility.
The bill's core objective—better matching of family supply to child need through data and stakeholder input—is straightforward, but execution raises knotty practical questions. States vary widely in licensing definitions, data systems, and survey capacity; creating comparable, actionable State-by-State metrics will require careful standard-setting and likely new guidance and technical assistance from HHS.
Without dedicated federal funds, many States will need to reallocate existing resources away from casework or other initiatives to meet the new reporting and planning obligations.
There are also measurement and incentive risks. Metrics that focus on counts of licensed families and 'unused' capacity could encourage superficial compliance (for example, labeling families as available even when they are not a practical match) or gaming of congregate-care counts.
Privacy and confidentiality deserve attention: the bill asks for demographic and characteristic-level reporting and reasons families are unused or placements fail; States will have to design reporting that protects identifiable information about children and families while still being useful. Finally, the Secretary's authority to require 'other information' leaves open which additional data elements could become mandatory, creating uncertainty for planning and budgets.
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