Wyden

The nomination of Lynn Johnson, the Trump administration’s choice to lead the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), was approved by the Senate Finance Committee on a party-line vote held before the July 4 holiday.

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) is planning to delay the collection of new data on foster youth and families until fiscal 2022, and also plans to reconsider the new rules set up for that process by the Obama administration in December of 2016.

Democratic supporters of a federal home visiting program are ticked off about the reauthorization bill introduced by several Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee this month. That bill – H.R.

Yesterday, a bipartisan bill to reform child welfare financing looked like it had risen from the ashes. Today, it was dropped back into the chimney soot. Late last weekend, the House attached the Family First Preservation Services Act to the 21st Century Cures Act, a much larger bill that funds medical research, speeds up the approval process for drugs and devices at the Food and Drug Administration, and funds states to fight the opioid epidemic.

Thought by many to be left for dead by a handful of Senate objectors, the Family First Preservation Services Act has been given new life as part of a larger bill.

Is the Family First Preservation Services Act back from the dead? Doubtful, but it does seem to Youth Services Insider that the push for and against it has not completely evaporated.

Earlier this week, in an op-ed published by The Imprint, FosterClub CEO Celeste Bodner described a letter endorsing the Family First Prevention Services Act that had been signed by hundreds of foster youth and alumni of foster care and shared with Senate leadership.

The Family First Prevention Services Act will either pass in September or drift into the ether, never to be heard from again. And it will live or die as is; there won’t be changes to it.

Congress returns to action, or at least Washington, this week. For those in the field of youth and family services, all eyes will be on the Family First Prevention Services Act, a proposed major overhaul the federal foster care entitlement that has passed the House and awaits Senate action.