S162-119

What This Bill Does

The Recruiting Families Using Data Act of 2025 changes the child welfare state plan requirements in Title IV-B of the Social Security Act. It requires each state plan to include a family partnership plan for identifying, recruiting, screening, licensing, supporting, and retaining foster and adoptive families. The plan must be developed with birth families, kinship families, foster families, adoptive families, community-based service providers, technical assistance providers, and youth with lived foster care and adoption experience. States must explain how they will contact relatives and other people connected to a child, create child-specific recruitment plans, engage children and youth in recruitment, use data to reduce unnecessary congregate care, improve permanency and placement stability, increase kinship placements, recruit families for teens and sibling groups, and support foster family advisory boards. States must also collect and update annual information on actual foster family capacity, congregate care use, unused licensed homes, feedback from foster and adoptive parents and youth, and barriers to recruiting families who reflect the racial and ethnic background of children in foster care. The bill also expands the annual federal child welfare outcomes report to Congress, starting with fiscal year 2028, to include state-by-state foster and adoptive family data and summaries of reported recruitment, licensing, retention, disruption, and racial-equity barriers.

Who Benefits and How

Children in foster care benefit because states must plan around actual family-placement needs instead of only broad recruitment activity. The bill pushes states to identify relatives, make child-specific recruitment plans for children who need foster or adoptive families, reduce unnecessary congregate care, improve permanency, and increase placement stability. Kinship caregivers, foster parents, adoptive parents, teens in foster care, sibling groups, and children whose race or ethnicity is not well matched by the available family pool benefit from more explicit state planning, advisory boards, data collection, and federal reporting about barriers. Congress and federal child welfare oversight officials benefit from recurring state-by-state data on family capacity and congregate care use.

Who Bears the Burden and How

State child welfare agencies administering Title IV-B plans bear the main compliance burden. They must consult with affected families and youth, write and implement the family partnership plan, collect annual data on licensed families and congregate care placements, summarize feedback from parents and youth, analyze racial and ethnic recruitment barriers, and update the plan each year. The Secretary of Health and Human Services and the HHS child welfare reporting function also bear administrative burdens because HHS must determine when state legislation is needed, may require additional plan information, and must include the new data and barrier summaries in annual reports to Congress. Congregate care facilities could see fewer placements if states use the required data and recruitment planning to reduce unnecessary congregate care.

Key Provisions

• Requires state Title IV-B child welfare plans to include a family partnership plan for identifying, recruiting, screening, licensing, supporting, and retaining foster and adoptive families.
• Requires the plan to be developed with birth families, kinship families, foster families, adoptive families, community-based providers, technical assistance providers, and youth with lived foster care and adoption experience.
• Requires states to describe how they will identify relatives, create child-specific recruitment plans, engage children and youth, use data to reduce unnecessary congregate care and improve permanency, increase kinship placements, and support foster family advisory boards.
• Requires annual state collection and updates on actual foster family capacity, licensed homes that are unused or underused, congregate care placements, parent and youth feedback, and barriers to recruiting families whose racial and ethnic background reflects children in foster care.
• Expands the HHS annual child welfare outcomes report to Congress for fiscal year 2028 and later years to include state-by-state foster and adoptive family data and summaries of barriers reported by states.