Split at the Door: How America Separates Foster Siblings by Default — and Why Washington Grades It a "Strength"
Investigation by Project Milk Carton
Split at the Door: How America Separates Foster Siblings by Default — and Why Washington Grades It a "Strength"
A Project Milk Carton investigation — child welfare transparency, public data, and the federal grading machine that scores paperwork instead of children.
By PMC Intelligence Desk | July 19, 2026
PROLOGUE: ONE DOCUMENT, TWO NUMBERS
Somewhere in the federal record sits a single document that explains, better than any statute, any lawsuit, or any budget table, how the United States treats the bond between foster brothers and sisters. It is Oregon's Child and Family Services Review Round 4 final report, issued in 2025 by the Children's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
On its scoring pages, the document announces that Oregon earned a "Strength" rating on Item 7 — "Placement with Siblings" — at 94.59 percent, thirty-five of thirty-seven applicable cases, comfortably above the 90 percent threshold a state must clear. A passing grade, from the federal government, on keeping siblings together.
In the same document's appendix, a sub-question labeled 7A asks a plainer question: Was the child placed with all siblings who were also in foster care? The answer, from the same thirty-seven case files, read by the same reviewers, in the same review:62.16 percent. Twenty-three of thirty-seven.
Hold both numbers at once, because the federal government does. Nearly four in ten of the Oregon foster children in that sample were living apart from a brother or sister. And the official verdict, printed on the cover of the same report that contains that appendix, is that Oregon's performance on sibling placement is a Strength.
This is not a typo. It is not a clerical inconsistency that slipped past an editor. Both numbers are correct, and both were produced by the same instrument working exactly as designed. The 94.59 percent measures whether Oregon's case workers made concerted efforts. The 62.16 percent measures whether the children ended up together. The federal review system grades the first number and buries the second in an appendix — and that single design decision, replicated across every state and every review cycle since the system began, is the subject of this investigation.
This is the fifth module in Project Milk Carton's investigative series on the machinery of American child welfare. Like its predecessors, it is built on public documents — and one rule governs everything that follows, stated up front: every factual claim, number, name, case, and quotation in this article comes from primary and public sources — the U.S. Code, the Code of Federal Regulations, the Children's Bureau's own CFSR reports and aggregate data, the Government Accountability Office, federal court records, state legislative records, academic research published in peer-reviewed journals, and financial filings. Every figure is attributed. Where the analysis is ours, we say so. Where a number is the government's, we tell you which document it lives in. Project Milk Carton produces transparency research from public data; we do not speculate, and we do not invent.
The investigation proceeds in ten movements. First, the mandate — what Congress actually ordered in 2008. Second, the scoring machine — how the federal review converts a separated sibling into a passing grade. Third, the current round of reviews, which is making the pattern worse. Fourth, the data vault — the sibling numbers the federal government has been collecting since fiscal year 2023 and has never once published. Fifth, the money — why the funding stream is structurally indifferent to whether four children share a roof. Sixth, the contractors who hold the mandate in privatized states, and what happened to the money in Kansas. Seventh, the case law — thirty-seven years of federal courts saying the sibling bond is constitutionally protected, and what the settlements' own monitors report. Eighth, the veto — the moment a governor, herself a named defendant in a sibling-separation lawsuit, killed the bill that would have made separation harder. Ninth, the accountability gap — why none of this has ever cost any state a dollar. Tenth, what the separation costs the children, and the four fixes that follow directly from the government's own findings.
Then we will return to the Oregon document, because it deserves a second reading once you know what built it.
PART I — THE MANDATE: WHAT CONGRESS ACTUALLY WROTE IN 2008
Eighteen years of "reasonable efforts"
In 2008, Congress passed the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act. Among its provisions was a directive to every state in the country, codified at42 U.S.C. § 671(a)(31), that reads in substance as follows: when a state takes children away from their parents, it must make "reasonable efforts" to place brothers and sisters together — and when it cannot place them together, it must provide for frequent visitation or other ongoing interaction between the separated siblings.
Read as plain English, the statute makes a two-part promise to every child the state removes. First: the state will try to keep you with your siblings. Second: if it fails, it will at least make sure you see them.
The statute contains an exception — siblings may be separated when joint placement would be contrary to the health or safety of a child— and that exception matters enormously to this story, for a reason that will arrive in Part IX: as the Government Accountability Office documented, no federal guidelines have ever been issued explaining how to assess when that exception applies. The federal government wrote a rule, wrote an escape hatch into the rule, and then declined for nearly two decades to define what the escape hatch means. Every caseworker in America decides for herself, case by case, file by file, what "contrary to the health or safety of a child" requires — and, as the federal government's own case reviews will show in the next section, in more than a third of separations the file contains no justification the government's own reviewers can accept.
Eighteen years have passed since Congress wrote § 671(a)(31). Here is where the promise stands, according to the federal government's own case-file reviews: in 54 percent of applicable foster care cases, children were not placed with their siblings. In more than a third of those separations, caseworkers could not produce a valid documented reason for the split. And in that same federal review, the Children's Bureau rated state performance on sibling placement as a "Strength" in 81 percent of cases.
Those three numbers — 54 percent separated, a third of separations unjustified, 81 percent Strength — cannot coexist in an honest accounting system. They coexist in this one. The rest of this article explains how, and the explanation begins with the most important verb in the statute. Congress did not order states to place siblings together. It ordered them to make reasonable efforts to place siblings together. Everything downstream — the scoring instrument, the appendix numbers, the perpetual improvement plans, the money that never stops — flows from the gap between those two verbs. An effort can be documented. An outcome has to be achieved. The entire federal oversight apparatus chose to measure the one that can be satisfied with paperwork.
And one more feature of § 671(a)(31) deserves stating before we descend into the machinery: Congress attached no consequence to breaking it. No state has ever lost a dollar of Title IV-E money over a separated sibling. Not one, not ever. That is not an accident of enforcement discretion. As Part IX will show, it is the mathematical output of a penalty structure designed to suspend itself.
PART II — THE SCORING MACHINE: GRADING THE EFFORT, NOT THE OUTCOME
How a CFSR works
The federal instrument that measures state compliance with the sibling mandate is the Child and Family Services Review— the CFSR — run by the Children's Bureau within the Administration for Children and Families. Every state is reviewed roughly every five to seven years. The review is not a data pull; it is a case-file excavation. Reviewers select a minimum of65 case files per state, read every document in them, and interview the people around each case — caseworkers, judges, foster parents, and the youth themselves.
Item 7 of the review instrument is titled "Placement with Siblings." It is the federal government's designated measure of whether states are honoring the 2008 mandate.
Investigation data visualization
The fine print that decides everything
Read how Item 7 is actually scored, and the entire system comes into focus.
Reviewers ask two sub-questions about every applicable case. Question 7A: Was the child placed with all siblings who were also in foster care? Question 7B: If not, was there a valid reason for the separation?
Those are the two questions a child would ask. Am I with my brothers and sisters? And if not — why not?
But the item's overall rating — the number that actually counts toward whether a state pass —turns on neither. It turns on whether "concerted efforts were made. "The sub-questions are recorded, tabulated, and filed in the appendix. The rating is decided by the effort.
Follow the logic of that scoring rule to its endpoint, because the endpoint is not hypothetical: a state can separate a child from every sibling she has and still be rated a Strength, so long as the file shows somebody tried. The caseworker who made three phone calls looking for a home that would take both children, document the calls, and then split the children anyway has produced a Strength. The scoring instrument cannot distinguish between a state that keeps siblings together and a state that generates paperwork about wanting to.
What the scoring rule produced
The results are exactly what that rule would predict — and we do not have to estimate them, because the Children's Bureau published them itself. In the Bureau's aggregate report covering the first three years of CFSR Round 3, fiscal years 2015 through 2017, prepared by contractor JBS International:
Children were placed with all their siblings in foster care, for the entire period under review, in just46 percent of 1,164 applicable cases. Flip that number over and you have the statistic this investigation opened with in 54 percent of applicable cases, the children were not together.
Where children were separated, reviewers found a valid documented reason in only64 percent of 625 cases. Do the arithmetic on the remainder: roughly 225 children — more than a third of the separated group — were split from their brothers and sisters with no justification the federal reviewers could accept. Not a contested justification. Not a debatable one. None that the government's own reviewers would credit.
And Item 7's overall rating, the one computed from "concerted efforts":81 percent Strength.
The aggregate report is unusually blunt about why the separations happen. It lists two national "practice concerns," in the Bureau's own words: "Lack of placement resources able to accept sibling groups "and" Failure to reconsider placement of siblings together after initial separation. "Translated out of the review instrument's dialect: there was no home big enough, and once the children were split, nobody ever went back and fixed it. Keep both of those phrases in hand. The first one is a money problem, and Part V will show that the money is designed to produce it. The second one is a process problem, and Part VIII will show what happened when one state legislature tried to solve it.
The visitation half fails too
Recall that § 671(a)(31) makes a two-part promise: placement together, or failing that, frequent visits. The CFSR measures the second promise at Item 8— whether siblings placed apart actually see each other. In the same Round 3 aggregate data, concerted efforts to ensure sibling visits of sufficient frequency were found in only66 percent of 599 applicable cases. A third of the time, even the effort to maintain visits — the lower bar, the paperwork bar — was not there.
And then the finding that should have ended the debate about whether this is a state-by-state problem or a system problem: no state — not one — achieved substantial conformity with Permanency Outcome 2, the CFSR outcome under which both sibling placement and sibling visitation sit. Fifty states, fifty reviews, zero passes. When every participant fails the same test, the test is measuring the system, not the students.
PART III — ROUND 4: THE PATTERN IS STRUCTURAL, NOT HISTORICAL
The Round 3 numbers cover fiscal years 2015 through 2017. A defender of the system might argue they are old — that practice has improved, that the 2008 mandate simply needed time to soak in. The current review cycle, Round 4, is producing final reports now, and it forecloses that defense. The pattern is structural, and the newest documents display it more nakedly than the old ones.
Oregon: the loophole, photographed
Oregon's Round 4 final report (2025) is the cleanest illustration of the loophole in the entire federal record — the document this article opened with. Oregon was rated a Strength on Item 7 at 94.59 percent — 35 of 37 cases— comfortably clearing the 90 percent threshold. And buried in the same report's appendix, Question 7A shows Oregon placed children with all their siblings in foster care in only 62.16 percent — 23 of 37 — of cases.
Sit with the gap between those numbers: more than thirty-two percentage points between the grade and the reality, inside one document. Fourteen of thirty-seven sampled children — nearly four in ten — were living apart from a brother or sister, and the federal government's verdict on the state's sibling-placement performance was a passing grade. The two children whose files failed even the effort test are the only two the rating registers. The other twelve separated children are invisible to the score, because their files showed somebody tried.
California: the other failure mode
California's Round 4 final report (2024) shows what the machine produces when a state misses the bar. California was rated87.64 percent on Item 7 — 78 of 89 cases— just under the 90 percent threshold, earning the designation "Area Needing Improvement." The appendix tells the fuller story. Question 7A: children placed with all siblings in only 64.04 percent of cases. Question 7B: a valid reason for separation in only 65.63 percent — 21 of 32. A third of California's separations, once again, undocumented — the same fraction the national Round 3 data showed, seven years later, on the other side of the country. And Item 8 — visiting with parents and siblings — collapsed to 42 percent.
Notice what the two states have in common underneath their different grades. Oregon "passed" at 94.59; California "failed" at 87.64. But their appendix numbers — the ones measuring whether children were actually with their siblings — are nearly identical: 62.16 and 64.04. The grade distinguishes them; the reality does not. The difference between a Strength and an Area Needing Improvement, in this system, is a difference in the quality of the paperwork, not the placement of the children.
And the consequence, in both cases
Investigation data visualization
Both states failed Permanency Outcome 2 — as, in Round 3, every state did. Both will write a Program Improvement Plan. Neither will pay a penalty. Why the plan and the penalty can never meet is the subject of Part IX. First, the data — because before you can ask why the federal government tolerates these numbers, you have to know that the federal government possesses far better numbers than these and has decided not to show them to you.
PART IV — THE VAULT: THE DATA HHS COLLECTS AND REFUSES TO PUBLISH
The claim that is no longer true
The Children's Bureau's aggregate report is drawn from a few thousand hand-reviewed case files. It is a sample. For decades, the standard account of why no national sibling-separation number exists has been that the federal government simply doesn't gather one. As our source investigation put it: "The common claim among advocates is that the federal government 'doesn't collect' sibling data."
That claim is no longer true. And the truth is worse.
Three data elements, every child, every state
The Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System — AFCARS —is the census of American foster care. Every state must report a record on every child in its custody. In 2020, HHS issued the AFCARS final rule —85 Fed. Reg. 28410, May 12, 2020— which took effect October 1, 2022, and is now codified at45 C.F.R. § 1355.44(b). That regulation requires every Title IV-E agency to report, for every single child in foster care in the United States:
(b)(19) — Total number of siblings.
(b)(20) — Siblings in foster care.
(b)(21) — Siblings in living arrangement— defined in the rule's own words as "the number of siblings of the child who are in the same living arrangement as the child, on the last day of the report period."
A parallel element, § 1355.44(e)(15), captures siblings in the adoptive or guardianship home.
Understand what those three fields make possible, because the arithmetic is not sophisticated. Take element (b)(20) — the number of a child's siblings who are in foster care. Subtract element (b)(21) — the number of siblings living with the child. The result, for every foster child in America, is the exact number of brothers and sisters the state is holding somewhere else. Aggregate it and you have a national separation rate. Group it and you have a state ranking. Run it year over year and you have a trend line. No sampling. No hand review. No "concerted efforts" judgment call. A number, per child, to the child.
The federal government has been sitting on this data since fiscal year 2023.
What has been published: nothing
It has published none of it. The public-facing AFCARS Report— the annual release that journalists and legislators actually use — does not contain a sibling figure. The Children's Bureau's AFCARS Dashboard does not contain the word "sibling" anywhere in it. There is no national number. There is no state ranking. There is no trend line. HHS knows how many American children have been severed from a sibling to the child and has chosen not to say.
This is the finding that reframes the entire story. The scandal of the sibling data is not absence. It is suppression — or, at the most charitable reading, an institutional silence so complete that it is indistinguishable from suppression. A government that did not collect the data could plead ignorance. A government that collects it, holds it, and publishes a dashboard scrubbed of the word "sibling" cannot.
The lineage of the silence
The silence has a history worth knowing. The 2016 version of the AFCARS rule required roughly272 data items in the out-of-home care file. The 2020 rule cut that to about183, stripping elements on sexual orientation, ICWA detail, educational stability, and health assessments. The sibling elements — (b)(19), (b)(20), (b)(21) —survived the cut. They were reviewed, contested, retained, and mandated. States have been reporting them for three fiscal years. They simply never made it into daylight. The data exists in the vault; the vault door has never been opened.
What the academics found while waiting
Into that vacuum, researchers have improvised — assembling estimates from state administrative data because the federal number, though collected, is unavailable. The best estimates hold that53 to 80 percent of foster children with siblings are separated from at least one of them. Note the width of that range: twenty-seven percentage points of uncertainty about one of the most basic facts of American foster care, in an era when the precise answer sits on a federal server.
And a *March 2025 study in Child Maltreatment* — by Dylan Jones, Sarah Font, Minjoo Lee, Rebecca Orsi-Hunt, and Hyunil Kim, using linked NCANDS and AFCARS data — found something the system does not even attempt to measure at least 27.4 percent of sibling groups in which any child is removed are "split" at the front door* — some children taken into care, others left behind. Before the first placement decision is ever made, before any caseworker has searched for a home big enough, more than a quarter of sibling groups have already been divided by the removal itself. The separation begins before the child ever reaches a foster home — which means every downstream statistic in this article, grim as it is, undercounts* the phenomenon, because the CFSR and AFCARS only see the siblings who made it into care together in the first place.
PART V — THE MONEY: WHY THERE IS NO BED FOR FOUR CHILDREN
The Children's Bureau's own reviewers named the first cause of sibling separation: lack of placement resources able to accept sibling groups. This section is about why that lack exists — and the answer is that the federal funding stream was built indifferent to it.
Investigation data visualization
A per-child, per-day machine
Federal support for Title IV-E— the foster care entitlement — ran roughly$9.7 billion in fiscal year 2024, covering about 713,200 children a month across foster care, adoption assistance, and guardianship. It is an open-ended entitlement: the federal government reimburses a share of what states spend on eligible children, and it pays per child, per day.
Now apply that structure to a sibling group of four. Title IV-E does not pay a nickel more to keep four children together than to scatter them across four homes.There is no sibling-group rate. There is no capacity incentive.The ledger records four children, four per-diems, four placements — and it is arithmetically identical whether those placements are one house or four counties. The single largest funding stream in American child welfare is, by construction, incapable of noticing the thing § 671(a)(31) mandates. Congress wrote the sibling requirement into the conditions of Title IV-E in 2008 and left the payment architecture of Title IV-E untouched. The mandate and the money have never met.
The supply is collapsing
Meanwhile, the homes that could take a sibling group are disappearing. A national survey by The Imprintfound178,026 licensed foster homes in 2025 — down 9 percent from 2023, and down 19 percent from the 220,002 homes licensed in 2019. One in five licensed foster homes in America, gone in six years. Against that shrinking supply: roughly 328,947 children in foster care as of September 30, 2024.
The homes that remain are overwhelmingly licensed for one or two children. And agencies routinely report that the hardest placements to find are teenagers, children with complex needs, andsibling groups— the three categories most likely to end in a group facility or a split. The system's own practitioners have identified sibling groups as a placement of last resort under current capacity, at the same time federal law declares keeping them together a mandate.
The rate structure pushes the same direction
Look at what the system pays, and the incentive gradient becomes visible. Basic family foster care per-diems in many states run roughly $20 to $24 per child per day. Emergency shelter beds run about$30.Treatment and specialized homes run$37 to $45.Congregate and residential care runs into the hundreds per day.
Set those numbers side by side and read them as an economist would. A family willing to take four siblings absorbs four children's worth of chaos on four children's worth of a basic rate — a rate that was never designed to cover the cost of a fifth bedroom, a bigger vehicle, or the sheer logistics of four simultaneous placements. A residential facility takes one of those children and bills a multiple of the family rate for that single bed. Every dollar in the table points away from the sibling-group family home and toward the split: the cheapest placement is the one the mandate requires and the market cannot supply; the most expensive placement is the one that takes children one at a time.
"Acknowledge the importance"
The 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act tried to curb congregate care by capping Title IV-E room-and-board payments at14 daysfor non-family placements — unless the child is in aQualified Residential Treatment Program, a QRTP. And here the sibling mandate makes its cameo in the congregate-care reform, in six words that summarize the entire federal posture. The QRTP assessment is required to"acknowledge the importance of keeping siblings together."
Acknowledge. Not achieve. Not ensure. Not even attempt. The strongest verb Congress could muster, at the gate of the placement type most likely to separate siblings, wasacknowledge— a verb satisfied by a sentence in an assessment form. It is the "concerted efforts" scoring rule, rewritten as statute: the system asks its actors to demonstrate awareness of the sibling bond, and grades the awareness, while the bond itself goes unmeasured and unpaid for.
PART VI — THE CONTRACTORS: KANSAS, THE CASELOADS, AND THE CUBS TICKETS
In the states that privatized foster care case management, § 671(a)(31)'s mandate does not run to a state agency at all. It is subcontracted — to nonprofits whose incentives run through the same per-child machinery described above, and whose oversight has been, at times, catastrophic. Kansas is the case study.
The structure
Kansas farms out foster care case management to KVC Kansas, Saint Francis Ministries, Cornerstones of Care, and TFI Family Services— with Ember Hopere placing Saint Francis in Sedgwick County under contracts running July 2024 through June 2028. The state's statutory obligations, including the sibling mandate, are executed day to day by these organizations' caseworkers.
The caseloads
By 2021, the state's own data showed what those caseworkers were carrying: 42 percent of Saint Francis caseworkers and 24 percent of KVC Kansas caseworkers were each responsible for more than 30 children. Saint Francis had more than 100 children with no assigned caseworker at all.
Connect that to the national practice concerns from Part II. The Children's Bureau identified two causes of sibling separation: no homes that take sibling groups, andfailure to reconsider placement of siblings together after initial separation.Now picture the caseworker with 30 children on her list. Finding a foster home willing to take three siblings is not a form; it is hours of phone calls, home visits, and persuasion. Revisiting a six-month-old separation — reopening a placement that is, administratively speaking, "stable" — is exactly the kind of non-urgent, high-effort task that a triage-driven caseload makes impossible. A caseworker holding 30 children does not have the hours to run down a sibling-group home, let alone to circle back and reunite children the system already split. The "failure to reconsider" that the Children's Bureau flagged as a national practice concern is not a mystery of professional culture. It is the predictable output of the staffing arithmetic — and the staffing arithmetic, in a privatized per-child system, is a business decision.
The money was not idle
While the caseloads climbed, the money moved. Robert Smith, the ordained Episcopal priest who led Saint Francis Ministries from 2014 to 2020, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in February 2026, admitting to a scheme with IT contractor William Whymarkto overbill the child welfare nonprofit — prosecutors alleged at least$4.7 million. Smith's personal charges included$65,000 in Chicago Cubs tickets, which he claimed he intended to flip on the secondary market.
Sixty-five thousand dollars in baseball tickets, charged to a child welfare contractor, by its chief executive, while more than a hundred of the children in its care had no caseworker assigned to them at all. The juxtaposition requires no embellishment.
Investigation data visualization
For scale on the organizations themselves: Saint Francis's Kansas parent entity (EIN 48-0543809) reported roughly $14.0 million in revenue in fiscal year 2023; KVC Health Systems' Kansas parent (EIN 26-2516589) reported about$16.3 million. Those are holding-company figures, and they sit atop operating subsidiaries that move far more public money.
And the children in that system, during those years? They were sleeping in offices and cycling through "night-to-night" placements— a new bed, or no bed, every night — while documents showing family visits that never happened were being falsified. The paperwork said the visits occurred. The visits did not occur. Remember that fact when you return to Part II: this is the same species of paperwork on which the entire federal "concerted efforts" scoring system depends. A review instrument that grades files can be passed by whoever writes the files.
PART VII — THE CASES: THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS OF COURTS SAYING THE SAME THING
The constitutional stakes of sibling separation are not a novel theory. Federal courts have been recognizing them since before the children in today's system were born — since before their parents were in the system. Four cases, in chronological order, trace both the principle and its non-enforcement.
Aristotle P. v. Johnson (N.D. Ill. 1989)
Aristotle P. v. Johnson, 721 F. Supp. 1002 (N.D. Ill. 1989). Nineteen years before Congress passed the sibling mandate, Judge Ann C. Williams allowed a class of Illinois foster children to proceed on claims that separating them from their siblings and denying them visits violated their First Amendment right of association and their Fourteenth Amendment liberty interest in their sibling relationships. A consent decree followed, setting minimum sibling visitation.
Absorb the date. The constitutional theory — that the state, having taken custody of children, cannot casually sever the bonds between them — has existed in the federal reports for thirty-seven years. The practice has not changed. Everything the CFSR data in Parts II and III documents was already being litigated when the reviewers now reading case files were themselves in school.
M.D. v. Abbott (S.D. Tex.)
M.D. v. Abbott. In December 2015, Judge Janis Graham Jack found that "Texas's foster care system is broken, and it has been that way for decades," ruling that the state's practices — including placements separate from siblings, and placements in mixed-age group homes where younger children were exposed to sexual abuse by older ones — amounted to de liberate indifference to the constitutional rights of some 12,000 children in the state's permanent conservatorship. Deliberate indifference is not negligence language; it is the standard for constitutional liability. And the story did not end with the ruling: federal monitors report that the risk of serious harm persists.
M.B. v. Howard (D. Kan.)
M.B. v. Howardis the Kansas case — the same Kansas whose contractor caseloads and falsified visit records appear in Part VI — and its lead plaintiffs put faces on the practice concerns the Children's Bureau described in the abstract.
The lead plaintiffs wereM.B. and S.E., brothers aged 8 and 10, who in 2018 were separated from their sister the moment they entered state custody, and then subjected to night-to-night placements. They gotfour months together in one foster home.When the state failed to deliver their mental health services, the foster parent couldn't cope — and Kansas responded byseparating the brothers from each otherand putting them back on the night-to-night circuit. Trace the causal chain, because it is the whole system in one family: the state splits the siblings from their sister at the door; the state fails to provide services; the failure destabilizes the placement; and the state's remedy for the instability it created is another separation. Every link is a state decision. The children supply nothing but the harm.
The January 2021 settlement was hailed as transformative. Then came the accounting. The September 2025 neutral report by Judith Meltzer of the Center for the Study of Social Policy found Kansas moving children 7.24 times per 1,000 days in care, against a target of 4.4; only 83 percent of children experiencing one or fewer moves, against a 90 percent target;34 percent of children with an identified mental health need receiving no appropriate services; and the number of children with no placement at all nearly doubling from 2023 to 2024 —the highest since tracking began. Four years after the transformative settlement, the neutral monitor's own numbers describe a system still churning children through placements at nearly double its agreed target — the same churn that separated M.B. from S.E.
Wyatt B. v. Kotek (D. Or.)
Wyatt B. v. Kotek brings the story back to Oregon — the state whose CFSR report opened this article — and it is named for two brothers. Wyatt, age 3, and his brother Noah, 18 months, were moved constantly through their first three weeks in Oregon's custody before the state gave up and placed them in separate foster homes. Wyatt began hitting, kicking, and screaming. Noah developed night terrors and had to be held constantly.
A three-year-old and a toddler. The state could not find, in three weeks of trying, one home for both — the lack of placement resources practice concern, incarnate — so it solved its logistics problem by dividing them, and the children's bodies registered the cost immediately. Oregon settled the case in May 2024 under neutral-expert oversight.
Hold on to the case caption. The named defendant — the governor of Oregon, sued over a system that separated Wyatt from Noah — is about to reappear.
PART VIII — THE VETO: THE INCENTIVE STRUCTURE, STATED OUT LOUD
Then Oregon did something that exposes the incentive structure better than any statistic in this article.
Senate Bill 875
In 2025, the Oregon legislature passed Senate Bill 875.Its central provision attacked the bureaucratic default at the heart of this investigation: it would have required a court order before an agency could block or limit contact between foster siblings. Understand what that changes. Under the status quo, separation and restricted contact are administrative defaults — decisions made inside an agency, recorded in a file, reviewed by nobody outside it. SB 875 would have converted that default into a decision a judge has to own, on the record, with a name attached. It is the precise remedy for a system whose federal reviews found a third of separations carrying no valid documented reason: force the reason into a courtroom, where "no valid reason" is not an option.
Investigation data visualization
The bill also guaranteed foster children an attorney. And, in a detail that says everything about the system it was written for, it guaranteed them luggage to carry their belongings — instead of trash bags. A state legislature found it necessary to write into statute that children being moved between homes should have suitcases. That provision is not symbolism; it is testimony. It tells you exactly how children in the system have been moving their lives from placement to placement.
The veto
Governor Tina Kotek — a named defendant in Wyatt B. — vetoed it, saying it was unclear why "this level of prescriptiveness" was needed in statute.
Read the two facts together, because they belong together. The governor being sued over a system that separated three-year-old Wyatt from eighteen-month-old Noah vetoed the bill that would have made it harder to separate Wyatt from Noah. And her stated objection was not to the goal but to the prescriptiveness— to the conversion of agency discretion into judicial obligation. That is the incentive structure of American child welfare, stated out loud by its most senior possible spokesperson: prescriptiveness is a liability. Discretion is a defense. A statutory requirement can be violated, cited, and litigated. A "reasonable effort" cannot. Every actor in this story — the state defending a lawsuit, the agency writing a Program Improvement Plan, the contractor documenting concerted efforts — is safer under vague standards than firm ones. Only the children do better under the firm ones.
The override, and the clock
The Oregon Senate did not accept the veto. It overrode her, 21 to 6— Republicans and Democrats both —the first veto override in that chamber since 2011. A supermajority of a state senate, crossing party lines, to defend foster siblings' contact with each other against their own governor: as a measure of where the public's representatives stand when forced to vote on the record, it could hardly be clearer.
Then the override died in the House when the clock ran out on the session. Not defeated — expired. The bill that survived a gubernatorial veto and a two-thirds Senate vote was killed by a calendar.
The bill wasreintroduced in January 2026.As of this writing, that is where it stands — which means the administrative default it targeted still stands too.
PART IX — THE ACCOUNTABILITY GAP: WHY NONE OF THIS COSTS A STATE ANYTHING
Every preceding section ends at the same question: how is all of this free? Fifty states failing Permanency Outcome 2. A third of separations without valid documentation. Contractor caseloads at 30-plus children. Falsified visit records. The answer is a three-layer machine, and each layer is a public document.
Layer one: the penalty that suspends itself
Under45 C.F.R. § 1355.36, a state that fails a CFSR outcome face withholding of 1 percent of its Title IV-B and IV-E funds per failed outcome. On paper, a real penalty. But the same regulation provides that ACF suspends the withholding while a Program Improvement Plan is in effect and the state is "actively implementing" it.
Now add the empirical record: every state in the country has been found out of substantial conformity and placed in a PIP after every round of the CFSR since 2001.Combine the rule and the record and the machine reveals itself. The PIP is not a penalty phase a state occasionally enters; it is the permanent condition of the program. Fail the review, write the plan, and the penalty sleeps for as long as you are "actively implementing" — a status with no endpoint, renewed each round by the next failure and the next plan. Compliance is perpetually pending; the money never stops. Twenty-five years of universal failure, zero dollars withheld. The 1 percent penalty has the same relationship to reality as Oregon's 94.59 percent: it is a number that exists to be displayed, not applied.
Layer two: the measure that doesn't count
Worse, sibling placement isn't even in the part of the review that has teeth. The CFSR'sseven statewide data indicators— the hard numbers computed from AFCARS and NCANDS that determine national standards — are maltreatment recurrence, maltreatment in foster care, three permanency-in-12-months measures, re-entry, and placement stability.Sibling placement is not one of them.It lives only in the case-review portion, scored on "concerted efforts," by reviewers reading files.
This is the quiet architectural choice underneath everything in Parts II and III. The federal government maintains two grading tracks: a data track, where a computed number is compared to a national standard, and a narrative track, where reviewers assess effort in a sample of files. Sibling placement was assigned to the narrative track — even though, as Part IV showed, the data to move it to the numeric track has been flowing into AFCARS since fiscal year 2023. The measure was placed where the paperwork could satisfy it, and it has stayed there.
Layer three: the warning that was ignored
And none of this can be called an oversight, because the overseer was warned — in writing, twelve years ago. InGAO-14-347, issued May 29, 2014, and titled "Foster Care: HHS Needs to Improve Oversight of Fostering Connections Act Implementation, "the Government Accountability Office found that HHS had approved states' Fostering Connections plans but had never monitored whether states actually did any of it— and was still using a review instrument designed before the Act passed. GAO also flagged the exception at the heart of the mandate: although states may separate siblings when joint placement is "contrary to the health or safety of a child," no federal guidelines address how to assess when that exception applies.
Twelve years later, the CFSR still finds a third of separations undocumented, and there is still no guidance. The statute's escape hatch remains undefined; the undefined hatch remains the pathway for every unjustified split; and the agency told to define it has not.
The gap, assembled
Stack the three layers and the accountability gap is complete. Congress wrote the mandate at 42 U.S.C. § 671(a)(31) and attached no consequence to breaking it. HHS built a scoring system that rewards effort over outcome. GAO told HHS to fix the monitoring, and HHS did not. The states hired contractors and stopped counting. Nobody is watching, and everyone has an explanation for why that's someone else's job. The legislator points to the agency's review system; the agency points to the states' improvement plans; the state points to its contractors' documented efforts; the contractor points to the caseworker's file; and the file — as Kansas demonstrated — says whatever was typed into it.
Investigation data visualization
PART X — WHAT IT COSTS, AND WHAT WOULD FIX IT
The only continuous fact
Strip away the regulatory vocabulary and remember what is actually being distributed here.
For a child pulled out of her home at 3 a.m. by a stranger, a sibling is the only continuous fact of her life. She loses her house, her school, her bedroom, her parents, her dog, and her name on the mailbox in a single night. Her brother is the one thing that comes with her — unless the state decides he doesn't. The entire apparatus this article has described — the scoring instrument, the appendix, the per-diems, the caseloads, the veto — is the machinery that makes that decision, and the record shows it makes the severing decision in more than half of applicable cases, and cannot justify a third of them.
The research is not ambiguous
Nor is this a matter of sentiment against efficiency, because the research on outcomes points one way. Children placed with at least one sibling are less likely to experience a placement move— and specifically less likely to experience the destabilizing "non-progress" moves that cascade into more moves. Sibling separation carries a strong negative association with mental health. Sibling connection increases the likelihood of both reunification and adoption— the two outcomes the entire system is nominally organized to produce. And placement instability itself drives depression, anxiety, and aggression.
Put those findings against the system's own justifications and a bitter circularity appears. Every mechanism used to justify splitting siblings — no home big enough, needs too different, one child too hard — produces the very instability the split was supposedly avoiding. The separated child destabilizes; the destabilized child moves; the moves compound; and each new placement is easier to find for one child than for two, ratifying the original split. The system's justification for separation manufactures the conditions that keep children separated. Even on the system's own terms — stability, permanency, the seven data indicators it actually measures — separation is a losing trade.
Four fixes, in order of speed
The remedies are not mysterious, because every one of them follows directly from a failure the federal government itself has documented. Four fixes, in order of how fast they could happen:
1. Publish the AFCARS sibling data. HHS already has elements (b)(19), (b)(20), and (b)(21) for every foster child in America, going back to fiscal year 2023. Put the separation rate in the AFCARS Report and on the dashboard, by state, this year. This requires no legislation, no rulemaking, no appropriation. It requires a decision. Every day the vault stays shut is a day that choice is being made.
2. Make sibling placement a statewide data indicator with a national standard. Move it out of the "concerted efforts" case review and into the seven measured indicators, where a number — not a narrative — determines conformity. That is a Children's Bureau regulatory action, and it would end the Oregon two-numbers problem at a stroke: when the indicator is computed from AFCARS, the appendix is the grade.
3. Amend § 671(a)(31) to give it teeth. Require, as Oregon's SB 875 would have, a judicial finding on the record before siblings are separated or sibling contact is restricted — and require the agency tore-justify the separation at every permanency hearing. The Children's Bureau's own reviewers identified "failure to reconsider placement of siblings together after initial separation" as a national practice concern; a recurring judicial checkpoint is the direct remedy, because it converts "reconsideration" from a caseworker's discretionary afterthought into a scheduled legal event that cannot be skipped.
4. Pay for the capacity the mandate assumes. A sibling-group placement rate under Title IV-E, and a licensing and recruitment push aimed squarely at homes that can take three or four children, would attack the cause the federal government itself named first: lack of placement resources able to accept sibling groups. Eighteen years of experience with an unfunded mandate have established the limit of unfunded mandates. You cannot mandate a bed into existence.
Note the order. The first fix is administrative and could happen this year. The second is regulatory. The third is statutory. The fourth is budgetary. The system's defenders cannot claim the ladder is too steep, because its bottom rung is a publishing decision about data already collected.
EPILOGUE: THE COVER AND THE APPENDIX, AGAIN
Return, finally, to the Oregon document — because you now know everything that produced it.
You know that the 94.59 percent on its scoring pages was computed from "concerted efforts," a standard satisfiable by paperwork, in a state whose foster care system was sued over two brothers, three and eighteen months old, whom it moved for three weeks and then split into separate homes. You know that the 62.16 percent in its appendix — twenty-three of thirty-seven children actually placed with all their siblings — is the number the child would recognize, and that the scoring instrument was built so that number could not touch the grade. You know that the same state's legislature passed a bill to make such separations answerable to a judge, that the governor named in the brothers' lawsuit vetoed it as too prescriptive, that her senate overrode her for the first time since 2011, and that the override died of a calendar. And you know that the state faces no financial consequence for any of it, because the penalty regulation suspends itself for as long as an improvement plan is "in effect" — a condition every state has occupied continuously since 2001.
One document. Two numbers. The cover is for Washington. The appendix is for the children.
And behind both stands the number the federal government has and will not print. HHS has been collecting, since fiscal year 2023, the exact count of every foster child's siblings held elsewhere — element (b)(20) minus element (b)(21), per child, per state, per year — and has published none of it: not in the AFCARS Report, not on a dashboard that does not contain the word "sibling," not anywhere. Until that vault opens, the most recent national accounting remains the government's own case-file reviews. In them, 54 percent of foster children with siblings in care were not living with them.
The federal government looked at that number and called it a Strength.
Project Milk Carton's position is the same one that runs through every module of this series, and it is not a slogan; it is a publishing schedule. The paper trail is public — the statute, the scoring instrument, the aggregate report, the appendices, the regulation that suspends its own penalty, the GAO warning, the court files, the veto message, the override vote. Pull up a chair. Pull up the file.
The pending NEICE mandate is often presented as a solution. NEICE, the National Electronic Interstate Compact Enterprise, is designed to modernize ICPC transmission and reduce paper-based delays. Digital transmission matters, and full implementation is better than fax machines, mail bins, and scattered local processes. But digitizing a broken process is not the same as fixing it. If the underlying compact still lacks enforcement, penalties, staffing requirements, family remedies, and real-time accountability, then NEICE may simply move files more efficiently into the same queues. A digital bottleneck is still a bottleneck.
The ICPC crisis should force a much bigger question: why does the system make it so hard to place children with family while making it so easy to keep them in paid care? The answer is not one villain. It is design failure. It is legacy law. It is federalism without accountability. It is underfunded administration. It is risk avoidance. It is provider economics. It is the absence of a private right of action. It is decades of reform language without enforcement teeth. It is the oldest story in child welfare: the state says family matters, then builds a process that treats family as a paperwork problem.
A serious reform agenda would begin with enforceable deadlines. The 60-day home study requirement should not be a polite suggestion. If a receiving state misses the deadline without documented good cause, there should be automatic escalation, public reporting, and financial consequence. If the delay continues, relatives should have a direct administrative appeal and a fast-track court remedy. A compact that can stop a child from moving should also give the child and relative a way to force the government to act.
Second, the ICPC should include a child-centered emergency placement pathway for vetted relatives. When a relative has already passed background checks, has an existing relationship with the child, and meets basic safety criteria, the law should allow provisional placement with supervision while the full home study is completed. The system already takes risks by placing children with strangers in emergency settings. It should not pretend that relatives are uniquely dangerous simply because they live across a state line.
Third, Congress and the states must fund ICPC offices like critical infrastructure. A state with thousands of foster care cases cannot run interstate placement through one or two overburdened staff members and then act shocked when children wait. Staffing ratios should be published. Caseloads should be published. Average processing times should be published. Returned packets should be tracked. Clock restarts should be tracked. Every state should have a public ICPC dashboard showing how many children are waiting, how long they have waited, and where the file is stuck.
Fourth, the law must close the clock manipulation loophole. The 60-day period should not begin only after the receiving state accepts a completed referral while the sending state can take weeks or months to prepare it. There should be deadlines on both sides. The sending state should have a fixed period to identify relatives, prepare the referral, and transmit the packet. The receiving state should have a fixed period to accept, reject, or request specific missing information. If a packet is returned as incomplete, the reason should be documented, time-limited, and reviewable.
Fifth, ICPC delays should trigger placement cost review. If a child remains in congregate care or high-cost foster care solely because of interstate paperwork delay, the state responsible for the delay should bear financial consequence. Right now, the cost of delay is diffused across systems, while the child pays emotionally. Accountability should follow the bottleneck. If a state’s failure to process a home study causes months of unnecessary paid placement, that failure should show up in the budget.
Sixth, federal child welfare reviews should include ICPC compliance as a core performance measure. It is absurd to review state child welfare performance while allowing interstate family placement delays to remain a side issue. If a state cannot move children to safe relatives across state lines within legal timelines, that is a permanency failure. It should affect federal oversight, corrective action plans, and funding scrutiny.
Finally, families need rights, not just promises. Relatives who step forward should receive notice, status updates, reasons for delay, and access to review. Children should have counsel empowered to challenge ICPC delay when it harms permanency. Parents should be able to argue that the state cannot move toward termination while kinship placement is delayed by government inaction. No child should lose family because two state agencies could not move paperwork on time.
The ICPC began as a protective reform. That origin matters because it explains why the system has been so hard to challenge. Nobody wants to be accused of weakening safeguards for children. But after sixty-six years, the question is no longer whether children need protection across state lines. Of course they do. The question is whether the existing compact protects them from harm or creates a new kind of harm through delay, drift, and family separation. A child left in congregate care for six months while a safe relative waits is not being protected by paperwork. That child is being failed by it.
The phrase “fall through the cracks” is too soft for what is happening here. Children are not falling through cracks. They are being held in a pipeline with known failure points, known delays, known staffing shortages, known enforcement gaps, and known financial consequences. When a system knows where children get stuck and still does not build a release valve, the problem is not accidental. It is tolerated.
This is why the ICPC crisis deserves national attention. It is not as visible as a courtroom termination. It is not as emotionally packaged as an adoption ceremony. It is not as politically explosive as a removal caught on video. But it may be one of the most consequential hidden mechanisms in the child welfare system because it decides whether family can actually function as family when state lines are involved. In a mobile country where relatives often live in different states, a slow interstate placement system is a family-separation engine.
The children caught in this engine do not need another conference panel. They do not need another best-practices memo. They do not need another voluntary compact reform stalled for twenty years. They need enforceable timelines, funded staffing, transparent dashboards, provisional kinship pathways, legal remedies, and consequences for states that ignore deadlines. They need a system that treats family placement as urgent, not optional.
The ICPC was built to stop children from being sent across state lines without protection. But in 2026, the greater danger is that children are being kept from family without accountability. A compact designed to protect children has become a maze that delays them. A law built for paper files is governing digital-age families. A process created to ensure safety is too often producing separation.
And the most damning fact remains the simplest: when states miss the deadline, nothing happens to the states. Something happens only to the child.
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SOURCES
All sources below are the sources of the underlying Project Milk Carton investigation, cited as the investigation cites them.
CFSR Aggregate Report, round 3: FYs 2015–2017 — HHS Children's Bureau / JBS International (Items 7, 7A, 7B, 8E, 8F; Permanency Outcome 2)
California CFSR Round 4 Final Report (2024) and Oregon CFSR Round 4 Final Report (2025)
45 C.F.R. § 1355.44 (AFCARS sibling elements) and 45 C.F.R. § 1355.36 (withholding/PIP suspension)
AFCARS Final Rule, 85 Fed. Reg. 28410 (May 12, 2020); AFCARS Dashboard
42 U.S.C. § 671(a)(31) — Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act
[GAO-14-347,Foster Care: HHS Needs to Improve Oversight of Fostering Connections Act Implementation](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-14-347)
[Jones, Font, Lee, Orsi-Hunt & Kim, "Sometimes, Only Some Siblings Go to Foster Care,"Child Maltreatment(2025)](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40037990/); Sibling Separation and Placement Instability for Children in Foster Care
Aristotle P. v. Johnson, 721 F. Supp. 1002 (N.D. Ill. 1989); M.D. v. Abbott (Children's Rights); M.B. v. Howard (Children's Rights); Wyatt B. v. Kotek (Disability Rights Oregon)
Kansas foster care settlement progress report, Sept. 2025 (Kansas Reflector); Ex-CEO of Saint Francis Ministries pleads guilty to wire fraud (Kansas Reflector, Feb. 2026)
Oregon Senate overrides Kotek veto of SB 875 (OPB, June 2025); Kotek Vetoes Three Bills Relating to Child Welfare (Willamette Week)
Licensed Foster Homes Down 19% Since 2019 (The Imprint); Child Welfare: Purposes, Federal Programs, and Funding (CRS IF10590)
Form 990 financials via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer: Saint Francis Ministries Inc. (EIN 48-0543809), KVC Health Systems Inc. (EIN 26-2516589)
Project Milk Carton is a 501(c)(3) organization producing child welfare transparency research from public data and primary documents. Every figure in this article is drawn from the sources above; where widely repeated claims could not be traced to a primary source, they do not appear here.
Project Milk Carton
501(c)(3) Nonprofit • projectmilkcarton.org • t.me/ProjectMilkCarton
I know a person (female) who was placed in an orphanage at pre-school age along with two little brothers , who were immediately transferred to a boys orphanage . She never saw them again and is still grieving as their 'little momma ' some fifty years later .
My wife is from a family of twelve kids in S. America . At about that pre-school age she became 'little momma' to her 'next younger brother' , just a year or so different in age. They still have a strong bond , many decades later .
Separating bonded children can be devastating to both .