The Zeroes: A Unanimous Court Called Hidden Foster Care a Shadow System. Here Is Why It Is Still Running.
Investigation by Project Milk Carton
Project Milk Carton — Investigation | July 23, 2026
Brooklyn was two years old, and on paper she was never in foster care.
Georgia's Division of Family and Children Services placed her — informally, without a court order, without taking custody — in the home of her father's live-in girlfriend. Her mother, Rachel Aldridge, objected. She told DFCS the girlfriend was using methamphetamine. The placement happened anyway. Brooklyn died of blunt trauma to the head, and the woman the agency chose was convicted of her murder. Her mother later told a United States Senate panel: "Brooklyn would still be alive today if anyone at DFCS had been willing to listen to me, her mother." The Senate's own investigation confirmed that DFCS informally placed her "with plainly unsuitable caregivers."
Because no petition was ever filed, Brooklyn does not appear in any federal foster care statistic. Neither do the estimated 100,000 to 300,000 children a year who are separated from their parents the same way — by a signature on a "safety plan" at a kitchen table, under threat of formal removal, with no judge, no lawyer, and no entry in any database. Our July investigation laid out the machine: the coercion mechanic, the legal fiction of consent, and the New York Court of Appeals' unanimous ruling on May 21, 2026, striking down that state's attempt to formalize a version of it. Judge Shirley Troutman's question at argument — "How is this not creating a shadow system without oversight?" — took seven judges one opinion to answer: it is.
This investigation asked the next question: if the highest court of a state can see it in one sentence, why is the system still running everywhere else?
We pulled the regulations from the live Code of Federal Regulations, the penalty history from the Federal Register, the bill records from Congress, the docket sheets from the federal courts, the rate schedules from five state agencies, and the placement data directly from Texas's own government data servers. The answer is written in zeroes:
Zero penalties. A federal regulation already on the books arguably requires states to report these children — and the federal government has not penalized a single state for foster care data noncompliance since January 2002.
Zero hearings. The bill that would simply count the children has one cosponsor in each chamber and has never had a hearing. It is Congress's second attempt. The first died without a vote.
Zero words. In forty years of foster care data rulemaking, the responsible federal agency has never once addressed whether informal, agency-arranged placements must be reported. Its own policy page touching the question is now a dead link.
Zero dollars. Federal matching money exists to support the relatives raising these children. In fiscal year 2024, three states claimed it. More than forty claimed nothing.
Zero plan. Two months after New York's shadow program was struck down, the agency that ran it has not said what happens to the children already placed through it — and has not answered press inquiries at all.
And one number that is not zero: 3,202 — the children Texas counted in its informal-placement system last fiscal year, after becoming the only state in America forced by law to count. The number is going up.
This is the record.
I. The regulation that already exists — and the enforcement that stopped in 2002
The entire national debate over hidden foster care assumes the practice falls through a statutory gap: states don't report these children because no rule requires it. We pulled the operative federal definition from the live Code of Federal Regulations. Read it:
"Foster care means 24-hour substitute care for children placed away from their parents or guardians and for whom the title IV-E agency has placement and care responsibility. This includes, but is not limited to, placements in foster family homes, foster homes of relatives, group homes, emergency shelters, residential facilities, childcare institutions, and proadaptive homes. A child is in foster care in accordance with this definition regardless of whether the foster care facility is licensed and payments are made by the State, Tribal or local agency for the care of the child... or whether there is Federal matching of any payments that are made."
— 45 C.F.R. § 1355.20
There is no court-order requirement in that definition. There is no custody requirement. The trigger is "placement and care responsibility" — and the federal Administration for Children and Families' own policy manual said plainly (in a Q&A now reachable only through the Internet Archive, because the live page 404s after ACF's website migration): "custody of the child is not a requirement of Federal law or policy under title IV-E and the title IV-E agency need not be given custody, but must be given responsibility for placement and care of the child."
When a caseworker selects the relative, sets the conditions, controls the visitation, and holds the threat of formal removal over the arrangement — who has placement and care responsibility?
The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform has pressed exactly this reading for years. Its considered formulation, from its 2025 Rate-of-Removal Index: "NCCPR believes that federal regulations actually require states to report entries into hidden foster care, but ACF is not enforcing those regulations." On Kansas, which it accuses of making hundreds of foster children statistically disappear: "At best, Kansas is exploiting a technicality in regulations... At worst they may not be following those regulations." NCCPR itself hedges between "loophole" and "violation" — and honesty requires saying the fetched text supports the hedge, not a flat conclusion. The regulation's mechanics contemplate responsibility arriving by "Voluntary Placement Agreement or court order" (45 C.F.R. § 1355.44(e)(1)); the informal, nothing-signed-but-a-safety-plan arrangement sits in the seam between the broad definition and the narrow mechanics.
But here is what is not ambiguous. We searched the full text of both modern AFCARS rules — the 2016 final rule (81 Fed. Reg. 90524) and the 2020 final rule (85 Fed. Reg. 28410). Neither contains the words "hidden," "kinship diversion," or any discussion of informal agency-arranged placements. Not one sentence. The agency that wrote the definition has never said what it means for the largest uncounted population in child welfare. Silence, maintained across two administrations and two complete rulemakings, on a practice the research literature says accounts for nearly half of all out-of-home placements after a CPS investigation.
And here is the enforcement record, from ACF's own 2015 Federal Register preamble (80 Fed. Reg. 7132):
"There are no penalties currently for non-compliant data submissions. Due to a settlement of several States' appeals of AFCARS penalties, ACF discontinued withholding Federal funds for a title IV-E agency's failure to comply with AFCARS requirements in January 2002."
Congress responded by mandating penalties in the Adoption Promotion Act of 2003. ACF then notified states it would not assess them until it finished revising its regulations — a revision it did not complete until 2020, with compliance applying only to data submitted from October 2022 forward. The penalty machinery now exists on paper at 45 C.F.R. §§ 1355.46–47: one-sixth of one percent of certain federal claims for a first noncompliant period. We found no public record of any AFCARS penalty actually assessed against any state, under any rule, at any time since January 2002 — a period covering the entire documented history of hidden foster care.
One more thing about that penalty machinery, and it may be the most important paragraph in this investigation. Every compliance check in § 1355.46 tests the file the state submits — missing data, invalid data, internal inconsistencies, late transactions. There is no check that can detect a child the state never entered into the file at all. The federal government built a data-quality system that audits the shadow's paperwork and is structurally incapable of seeing the shadow. Even perfect enforcement of the existing rule could not find Brooklyn.
II. The state that counted
On September 1, 2023, Texas became the only state in the country legally forced to count its hidden foster care system. House Bill 730 and Senate Bill 614 did four things to the state's "Parental Child Safety Placements": capped the initial agreement at 30 days, renewable at most twice — a hard 90-day ceiling unless a parent's attorney signs or a court orders more; required written notice of the right to consult an attorney before signing; required an annual report on court involvement; and required the Department of Family and Protective Services to track and publish the data.
Texas now runs a public PCSP dashboard. We did not read press summaries of it — we pulled the underlying data directly from the state's own data servers on July 23, 2026. Here is what forced counting actually revealed:
Three findings, none of them the story anyone expected.
First: the cap works on time. Average placement duration fell from 102 days — above the legal ceiling, in a fiscal year that mostly predated it — to 56 days and falling. When the law imposed a clock, the clock ran.
Second: the count is going up, not down. Distinct children in PCSPs have nearly doubled since the law took effect — 1,623 to 3,202 — and FY2026 is on pace to keep climbing. A note of statistical honesty the secondary coverage has botched: the famous old Texas numbers (roughly 34,000 placements in FY2014, falling to about 12,000 by 2020 and 1,481 initiated in FY2022) counted placements initiated and collapsed mostly because of a March 2022 internal DFPS practice change — before HB 730 existed. The new dashboard counts distinct children. The two series cannot be spliced, and anyone telling you HB 730 shrank Texas's hidden system by some tidy percentage is comparing measures that don't compare. What the clean post-reform series shows is a system growing every year while being counted.
Third: the removals tripled. When HB 730 passed, Representative Gene Wu warned the cap could "force CPS's hand" — that agencies unable to park children in indefinite informal placements would convert them into formal removals. The dashboard shows children removed into foster care during an active PCSP nearly tripling, from 108 in FY2023 to 363 in FY2025, with the removal rate climbing 6.7% → 8.5% → 11.3%. That is not an argument against counting. It is the strongest argument for it ever produced: the informal system was absorbing children who, by the agency's own later judgment, needed the formal one — with its vetting, its judges, and its lawyers.
And even the country's only counting law is fraying at the edges. The statute requires an annual report on court-ordered services during PCSPs; DFPS published the first (83 cases statewide, September 2024) — and as of July 23, 2026, no 2025 edition appears anywhere on the agency's reports page. Senate Bill 596, which passed the Texas Senate in April 2025 and would have required monthly public PCSP reporting broken out by age, race, sex, and county, died on the House calendar without a floor vote. A companion bill to give PCSP caregivers monetary assistance died in committee. The state that proved counting is possible is already testing how little counting it can get away with.
III. The bill with one cosponsor
Everything Texas was forced to do; Congress has twice been asked to require of all fifty states — and has twice declined to even discuss.
The Hidden Foster Care Transparency Act would do one thing: make states measure and publicly report children diverted into informal placements, with the data going to HHS and an annual report to Congress. It does not ban the practice. It does not fund anything. It asks the government to count.
Its status, verified from congressional records on July 23, 2026:
H.R. 5507 (Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-TX): introduced September 19, 2025; referred to House Ways and Means; the only recorded action in ten months is "Introduced." Zero hearings. Zero markups. One cosponsor — Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI), who signed on July 14, 2026, nine days before this publication. That signature is the bill's only movement in all of 2026.
S. 2902 (Sen. John Cornyn, R-TX, with Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-GA): referred to Senate Finance. Only action: "Introduced." Zero hearings. One cosponsor.
The predecessor — the Foster Care Placement Transparency Act, S. 5214, introduced by the same senators in October 2024 after Ossoff's 13-month investigation of Georgia's foster system — died at the end of the 118th Congress without a vote. The current bills are the rerun.
The Senate investigation that produced the bill found, in Georgia alone, that "voluntary kin placements are not appropriately vetted" and that children had been placed in the homes of people with histories of sex crimes — none of those children counted anywhere. Ossoff's bipartisan follow-up work with Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-VA) found in April 2026 that in at least seven states, children removed from their homes — charged with nothing — were held in juvenile detention because no foster placement existed; one severely autistic child was detained and then slept in a state office building.
Meanwhile the numbers Congress is legislating with are fossils. The canonical national estimate — 100,000 to 300,000 children a year — traces to research published in 2019 and 2020. We verified that the 2025 Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute report and Senator Cornyn's own September 2025 release still cite it, because no better national number has been produced in six years. The federal government's newest kinship-care publication — an ASPE/ACF issue brief from March 2026 — contains, by our full-text search, zero mentions of diversion, informal placements, or hidden foster care. The most current official document about kinship caregiving in America does not acknowledge that the uncounted half of it exists.
One state counts. The count is public, it is revealing, and it is inconvenient. The bill to extend it nationally cannot get a hearing in either chamber.
IV. The price: what the shadow saves the state, per child, per month
Hidden foster care persists for a reason our July investigation named and this one prices: it is free. When a state formally removes a child, it owes a foster care maintenance payment. When it diverts the same child onto a grandmother's kitchen table, it owes nothing — and the grandmother's fallback, if she even knows to apply and clears the barriers, is a TANF "child-only" grant that is a fraction of the foster rate.
We pulled the current rate schedules from the five biggest state systems and the TANF child-only maximums from the Child Trends compilation for the Grandfamilies & Kinship Support Network. This is the arithmetic of a diversion, per child, per month:
(Foster rates from each state agency's current published schedule; TANF figures from Child Trends' FY2023 state compilation; the gap is our calculation from those verified inputs.)
Annualized, every diverted child carries roughly $4,100 to $15,600 a year off the state's books and onto the budget of the relative who took them in — a relative who, the research consistently finds, is likelier to be poor than a licensed foster parent. And that arithmetic is the best case: per the same Child Trends data, only about 13 percent of children in kinship care nationally actually receive the TANF child-only grant. The typical diverted caregiver gets the $121 column rounded down to zero. Texas — the state with the model transparency law — pays its diverted caregivers the least in the nation's five biggest systems while its formal rate runs eleven times higher.
The federal government has, on paper, been closing this gap. The September 2023 kinship licensing rule lets states license relatives under kin-specific standards and pay them full foster rates with federal matching; as of ACF's April 2026 update, 20 states have approved plans, with two more under review — meaning thirty states, two and a half years on, still have not filed the paperwork to pay grandmothers equally. And the kinship navigator money Congress created in 2018 tells the same story with harder numbers: GAO reported in December 2025 that twelve jurisdictions now have approval to claim federal matching funds, and ACF's own FY2024 claims data — we parsed the spreadsheet — shows exactly three states actually drew money: Ohio ($8.99 million total claims), Colorado ($30.9 million), and Utah ($0.9 million), roughly $20.4 million in federal share nationwide. California, Florida, New York, and more than forty other title IV-E agencies claimed $0. GAO's 2020 recommendation that HHS proactively push this money to states remains, in GAO's own words, open — because HHS did not agree to do it.
The support exists on paper. The paper is the point.
V. The only rooms where it's moving are courtrooms — and there's a trial date
Congress won't count, ACF won't enforce, and thirty states won't file licensing paperwork. The motion in this field is now entirely in federal court, and for the first time it has a calendar.
October 13, 2026. That is the jury trial date — verified from the federal docket — in K.H. v. District of Columbia, before Judge Ana Reyes in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It is the lead case of eight consolidated suits by 24 plaintiffs, brought by DC KinCare Alliance and Ropes & Gray, alleging the District's child welfare agency informally placed children with relatives without telling those relatives they had the right to be licensed and paid as foster parents. Judge Reyes allowed federal Social Security Act and D.C. tort claims to survive dismissal in 2024. The District moved for summary judgment in June 2025; as of the docket's last activity on July 15, 2026, no ruling has appeared — but the court has already held an evidentiary hearing on a question that should chill every state running a diversion program: whether the children themselves have standing to sue for the foster payments never made on their behalf. If that trial goes forward this October, an American jury will, for the first time, put a price on a hidden foster care placement.
Juries that have seen adjacent versions of this practice have not been kind to it. In Stein v. Depke, an Arizona federal jury awarded parents roughly $563,000 in compensatory and punitive damages over a coerced temporary-custody arrangement. In Hogan v. Cherokee County, a North Carolina jury awarded what the court called considerable damages for a custody agreement extracted with 24 hours' notice and no counsel. The Sixth Circuit in Schulkers v. Kammer let due-process claims proceed where a "prevention plan" was kept in force for months after the parents' drug tests came back negative. In Stumpf v. Cooley (W.D.N.Y. 2024), claims survived where caseworkers had police effect a "voluntary" turnover of the children. And in the darkest entry in the American Bar Association's caselaw compilation on this subject, Ridener v. Indiana: after charges against the parents were dropped, the agency failed to tell the court, the children remained in the informal arrangement it had pressured into existence — and died in a house fire days later, along with the adult sibling caring for them.
New York City. In Gould v. City of New York, nine parents allege the Administration for Children's Services conducts its roughly 50,000 investigations a year through coerced, warrantless home searches — more than 99.5 percent without any court order. On February 2, 2026, a federal magistrate judge recommended certifying a class covering, in effect, every investigated NYC parent. The city objected; in March, the district judge paused the certification on a standing question. The decision could arrive any week. If certification holds, the front door of hidden foster care — the warrantless entry that produces the kitchen-table signature — goes on trial at city scale.
And New York State. Two months after the Court of Appeals unanimously killed the Host Family Homes program as an unauthorized "shadow system," here is the complete public record of the state's response: the Office of Children and Family Services declined to comment to the press, no wind-down plan or accounting of children already placed through the program has been published anywhere we could find, and not one bill has been introduced in Albany to either revive or formally bury the program. A 7–0 ruling from the state's highest court, answered with silence. The second-most important open question in this field — after "how many children are in the shadow nationally" — is how many children are in New York's dead program right now, and who is checking on them. That is a question with a name and an address, and a public records request can ask it.
The mirror image, same court system: in B.B. v. Hochul, the Second Circuit in February 2026 revived a class action for children denied placement with their own relatives by blanket disqualification rules. Read together with the diversion cases, the two dockets describe a single system with no principle at all: when kin placement saves the state money, it happens with no vetting and no court; when kin placement would cost the state money, it is refused. The variable is never the child.
VI. What the record shows
Stack the zeroes next to the one real number and the shape of the thing is unmistakable.
The federal definition of foster care, on its face, reaches a child placed by an agency in a relative's home, unlicensed and unpaid. The agency that owns that definition has never applied it, never explained it, never audited for it, has assessed zero penalties on anyone's foster care data for twenty-four years, and operates a compliance system that cannot detect an uncounted child even in principle. The bill that would mandate counting has one cosponsor per chamber and no hearing on its second trip through Congress. The money to make honest kinship placements affordable sits unclaimed by forty-plus states. And the single state forced to count found the shadow growing, the durations shrinking, and the removals tripling — evidence that the uncounted system had been quietly holding children the formal system, with its judges and lawyers and vetting, would not have left there.
The fixes are not mysterious, and every one of them now has a working example: count (Texas's dashboard — nationally, H.R. 5507/S. 2902); time-limit (Texas's 90-day cap); lawyer it before the signature (New Mexico's pre-petition counsel infrastructure; the Washington State bill that died is the template of what not to let die); pay kin equally so the fiscal incentive to hide the removal collapses (the 2023 federal rule the remaining thirty states haven't adopted; Illinois's KIND Act parity law). And enforce the regulation that already exists — or amend it one sentence's worth, so that "placement and care responsibility" says what everyone at every kitchen table already knows it means.
Brooklyn's death was investigated by a Senate subcommittee. Her name reached the Congressional Record. The bill her story helped inspire has been introduced twice and heard zero times. The system that placed her was never required to count her, and it never did.
Until the counting is mandatory, every number in this field is a floor, not a fact. That is not an accident of the system.
It is the system.
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Sources
Federal regulations & rulemaking (all regulatory text fetched from the live eCFR / Federal Register)
45 C.F.R. § 1355.20 (definition of foster care): https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/section-1355.20
45 C.F.R. § 1355.42 (out-of-home care reporting population): https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/section-1355.42
45 C.F.R. § 1355.44 (removal/placement data elements): https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/section-1355.44
45 C.F.R. §§ 1355.46–1355.47 (AFCARS compliance & penalties): https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/section-1355.46 · https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/section-1355.47
2016 AFCARS final rule, 81 Fed. Reg. 90524: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/12/14/2016-29366/adoption-and-foster-care-analysis-and-reporting-system
2020 AFCARS final rule, 85 Fed. Reg. 28410: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/05/12/2020-09817/adoption-and-foster-care-analysis-and-reporting-system
2015 AFCARS NPRM (penalty history quote), 80 Fed. Reg. 7132: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2015/02/09/2015-02354/adoption-and-foster-care-analysis-and-reporting-system
ACF Child Welfare Policy Manual § 8.3A.12 (placement-and-care Q&A; live page currently 404 — archived): via web.archive.org (ACF citID=31)
ACF kinship licensing rule adoption map (20 states approved as of April 2026): https://acf.gov/cb/map/state-territories-separate-licensing-standards
ASPE/ACF, "States Increasingly Promote Kinship Care..." (March 2026): https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/9d9d8dc846e4e26acbab86c8d7e80ac8/Kinship%20Care%20Brief.pdf
NCCPR's regulatory argument
NCCPR, 2025 Rate-of-Removal Index (May 2026): https://nccpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2025RORMay26.pdf
NCCPR, "How the Kansas 'child welfare' agency makes hundreds of foster children 'disappear'" (2025): https://www.nccprblog.org/2025/04/how-kansas-child-welfare-agency-makes.html
NCCPR, "Getting basic federal data on foster care" (Mar. 2025): https://www.nccprblog.org/2025/03/getting-basic-federal-data-on-foster.html
Texas (primary data pulled from state servers July 23, 2026)
DFPS PCSP dashboard, "Data About Parent Child Safety Placements": https://databook.dfps.texas.gov/views/cps_pcsp_06_dfps/fy_summary (linked from https://www.dfps.texas.gov/About_DFPS/Monthly_Data/default.asp)
HB 730 enrolled text (Tex. Fam. Code § 264.902 amendments, § 264.2032, § 264.907): https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/html/HB00730F.htm · SB 614 analysis: https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/analysis/html/SB00614S.htm
DFPS, HB 730/SB 614 Court Order Report (Sept. 1, 2024; 83 cases): https://www.dfps.texas.gov/About_DFPS/Reports_and_Presentations/CPS/documents/2024/2024-08-30_HB730_SB614_Court_Order_Report.pdf · DFPS CPS reports page (no 2025 edition listed as of July 23, 2026): https://www.dfps.texas.gov/About_DFPS/Reports_and_Presentations/CPS/default.asp
Texas Children's Commission, PCSP Round Table Report (34,000 in FY2014): https://texaschildrenscommission.gov/media/0omngxez/pcsp-round-table-report-final.pdf
Texas CFSR Round 4 Statewide Assessment (6,192 FY2021 / 1,481 FY2022; March 2022 practice change): https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/tx-cfsr-r4-swa.pdf
Martinez, "Out of the Shadows: The Hidden Foster Care System in Texas," 101 Tex. L. Rev.: https://texaslawreview.org/out-of-the-shadows-the-hidden-foster-care-system-in-texas/
SB 596 (89R, monthly public PCSP reporting — died on House calendar): https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=89R&Bill=SB596 · SB 607 (caregiver assistance — died in committee): https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=89R&Bill=SB607
The Imprint on HB 730 and Rep. Wu's warning (via archive): http://web.archive.org/web/20240921033018/https://imprintnews.org/top-stories/texas-bill-to-increase-rights-for-parents-under-investigation-passes-state-house-and-senate/241759
Congress
H.R. 5507, Hidden Foster Care Transparency Act (status & cosponsors via GovTrack/Congress.gov): https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr5507 · https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5507
S. 2902: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/s2902 · https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/2902
Cornyn–Ossoff release (Sept. 2025): https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-ossoff-introduce-bill-to-support-foster-youth-2/
Predecessor bill S. 5214 (118th, died): https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/5214 · Ossoff introduction release (Oct. 2024): https://www.ossoff.senate.gov/press-releases/watch-following-13-month-foster-care-investigation-sen-ossoff-introduces-bipartisan-bill-to-strengthen-federal-oversight-of-foster-care-systems/
Ossoff investigation findings (Georgia; April 2024): https://www.ossoff.senate.gov/press-releases/foster-care-investigation-sen-ossoff-releases-findings-of-13-month-probe-into-safety-of-foster-children/
Ossoff–Kiggans, children detained for lack of placements (April 2, 2026): https://www.ossoff.senate.gov/press-releases/sen-ossoff-rep-kiggans-uncover-foster-children-locked-up-due-to-lack-of-foster-care-placements/
Brooklyn's case — Senate testimony coverage: https://capitol-beat.org/2023/10/u-s-senate-panel-hears-tragic-stories-from-georgias-foster-care-system/
The money
Texas DFPS T3C rate schedule: https://dfps.texas.gov/Texas_Child_Centered_Care/rates.asp · Every Texan, kinship rates (Feb. 2025): https://everytexan.org/2025/02/26/kinship-care-in-texas-benefits-children-and-saves-the-state-millions/
California CDSS ACL 25-45 (FY25-26 foster rates): https://cacaregivers.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/ACL-25-45-Foster-Care-Rates-2526.pdf
Florida DCF, 2026 foster parent COLA memo: https://kids.myflfamilies.com/documents/20260128-Memo_2026_FP_COLA.pdf
New York OCFS maximum state aid rates 2025–26 (AFFCNY compilation of 25-OCFS-ADM-10): https://affcny.org/wp-content/uploads/2025-2026-RATES.pdf
Illinois DCFS FY26 foster parent rate schedule: https://dcfs.illinois.gov/content/dam/soi/en/web/dcfs/documents/loving-homes/foster-care/documents/foster-parent-rate-schedule.pdf
Child Trends / Grandfamilies & Kinship Support Network, state TANF child-only grants (Table A2): https://www.grandfamilies.org/Portals/0/Documents/Financial%20Assistance/State-TANF-Data-Memo.pdf
GAO-26-107658, "Relatives Raising Children" (Dec. 2025): https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107658
ACF, FY2024 Title IV-E Kinship Navigator claims & caseload data: https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/fy2024-iv-e-kinship-navigator-claims-caseload.xlsx
GAO-23-105624 (baseline 2023 finding): https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105624
Litigation (docket data via CourtListener/RECAP, July 23, 2026)
K.H. v. District of Columbia, No. 1:19-cv-03124 (D.D.C.) — trial set Oct. 13, 2026: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16363177/kh-v-district-of-columbia/
Companion dockets: S.K. 1:20-cv-00753; S.S. 1:21-cv-00512; T.J. 1:21-cv-00663; Y.A.L. 1:24-cv-02206; J.R. 1:24-cv-02207 (D.D.C.)
DC KinCare Alliance, impact litigation: https://www.dckincare.org/impact-litigation
Gould v. City of New York, No. 1:24-cv-01263 (E.D.N.Y.): https://clearinghouse.net/case/45296/ · class-cert R&R: https://www.paulweiss.com/insights/client-news/new-york-families-win-class-certification-in-fourth-amendment-lawsuit-against-the-city-of-new-york
B.B. v. Hochul, 2d Cir. No. 23-7401 (Feb. 2, 2026): https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/10782766/b-b-v-hochul/
Matter of Lawyers for Children v. NYS OCFS, 2026 NY Slip Op 03218 (May 21, 2026): https://www.nycourts.gov/reporter/current/3dseries/2026/2026_03218.shtml · https://www.proskauerforgood.com/2026/05/proskauer-secures-unanimous-victory-at-the-new-york-court-of-appeals-on-behalf-of-three-legal-services-organizations/ · OCFS non-response: https://www.amny.com/news/high-court-strikes-down-host-homes-foster-care/
ABA Center on Children and the Law, "Hidden Foster Care and Kinship Diversion Caselaw" (2025) — incl. Stein v. Depke, Hogan v. Cherokee County, Schulkers v. Kammer, Stumpf v. Cooley, Ridener v. Indiana: https://www.grandfamilies.org/Portals/0/Hidden-Foster-Care-Caselaw.pdf
State reform instruments
New Mexico HB 46 (2022, Family Representation and Advocacy Act): https://www.nmlegis.gov/Legislation/Legislation?Chamber=H&LegType=B&LegNo=46&year=22
Illinois HB 4781, Kinship in Demand (KIND) Act (signed Feb. 5, 2025)
California AB 260 (2021, probate guardianship coordination): https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB260
Washington HB 1295 (2023 — died in Appropriations): https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1295&Year=2023
CCAI, "Supported Kin Diversion" (2025 policy roundup): https://www.grandfamilies.org/Portals/0/Documents/Kinship%20Diversion/CCAI25-Supported-Kin-Diversion.pdf
Foundational research
Josh Gupta-Kagan, America's Hidden Foster Care System, 72 Stan. L. Rev. 841 (2020): https://review.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Gupta-Kagan-72-Stan.-L.-Rev.-841.pdf
Chapin Hall, Diverting Children from Foster to Kinship Care (2023): https://www.chapinhall.org/wp-content/uploads/Policy-Brief_Kinship-Diversion_FINAL_2023_05_31.pdf