There are 57 foster homes for every 100 children in the foster care system right now. That means nearly half the kids who need a safe place to sleep tonight don't have one lined up.
So naturally, the Biden administration's priority was making sure those scarce homes met the right ideological litmus test.
On Tuesday morning, the Trump administration officially rescinded a Biden-era HHS rule from April 2024 that required foster children who identified as LGBTQ to be placed specifically with "affirming" families. The rule, issued through the Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families, had already been vacated by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas — but the Trump team drove the stake through it anyway, just to make sure the corpse stayed down.
Alex Adams, Assistant Secretary at HHS, said the rollback was about a simple math problem that the previous administration couldn't be bothered to solve. "Nationally, we have a shortage. We only have 57 homes for every 100 kids," Adams said. "We have too few foster families nationally. We must roll out the red carpet."
Roll out the red carpet. Not roll out a checklist of approved opinions.
The April 2024 designated placement rule effectively told religious foster families and traditional households that their homes weren't good enough unless they agreed to specific affirmations about gender and sexuality. In a system already bleeding for willing families, the Biden HHS decided the smart move was to narrow the pool further.
"The 2024 designated placement rule was one of those things that we think sent the wrong message," Adams said.
That's a polite way of putting it. The rule told millions of faith-based families — the backbone of foster care in this country — that their beliefs made them second-class applicants. Churches, religious charities, and families who'd been opening their doors to vulnerable kids for decades were suddenly on the wrong side of a bureaucratic purity test.
Defenders of the Biden rule argued it was about protecting LGBTQ-identifying youth from hostile placements. That sounds reasonable in a press release. It sounds less reasonable when you remember there aren't enough placements, period. A kid sleeping in a government facility because the available Christian family down the road didn't check the right box on an HHS form isn't "protected." That kid is just alone.
The Trump administration is replacing the approach with initiatives called "Fostering the Future" and "Home for Every Child" — names that suggest the new priority is, radically enough, finding homes for children. Adams framed the philosophy plainly: "The message that we think it sends is that all families are welcome."
The foster care crisis in America didn't start with one rule and it won't end with one rescission. But the April 2024 rule was a perfect distillation of how ideology can hijack a system that exists to serve the most powerless people in the country. When you have 57 homes for 100 kids, every door you close is a child who stays in the system longer.
Forty-three out of every hundred. That's the gap. The Biden administration looked at that gap and decided the real emergency was pronouns.
