Administration for Children and Families

Trump 2.0 is looking to fix this.

Over the past year, the Administration for Children and Families has pushed for commonsense reforms to ensure that social services benefit their intended targets instead of some bureaucrats in Washington.

Some reforms ask states to end the so-called orphan tax and launch a nationwide effort to recruit more foster families, Others eliminate mountains of outdated federal guidance to cut bureaucracy and refocus the agency on results.

All in all, this looks like a very different ACF than we've seen before.

To walk us through all the work going on at the ACF, I'm joined by Alex Adams.

He's the Assistant Secretary over at the Administration for Children and Families.

Assistant Secretary Adams, thank you so much for joining us today.

Glad to be here.

$183,000 a year for a job title.

$183,000 to do what? To be the chief equity officer at the Administration for Children and Families.

Which means? Exactly.

What does he do? Well, I'll tell you what he doesn't do.

Sure.

What was his job title

again? Equity what? Chief Equity Officer at the Administration for Children and Families.

I

It's across about 11 areas that the rule would really kind of shift more decisions to individual programs and state or local standards, but it would not come with any additional funding.

She adds the proposed rule from the Administration for Children and Families would essentially revise or remove nearly 90% of the current Head Start regulatory requirements.

Researchers in New York and nationwide

are concerned about federal approval of new research methods.

My name is Nick Solheim, and I'm the CEO of American Moment, and I'm very glad to have you back with us for another fantastic episode this week.

This week, we are privileged to have the Assistant Secretary of the Administration for Children and Families at HHS, Mr. Alex Adams, on the show to talk about all things ACF.

Now, you may have not heard a lot about ACF previously, but I have.

It's sort of been talk of the town in HHS circles for all of the important work that they've been doing on deregulation, cutting red tape, and making sure that there is no fraud, waste, and abuse occurring at the state level.

Thanks for having me.

I want to start in the same way that we do with everybody that we have on this podcast and talk a little bit about your background.

You know, you're serving as the assistant secretary for the administration for children and families at HHS.

How did you end up there? What's what's your story? Why do you care about this so much?

I won't go through, you know, picking at different ones and that I think is a real tension to this day and I think some of that is playing out within the present administration and and but I will note that even at the worst, in each of the things that I could point to over the past 25 years, there has been a core of trying to implement this core vision, and I see that happening today in many of the federal departments where the centers are still working within Department of Housing and Urban Development, within HHS, and now I think it has grown sometimes beyond the centers where this same vision has even become embedded in other parts of the government and in leaders who formerly were influenced by this vision and now are the deputy secretary over here, those sorts of things.

I think, for instance, Alex Adams at HHS, he runs the Administration for Children and Families.

And he is seeking to implement a vision for foster care and adoption and support for biological families that really integrates faith communities into that.

And even though he doesn't bear a title, you know, director of faith initiatives.

Right now, we're offering it for any couple in Los Angeles County and any couple in the counties near my colleague who's at the University of Miami.

And it's free, supported by a government program, the Administration for Children and Families, which has been supporting this work for 15 years.

It's available for people, very inexpensive.

It's really good if couples aren't ready for couple therapy but want to put their toes in it.

Yeah.

Well, first, Administration for Children and Families, when you think of health and human services, we are the and human services side of the agency.

So we oversee child welfare, which includes foster care, adoption, guardianship.

We oversee child care subsidy and a lot of programs like that.