AUTHORS:
Cody Inman, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary and Commissioner of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families (dlg.)
Alex J. Adams, Assistant Secretary, Administration for Children and Families
Key Points
- Across 25 years of CFSRs, no state achieved substantial conformity across all seven outcomes and seven systemic factors in a CFSR initial or subsequent review.
- An assessment found that the process imposed substantial cost and administrative burden and found little evidence that traditional Program Improvement Plans (PIPs) improved measured outcomes over time.
- The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) created a voluntary A Home for Every Child (AHFEC) alternative: a focused PIP organized around a 1:1 or greater home-to-child ratio, four uniform chaser measures, a limited set of jurisdiction-selected strategies and measures, and monthly reporting.
- On July 9, 2026, ACF announced that all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico had joined AHFEC. This brief analyzes 30 jurisdictional AHFEC PIPs available as of September 4, 2026, and compares them with same-jurisdiction predecessor plans.
- The 30 AHFEC PIPs average 6.0 pages and 1,347 extracted substantive words, compared with 58.6 pages and 19,046 words for their predecessors. They also contain fewer named strategy units and far fewer repeated metric statements.
- The strategy portfolio shifts upstream and toward usable family-home capacity. Prevention appears in 97% of AHFEC plans, kinship in 97%, caregiver recruitment and retention in 97%, and placement matching or stability in all 30.
- The next test is execution. The public scorecard and AHFEC Innovation Challenge can support transparency, cross-jurisdiction learning, and healthy competition—but only if early results are treated as a baseline for action rather than a verdict.
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