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| "Psst - hey bud. Ya wanna see an AFCARS report?" |
Yesterday (March 13, 2025) was an anniversary of sorts. It marked the first anniversary of the last time the federal government published something called The AFCARS Report.
AFCARS stands for Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System. The annual reports are the most important single source for national data about the family policing system. In addition to the national report, there’s one for every state. The reports tell us things like how many children were taken from their homes over the course of a year, how many children are trapped in foster care on the last day of each federal fiscal year, their race, age and gender, why family police agencies claim they were taken, where they were placed, and where they go when released from the system.
The advantage of AFCARS, aside from being a one-stop shop, is that states are required to provide the data, and there are specific definitions of what counts as foster care and what counts as an entry into foster care. In contrast, states can define these things any way they want when posting the information on their own websites, if they post the information at all.
The disadvantage is that the definitions still leave far too much wiggle room. In particular, they don’t count coerced so-called voluntary placements that are not voluntary at all. That’s why such placements are called “hidden foster care.”
Another downside to AFCARS is the time lag. The data are released by federal fiscal year. Most years, they’ve come out one year later. So, for example, data for the year ending Sept. 30, 2020 were published on Nov. 19, 2021.
During the last year of the Biden Administration, it got worse. The data for the year ending Sept. 30, 2022 weren’t released until March 13, 2024. The federal Administration for Children and Families said this was because the FY 2022 submissions from the states were the first to require many more things to be counted, along with other technical changes. As a result, ACF said, they needed to “take additional time to fully assess and evaluate” the data.
Now, here we are one year and one day later, March 14, 2025, and there’s still no AFCARS report for 2023 – and no indication that one will be coming soon.* The current administration is on a tear hiding information about almost everything, sometimes seemingly just for the heck of it. And even if no one has targeted the AFCARS Report, it’s not clear if there will be enough federal employees left standing to produce it.
The child welfare trade journal The Imprint does its own annual survey, and
their data typically run six months ahead of the latest AFCARS release (the
most recent covers the year ending March 31, 2023). Filling out that survey is,
of course, voluntary, but the results are impressively close to AFCARS, suggesting
that states are not fudging the figures – or at least not fudging them any more
than they do with AFCARS.
But because there’s only so much one can ask the agencies to do voluntarily, the number of data elements is quite limited.
So the question remains: Have we seen the last of AFCARS, at least for the next few years? Will we be largely blind to trends in foster care, and if so, is that intentional? Yesterday, we emailed the ACF media office to try to find out. If we hear anything, we’ll update this post.
*-People who spend way too much time “refreshing” webpages
from the Administration for Children and Families have noticed a pattern: If
you change the URL for an existing report for the expected URL for the next
one, and if that next one is coming out within a month or so, you’ll get a page
that says you’re not authorized to see the document in question. But if you try that here: https://acf.gov/cb/report/afcars-report-30 by changing "30" to “31” you don’t even
get that.
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