If Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to balance New York City’s budget—never mind fulfill his campaign’s many promises of “free” stuff—he is going to need to make some cuts. And so he has: Mamdani’s administration is reportedly planning to cut almost $3 million in “foster care prevention services” provided through the city’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS). Those services include mental-health counseling, addiction help, and parenting classes, as well as less obvious functions like helping clients apply for housing vouchers and food stamps.
Many of the mayor’s allies are upset. “It’s just a real gut punch,” Good Shepherd Services CEO Michelle Yanche told the Imprint, a news site focused on child-welfare issues. “Families are struggling economically, with mental health challenges, and this is part of the safety net that protects families and helps them navigate through these challenges.”
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But while funding recipients might protest, the cuts make sense. The evidence behind “prevention” services is often far weaker than proponents make it out to be. And it’s not at all clear that ACS was the right agency to provide these services, since doing so can conflict with what should be the agency’s paramount goal: protecting children, not providing social services to families.
In the first place, it’s hard to say which prevention services actually prevent kids from ending up in foster care. Only about 2 percent (175,000) of the 4 million child abuse and neglect reports received nationally each year result in the removal of a child. These removals typically occur in the most dysfunctional families.
Addiction and mental-health treatment are likely helpful remedies for these families—they need a lot more than just food stamps and housing vouchers. But once a family is “at risk” of having children removed, the abuse or neglect are already severe, chronic, or both. “Prevention” isn’t obviously the right approach in such situations.
Many of the states that have seen the biggest declines in foster care have credited prevention services. Officials in Indiana, for instance, touted a 50 percent reduction in foster care roles due to these services. But as my Lives Cut Short colleagues Emily Putnam-Hornstein and Sarah Font (along with Brett Drake) recently pointed out, “Indiana’s data show that fewer rather than more children reported for maltreatment have received in-home services.”
New Jersey has made similar claims. But the evidence there also suggests that the tiny increase in services could not have produced the drastic reduction in foster care. Instead, states may just be changing their standards for how severe maltreatment can be before it necessitates removal.
Nonetheless, many advocacy groups assert that services can prevent foster care. They insist that poverty drives neglect, so what at-risk families really need is more material resources. Neglect is easily solved, on this view, not just with food and housing vouchers but also unrestricted cash payments—more child tax credits, more free childcare, and a more generous social safety net.
The nonprofits providing these services also have a stake. While these organizations often provide legitimately helpful programs, such as mental health counseling, addiction treatment, and mentors for parents, it is easier to justify their funding to public officials and private donors if they can say that they’re preventing foster care—even if they have no evidence to back up the claim.
Prevention services can also be a distraction from child welfare agencies’ core mission: keeping children safe. Helping families apply for housing vouchers and food stamps may be useful—but should the Administration for Children’s Services be responsible for doing so? Addiction services are especially important, but arguably other public agencies and private organizations are better situated to provide them.
ACS has a limited budget, and its caseworkers are responsible for too many different goals. It should focus its scarce resources on determining whether children are safe in their homes and, if not, figuring out what would make them safe.
Last week, Angela Burton, a child welfare abolitionist who was a short-list candidate to head the ACS, proposed creating a separate New York City Office of Child Well-Being. That office would handle offering more of these resources and support to families in need. Burton correctly notes that ACS is “given sweeping authority to intervene in, and disrupt, the most fundamental human relationship—that of child and parent.” That can be a problem when families being investigated by ACS “are expected to gratefully, trustingly, and voluntarily turn to ACS for guidance, support, and for needed social service referrals.” Caseworkers are also torn: Is their job to give support to parents, or to protect children from maltreatment? The two are not always aligned.
In principle, Burton’s idea makes sense. That’s not to argue, as Burton does, that the Office of Child Well-Being will make ACS unnecessary. Children will always need protection, because there will always be parents unwilling or unable to care for them.
Nonetheless, providing services for struggling families can be an important vehicle for improving the lives of children. But everyone would be better off if this assistance were provided by agencies besides ACS.