Naomi Schaefer Riley and Rafael Mangual discuss the complexities of the child welfare system in the U.S. They explore controversial policies surrounding child protection, neglect, and foster care, emphasizing the need for transparency and reform.

Audio Transcript

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Rafael Mangual: Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal Podcast. I am your host, Rafael Mangual. And today I’m so lucky to be joined by my good friend, Naomi Riley. Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at AEI, the American Enterprise Institute, as well as IWF, the Independent Women’s Forum. And she is the nation’s foremost expert on all things child welfare policy related, which is what we’re going to be talking to you all about today. Naomi, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the show.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Thanks for having me, Ralph. I appreciate it.

Rafael Mangual: So I’m really excited to talk to you about this because I don’t think we’ve ever done an episode that touches on child welfare issues, which are incredibly important to me and I just think greatly underappreciated in the broader policy space. It’s just something that not a lot of people pay a ton of attention to. So I want to start with just some broad overviews here to give our viewers a sense of what is the child welfare system? What does it exist to do? How expansive is it? So why don’t we start there with just to sort of explain the logic of having a separate system that’s tasked with providing for child welfare and what that means.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Sure. Well, I mean, primarily a child welfare agency and child welfare agencies are run by states. Typically, it’s not federally run. The job is to protect children from abuse and neglect, largely protecting them from parents who cannot or will not care for them. And so we have child protective services, which investigates reports that come in of child neglect and child abuse. We have a system where we provide parents with different kinds of supports to try to figure out whether there’s something we can do to improve the situation. There’s a family court system that works in tandem with the child welfare system that puts its stamp of approval on whatever decisions we make. And there’s also a foster care system where we remove children when we deem that the risks are too high for them to remain in the home with their families of origin.

Rafael Mangual: So give us a sense of what the scope of this system is. I mean, you talked about investigating reports. How many reports are coming in throughout the country on an annual basis? Do we have a sense of that number?

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Sure. There are about three million reports that come in and they come in from all different places. There are doctors, teachers, religious leaders, neighbors, relatives who call in these reports into central child abuse hotlines. About 600,000 of those are what we call substantiated. That means that we have enough evidence to say that we think something wrong is going on there. That doesn’t mean that the remaining cases, everything is fine. It just means that we just don’t have enough evidence to say one way or the other whether or not they’re substantiated. And then we have about 350,000 kids right now who are in the foster care system in this country.

Rafael Mangual: Got it. So what happens when a call is substantiated? Or what does that process look like right between substantiating and unsubstantiated?

Naomi Schaefer Riley: So if a situation is substantiated, that means that we’re trying to sort of figure out what we can do to improve the situation for these kids. So there are all sorts of voluntary and sometimes kind of involuntary services that we’re providing for these families that could range from drug treatment. Up to 90 percent of families who are involved in the child welfare system are suffering from some kind of substance use disorder. So drug treatment. Absolutely. Drug treatment is a very important component of this. Also, we offer parenting classes and anger management classes. Sometimes we’re trying to mitigate issues of mental illness among parents or situations where there’s domestic violence. What can we do to improve the situation in this home so that children are at lower levels of risk?

Rafael Mangual: But that improving the situation doesn’t always involve removing the child as I think you were just…

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Absolutely not. In the vast majority of cases, we are not removing the child at all. We are simply trying to sort of provide supports, figure out whether there are other adults around who can sort of try to intervene in these situations, try to figure out if we can teach parents who don’t know how to parent children and who were never parented themselves, how to act as parents. Sometimes these are cases, most of the cases that are reported are neglect, so that could include…

Rafael Mangual: As opposed to what?

Naomi Schaefer Riley: As opposed to abuse. I think there’s obviously the cases that most often make the headlines are parents who are beating their children, but actually the cases that are often most dangerous and the ones that lead to the highest percentage of fatalities in this country are actually the ones that involve neglect. So that means a parent is not feeding a child, is not properly clothing a child, is not bringing that child to the doctor, is leaving a young child at home for hours or days at a time, is leaving a child with dangerous other adults. All of those things count as neglect and they all present a very high risk, particularly to young children.

Rafael Mangual: There’s a lot there that I want to ask you about. I mean, you mentioned child fatalities. I mean, how often does that happen? What’s the sort of scope of that problem?

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Sure. So child maltreatment fatalities, those are fatalities that are caused by abuse or neglect. There are more than 2,000 of those that happen in this country every year. We think that actually is a vast underestimate. We have a project at the American Enterprise Institute called Lives Cut Short, which is done in conjunction with UNC Chapel Hill, a colleague of mine, Emily Putnam-Hornstein is there and she and Sarah Font of the Washington University. We collaborate together to have created this website and you can go to the website livescutshort.org and you can see we now have records of 5,000 of these maltreatment fatalities since 2022. And we’ve collected those based on reports from medical examiners, media reports, child welfare agency reports. So just to give folks a sense, I mean, 2000 maltreatment fatalities, that’s more than the number of kids who are dying from childhood cancer, more than backyard drownings, more than school yard shootings, but those fatalities get much, much less attention in the media. There’s much less transparency around them when it comes to government reporting. And so we’re really trying to shine a light on those and figure out what are the risk factors that are happening there.

Rafael Mangual: One of the things that I’ve run into as I’ve started writing about these issues, as I’m sure you have, is this idea that neglect isn’t really that serious. I mean, you kind of mentioned the vast majority of these reports that get substantiated involve cases of neglect. And oftentimes people who are critical of the child welfare system will point to that statistic and say, well, look, the child welfare system isn’t really intervening in very serious cases. They’re only intervening by and large in cases of quote unquote neglect, which they seem to downplay. I mean, what does the definition of neglect entail? What does that involve?

Naomi Schaefer Riley: So like I said, I mean, it could involve medical neglect. So if you’re not getting medical attention to a child who clearly needs it, maybe a child has long-term chronic illness and you’re not treating it. It could involve exposing a child to dangerous adults. So you invite a violent felon to be caring for your child, which sadly is not unusual, or a family member who has a history of sexual abuse. All of those things count as neglect on your part, even though the child may be experiencing clear physical consequences of that. I think unfortunately what happens is the media highlights some cases where you have child welfare agencies or law enforcement sort of overstepping their balance and they’re taking a kid who walks to the park by themselves and is nine years old and bringing them back to the home and saying a parent, “You should really be watching this child more closely.” Those are not typical of what’s happening. And you could tell for two reasons. First of all, the cases of neglect are by and large cases of children under the age of three. And so those are kids who are not typically walking anywhere by themselves and many of them are not even walking yet, just to be clear. And the second thing is they often involve substance use and mental illness. And so these are parents, the ones who make the headlines are, oh, middle class professional couple sends their kid down the street or working mom has to go to an interview and puts her kid, the nine-year-old in the playground next door. What we’re talking about with most of the neglect cases are parents who are basically incapacitated. They’re high as a kite and they’re going out at night to score drugs, leaving their kid alone, a two-year-old alone for the night. That is much more typical of neglect than the nine-year-old walking to the park by themselves.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. I want to just sort of lay out the controversy in this space because it is a controversial policy area, even though a lot of people aren’t necessarily aware of what the debates might be and what their contours might be. But there are a lot of people who have a lot of money behind them whose entire professional career is dedicated to the idea that the child welfare system needs to be defanged, if not abolished in its entirety. Try to put yourself, just for the sake of our audience, in the shoes of those people, what is their case? What about the child welfare system seems objectionable to them? Because I think a lot of people hear what you’re saying and they say, “Well, I mean, who wouldn’t want someone to intervene if a child is being neglected or abused?” And yet we do have real institutions that have sort of dedicated themselves to this idea. Where does that come from?

Naomi Schaefer Riley: So I think there are definitely people who feel that the child welfare system is engaged in oversurveillance of certain families and those families are more likely to be poor, they’re more likely to be of certain races, and they feel that this is simply unfair. And so I think it is absolutely true that there are families who are more likely to be surveilled. I mean, they’re tending more to live in urban environments. They’re coming into contact more often, let’s say with law enforcement, their teachers, doctors, whoever is reporting them. But I actually, a lot of these families frankly need to be surveilled and it’s not because they’re poor. The vast majority of poor people in this country are not caught up in the child welfare system. And I really worry that when we just say you’re just bothering poor people or that poor people need to be protected from the child welfare system, you’re throwing a lot of poor parents under the bus. It is perfectly possible to be poor in this country and to raise your children without abusive or neglectful behaviors.

The second thing is they would say there’s a disparity in terms of which children are being investigated and which children are being removed to foster care. So just to be clear, we are not investigating children unless there is a report about something going wrong. We are not just randomly knocking on doors in the South Bronx and saying, “I just want to check on how you’re raising your kids.” We are getting reports from people who live next door to those people in their neighborhood. We’re getting reports from teachers who are often the same race as the children. We’re getting reports from police who have been called to the home because there’s been domestic violence going on. We’re getting reports from the pediatricians who are really worried about what’s going on in the home. And so we are responding, the child welfare system is responding to those reports. And to say that we need to abolish the child welfare system or defund the child welfare system because of this racial disparity ignores some very important realities. And I think the most shocking one is that black children in this country are three times as likely to die from maltreatment as their white peers. The child welfare system is basically the ambulance in this situation. It is not a system where we can write all racial wrongs in this country or undue history or all sorts of other things. It is who you call when there’s nobody else to call because this child is experiencing horrible levels of victimization and who is going to intervene.

Rafael Mangual: I often, in the context of criminal justice reform debates, which I think have a lot of parallels to the debates that you just described, I often hear the critique, “Well, sure, prison, policing, these are just band-aids. You’re just responding to something after the fact you’re not actually solving the problem.” And I always say, “Well, okay, so what? Do band-aids not have a purpose? Do bandages not have a purpose? Do we let patients bleed out because we don’t know the cause of the wound?” Of course not. And I think the same logic applies here in the child welfare system. If you have a kid who’s experiencing severe abuse or neglect, it doesn’t really matter what the…

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Your first question should not be, what race is this child? That would be crazy, but often that is the question that people want to ask. And when you look at the way that some people want to remedy racial disparities, it literally is, well, we shouldn’t take that child in because it will raise the number of black children that we have taken into our foster care system as if we should not be looking at the safety and the risk and the best interest of that particular child as opposed to looking at these group dynamics.

Rafael Mangual: And I worry that someone might hear that and think, “Well, this is hyperbole, right? That’s not really happening.” But I want to just let our listeners in on just how radical some of these proposals are that have actually made it close to, if not over the finish line. I mean, here in New York State where we are, there were a handful of child welfare proposals backed by New York City’s current mayor, Zohran Mamdani. And you and I wrote a piece about this for the New York Post and for City Journal. And one of those proposals was to abolish or ban, I should say, the conducting of routine drug screens of newborn babies and pregnant mothers. Now, the rationale undergirding this policy proposal is that, well, if we continue to do these drug screens, black families are going to be overrepresented among the babies who test positive or the mothers who test positive. And my response to that is like, “Well, so what? Who cares?” What rationale could there possibly be for sending a child home with a clearly drug addicted mother, as illustrated by the fact that she wasn’t able to refrain from using while her baby was in utero? It seems wild, but those are real policy proposals that are actually getting attention.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Oh, absolutely. And by the way, other states have adopted equally dangerous proposals. New Mexico finally just is thinking about walking back this policy that they have had in place for years called Voluntary Plans of Safe Care, where if you are a mother, you show up at a hospital, you give birth to a child, the child tests positive for drugs in their system. That child is sent home with the mother. There is no follow-up at all from child welfare systems, and the mother is simply handed some brochures about drug treatment, in case you’re interested. Now, you and I have both have kids. You leave the hospital with a nice pile of papers about all sorts of things that you might be interested in. And also, you’re in this complete haze, even if you’re totally sober, by the way. And this is the way we’re following up. We’re sending these children home with mothers with active addiction. And then what New Mexico has found is that a lot of these children are ending up dead. These children, New Mexico is seeing at least one child maltreatment fatality, one baby, child maltreatment fatality a month happening. And almost all of them were children who were covered under these Voluntary Plans of Safe Care because it is very hard to parent a child successfully while you are high. It is hard to do, hard to do a sober. Yes. All of the things that you have to worry about with a baby, you’re keeping track of feeding them, whether they’re sleeping, if they spike a fever, all of these things that you need to do as a responsible parent. And then when they’re a one-year-old or two-year-old and they’re walking around and they’re getting into ... They’re going to touch a hot stove. They’re going to jump into the bathtub. They’re going to swallow their siblings’ Legos. All these things require vigilant attention. And if you are suffering from substance abuse or severe mental illness that is not treated, it is really hard to do that.

Rafael Mangual: One of the other risks for small children, especially in homes with active addiction, is actual exposure to the substances themselves. I mean, there’s a case that’s actually been brought by a mother who had her child removed against the Administration for Children’s Services here in New York City, alleging that the ACS was overbearing and removed her child too soon. But you look into the details of the case of the child, they consumed some dangerous amount of cocaine.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Cocaine, yes.

Rafael Mangual: Which I believe belonged to the baby’s father. I mean, that’s not entirely uncommon where kids will actually consume drugs and overdose at very small ages.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Yeah. There was a Yale professor at the School of Medicine who was looking at just opioid exposures since the beginning of the opioid epidemic in the early 2000s. And I think she found 75,000 pediatric opioid deaths in that time. And these are kids ... And that obviously was accelerated with fentanyl because it’s so much more dangerous to come anywhere near those kind of drugs. But if you’re leaving those drugs out and you’re not properly supervising, pediatric ingestion is a real problem. And I don’t think people understand when ... You have child welfare caseworkers who are walking into homes where they see clear evidence of drug exposure and they are not understanding the real risks in those cases.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. No, I mean, it really is disconcerting. And it’s not just with a pulling back on stepping in and taking enforcement action in cases that might involve drugs, but even in cases involving potential abuse or neglect. I mean, one of the laws that was just signed by Governor Kathy Hochul just before last Christmas actually places an active ban on considering any report of abuse or neglect that was lodged anonymously in New York state, meaning that someone can call and say, “Hey, I saw this kid with an open gash after I heard their parents or saw their parents abusing them, but I’m too fearful to tell you my name and phone number.” And they have to pass on that information now.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Yep. I mean, again, this is sort of the idea of over surveillance. I think some of the advocates of this were worried about the use of child welfare reports as a way of retaliation. You definitely have cases where couples are reporting, they’re in the midst of some horrible divorce or otherwise splitting up. And you have these cases where someone is calling an abuse report against their ex in order to get back at them. But the answer to that is not ban all anonymous report. The answer is to say, “We are going to investigate this and just like the false report of any other crime, we will prosecute it.“

Rafael Mangual: Right. Yeah. I mean, we don’t ban anonymous 911 reports, right?

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Right. No, if you call and say someone’s robbing the bank across the street, they’re just there, “Well, I’m not going to listen to you unless you give me your full name and address.” No, that’s not the way things work. But for some reason, a lot of the logic I think that applies to the rest of whether it’s crimes that are domestic violence or other crimes doesn’t apply to crimes against children.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. I mean, and it’s not like the potential harm associated with this policy isn’t obvious. I mean, we just had a case not too long ago out of the Bronx where two twin boys, I believe age 15, were found weighing less than 55 pounds each, apparently had never consumed anything other than baby formula because their mother who was severely mentally ill was not feeding them properly. Unclear if they ever…

Naomi Schaefer Riley: And the neighbors called.

Rafael Mangual: Yes. I mean, years’ worth of anonymous complaints before an investigation finally triggered a substantiation or an investigation that triggered a substantiation. And now that mom is being prosecuted for the significant amount of abuse. I mean, 15 years and these kids haven’t been to school as far as I’m aware.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: And they were saved. But around the same time you had the case of Jacob Pritchett who was 11 years old. There were reports called in about him, autistic, nonverbal child, and the mother clearly had severe mental health issues. Police came to interview her because neighbors said, “We haven’t seen him in a while.” And the mother claims she was Jesus Christ, that she’d never had a child, despite the fact that she had a tattoo of Jacob’s name on her arm, police have searched dumpsters all over the city for a year. And it’s been a year since he’s been missing. And obviously, we know what really happened. There was another mattress in her apartment, there was blood, but these reports were anonymous because people don’t want to get involved. They don’t. And I think that’s very reasonable on the part of them. And so we just have to sort of figure out, are these credible, but we’re not willing to do that anymore.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. I mean, it boggles my mind. And yet, I mean, this is policy in one of the biggest states in the country that often sort of sets the tone for the rest of the country on where to go. And what I’m fearful of is that this is only just the beginning. So some of these policy initiatives like the ban on anonymous reporting that got over the hump are likely already get over the hump now that that’s happened. And I want to roll through some of these. You mentioned pediatricians, police, teachers. These are individuals that fall into a category of mandatory reporters, meaning that there’s a legal obligation for them to report any evidence of child abuse or neglect that they come into contact with. Now, my understanding is that the child welfare critics want to get rid of those legal obligations. What are the implications of that if that happens?

Naomi Schaefer Riley: They really want to discourage reporting. They want less information coming to the child welfare system. And I think the implications of that are very dangerous. So for instance, in New York, ACS has tried to discourage reporting from teachers. There have been articles in JAMA Pediatrics discouraging doctors from reporting. And what happens is that means we have fewer eyes on what is going on with these children. And sometimes a single report, someone might vacillate and say, “Look, this is a child who’s in my class. They’ve come to school. They’re not bathed. They say they’re not eating over the weekend. Maybe they’re okay. I haven’t seen them in a couple of weeks. Should I call? Should I not call?” What is being impressed on these teachers is that you calling could mean that child is going to be removed and you wouldn’t want to be responsible for that. In fact, what is happening is when you call, that piece of the puzzle is being added to the information that may already be coming in from other places. For all you know, we have an open investigation on that family or maybe another child in that home has suffered abuse and had to go to the emergency room or maybe the doctor for that family has already called. And so what you are doing is helping us get a clearer picture of what is going on in that family. One call from a teacher is not going to lead to a child being in foster care because they didn’t have a coat. But what it is doing is it is allowing us to understand better what’s going on in that family and discouraging that kind of information is just what I call like a see-no-evil approach to child welfare, which is crazy.

Rafael Mangual: It is. It is crazy. I mean, just the way that you framed it, I thought was perfectly, right? It’s like this idea that you don’t want to be responsible for removing a child. And embedded in that idea is this assumption that removal is on net the worst possible outcome. And it seems not to register in the minds of the people who make that critique that actually removal might be beneficial. And not only might…

Naomi Schaefer Riley: If you want to see the worst outcome, go to the 5,000 records we have at Lives Cut Short and you will understand what’s worse than foster care.

Rafael Mangual: Exactly right. I mean, so just break that down for us a little bit. I think one of the things that a lot of regular people who are consuming these debates casually don’t really understand is this bit of nuance, which is that yes, there are potential harms associated with removing a child into foster care. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s a risk of trauma to the child. I mean, that is a traumatic experience being ripped out of your home by force potentially, especially if your parents resist, if there’s an arrest associated with that. The foster care system is imperfect to say the least in the states around the country. So it is still possible that you might be abused or neglected within the foster care system or that you might have some unpleasant experience where you might be at a higher risk of running away or whatever. But given those potential risks, there is also a risk to not taking action, to leaving a child in an obviously dangerous environment. And it seems like what the system really exists to do is to do its best to kind of weigh which one of those potential risks is the lesser of two evils.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: The question of the best question public policy is always “compared to what?” Right. But I do want to point out that the most recent research we have on foster care shows that there are, for kids who are on the margin who might be taken out and might not be taken out, there are large scale longitudinal studies that suggest improved outcomes for kids who are actually taken into foster care. Even if they were reunified with their parents afterwards, which most foster kids are, the question is what happens-

Rafael Mangual: Which is an important thing, because not a lot of people know that.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Reunification happens almost all the time in these cases, but what this study suggested, it looked at hundreds of thousands of kids in Michigan over the course of many years. And it found that the kids who went through time in foster care compared to those who were left in their homes, but were also sort of on the margins, like could have been taken out, is that those kids had improved rates of high school graduations, lower risk of being involved in the criminal justice system, of being incarcerated. And when you look at it, it’s not surprising they had better school outcomes, but when you look at it, it’s not surprising because the parents’ outcomes were actually different too. The parents whose kids were taken into foster care also had lower levels of drug use, lower levels of criminal involvement.

And so what is going on here? I mean, the study can’t say exactly what happened in each of these families, but one thing that’s possible is that foster care is a wakeup call and that when we leave kids who are in danger in homes and just sort of continue throwing parenting classes at the parents, the parents aren’t taking us seriously. They don’t think that their kids are at real risk and they are not cleaning up their acts when their kids are removed to foster care. And I’m not saying this is the answer for all kids or even most kids, but on those marginal cases, when you sort of say to parents, “Look, we have given you years’ worth of chances. We have offered you endless amounts of services and you have not gotten off drugs, gotten treatment for your mental illness, stopped engaging in criminal activity. Now we have to take your kids and we would like you to clean up your act if you’re going to get these kids back.”

Rafael Mangual: I mean, again, I’m consistently blown away just by the parallels between this debate and the criminal justice policy debate because you see the exact same findings in the criminal justice space. There’s a pair of studies done by these researchers, Sam Norris, Jeff Weaver, I believe were two of the leading authors looking at data out of Ohio, looking at parents who are on the margins of incarceration and finding that in the cases where the parents were incarcerated, their kids did significantly better in school, were less likely to end up arrested or in jail or prison themselves. And then they used that same dataset to look at the effect of incarceration on the life expectancy of the people incarcerated and actually being incarcerated raised their life expectancy because they were getting regular medical checkups even if they didn’t want to. If they were on medication, it was being provided to them. They didn’t have a choice as to whether to take it. And so their health outcomes improved, not just while they were in prison, but also after they got out. And so there’s some sticky benefits.

But there’s another study on this that I wanted to ask you about, and now the author, of course, is escaping my memory, but I believe he’s a researcher at Duke and he looked at, again, kids who were on the margins of being removed to foster care, but sort of a random assignment identification.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: That’s the study they were talking about. Yeah.

Rafael Mangual: Got it. But one of the other findings, correct me if I’m wrong, was that upon reunification, what was found was that yes, black children were more likely to be removed than similarly situated white children. However, they seem to also be enjoying a disproportionate benefit, protective effect associated with the removal, which was illustrated by the fact that upon reunification, the disparity was driven by kids who were subsequently the subject of a substantiated allegation of abuse or neglect, meaning that they were going back to situations that were still dangerous for them.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: No, I think what you see in these situations, and what some of these studies, I think what they suggest is that we are leaving a disproportionate number of black children in dangerous homes, again, in order to get our numbers to come out right. And so when you do that, it has a really problematic effect on black children. One of my colleagues, Sarah Font, I mentioned earlier at Washington University did a few years ago for the American Enterprise Institute, a foster care report card. And she looked at each state and how long they were leaving kids in foster care. Now, we have guidelines in this country, the Adoption Safe Families Act passed in the 1990s that say foster care is not a permanent solution. You are supposed to find permanency for these kids. They are not supposed to languish in care forever. And what she found was that in a state like Illinois, which ranked at the very bottom of our rating system for just leaving kids in care for way too long, is that black children were left in care for much longer than white children.

Rafael Mangual: And this is a result of what?

Naomi Schaefer Riley: This is a result of social workers basically saying, “We don’t want to ever terminate parental rights. We don’t ever want to actually permanently remove these children from these situations. We would rather, as the National Association of Black Social Workers has said since the 1970s, we think it’s better for these kids to basically be in foster care and orphanages, who cares, as long as they are not ever placed with a family that is not the same race as them.” And that is the impact. The impact is you get many more black children who are being left in foster care for four, five, six years at a time because we want to engage in race matching.

Rafael Mangual: And it’s actually really fascinating because that sort of undermines the argument against the system being made by these same groups of advocates because their argument is that removing kids to foster care is dangerous because it puts them in this dangerous situation, subjects them to the trauma associated with that. And yet their same policy preferences result in an elongated period of time in the very system that they claim is dangerous. I mean, make it make sense.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Yes,I cannot for you. I’m sorry.

Rafael Mangual: I want to talk a little bit about New York City just because this is the Manhattan Institute. New York City, it’s where we are. As I mentioned earlier, this is not an issue that’s completely unfamiliar to our new mayor. I was semi-shocked, although not entirely surprised when I got news that one of the potential finalists for the ACS commissioner role was a woman named Angela Burton, who is an outward abolitionist of the child welfare system. She wants to see the system completely taken down. And I was asked to comment on this to the New York Post, and I did. And I was relieved when it was announced that she was no longer in the running, but we now have a new ACS commissioner. Tell us about who this person is and what we can expect.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: So Rebecca Jones Gaston has experience running two state agencies. She ran Maryland’s and she ran Oregon’s and she also worked in the Biden administration under HHS doing child welfare stuff there as well. So unlike some of the other candidates, she definitely has a lot of experience in this, but I think her record looks like a lot of the people who run child welfare agencies and it’s not good. I mean, first of all, of course, she’s deeply concerned with racial disparities and thinks a lot of policies should be made based on them. There are some just very disturbing things that happened while she was in Oregon. I mean, I actually was in Portland just after the time or just around the time that she had left. And Portland, as you know, went through this whole drug decriminalization process.

Rafael Mangual: Well, they just recriminalized drugs after that experience.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: When I was there and I wrote a piece for City Journal about this, when I was there, homeless encampments, there were kids in the homeless encampments. People were reporting instances of small children running around these homeless encampments. And when they called the child welfare agency, first of all, they were put on hold for hours. The wait times to just even make a report were so high that you had actual child welfare workers who were getting up at two o’clock in the morning because the child welfare agency employees are actually using the same hotline system as the public. So they’re getting up at two o’clock in the morning because that’s when they think they could possibly get through to make a report about child abuse or neglect. So I had homelessness outreach workers would tell me, I tried to call about a two-year-old, a four-year-old I saw running around this homeless encampment, there was fentanyl foil, the parents were nodded out and they told me poverty is not a crime. And so they wouldn’t even take these reports in. And so the idea that this is the person that we now have running New York system, I think is deeply concerning. And I really don’t think that safety is the primary concern and is going to be the primary concern of ACS. And so I just think we’re going to be digging ourselves deeper into the hole that the most recent ACS commissioners have gotten us into.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. I was going to say, I mean, how do we think she’s going to compare to Jess Dannhauser, who’s the outgoing ACS commissioner? I mean, I’ve been critical of some of his initiatives, including the expansion of this program called CARES, which is a…

Naomi Schaefer Riley: It’s a diversion program.

Rafael Mangual: It’s a diversion program, but it’s funny because it’s built as a non-investigatory track. And when you ask ACS which kinds of cases end up on this track, they say, “Well, not the dangerous ones.” It’s like, “But how do you know if you’re not actually investigating?”

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Right, because they’re CARES cases. No, it’s a circular argument. No, I think we are going to get more of the same, if anything, even more commitment to that kind of policy. And it’s dangerous. I don’t understand what’s behind it. And I think that a lot of the agency workers, I think it’s very dispiriting to them to be working for people who really don’t think that the Child Welfare Agency has much of a role. I mean, it’s interesting. There is this huge contradiction because I think there are people out there who are both critical of the role of child welfare agencies and want to abolish them, but also want the government to be involved in every aspect of a family’s life. Even some of the abolitionists who are now calling for Mayor Mamdani to add an office of child wellbeing. Now, you want an office of child wellbeing, I’m fine with that. But the question is, are you now going to try to divert all the cases that are child abuse and neglect into your office of child wellbeing? I think the Child Welfare Agency really should... We have a mission creep problem. I mean, the child welfare agency is engaged in trying to open community centers with laundry facilities and all sorts of other aid programs. And I’m like, what about child safety? How about if we focus on that? We don’t have a lot of workers. We don’t have a big budget. Maybe this should be our primary concern and you can save child wellbeing for another day or another budget or something like that.

Rafael Mangual: Well, if you build a community laundromat, Naomi, kids won’t get abused.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: I know. It will stop abuse. Yes, I’ve heard that before. Yeah.

Rafael Mangual: I mean, it really is. I mean, that seems like what the arguments often come down to and it’s wild. It’s just concerning.

Naomi Schaefer Riley: It’s divorced from reality.

Rafael Mangual: It is divorced from reality. And that’s a great way to put it. So I mean, I want to wrap up with some sort of affirmative proposals here, right? I mean, what does it look like to get child welfare policy right and what steps do we need to take? I mean, my sense is, is that one of the things that we could benefit from in cities like New York more than anything else is just more transparency into the system. What are the background cases of these child fatalities? How many of them have prior involvement with ACS? What were the decision frameworks like? Who made what choice to either get involved or not get involved that led to this result? What’s your sense?

Naomi Schaefer Riley: Yeah, 100 percent. I mean, I think we are really hiding a lot of information from the public. And when the public sees these cases, they want to find out who knew what and when. And what is happening is agencies across the country are hiding behind confidentiality. There’s a lawsuit that’s going on in New Mexico right now where the attorney general is suing the child welfare agency and he has this line where he says they are weaponizing confidentiality. And I think that is 100 percent true. They are saying, “Well, we don’t want to tell you all the details because it’s disrespectful to the kid.” The kid is dead. There needs to be some accountability here. And so what we have done at Lives Cut Short, not only have we amassed all these records, but we recently launched a tool using a large language model. And you can go on and look at all of the factors here. You can look at prior history of child protection. You can look at whether there was prenatal substance exposure, whether the parents have criminal records, whether this child was placed with relatives, whether the child was in foster care, whether they’ve pulled their kid out of school. It is really important to be able to sort through these records and to get transparency around them, but until that information is released, we cannot understand what the real risks are and we cannot make the kind of reforms that are necessary.

Rafael Mangual: Well, I think that’s a really important place to start. It’s a great place to start. And I am very, very confident that if those steps are actually taken, the public won’t really like what they learn and maybe that’s what it will take to get some real positive change on this front. Naomi, I hope you can come back and talk to us more about this because there’s so much more to say, but I appreciate you giving us your time today. And I hope you all enjoyed the episode and found it as useful as I did. As always, please do not forget to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a note, let us know what you think, leave us a review so that we can bring more brilliant guests like Naomi Schaefer Riley onto the show. Until next time, see you soon.