The votes are in! America voted in potentially record numbers yesterday for a midterm election season. As a result, control of the House of Representatives has changed, 20 states will have new governors, and myriad ballot initiatives were approved and rejected.
Following are some initial notes from Youth Services Insider on how yesterday’s elections could affect youth and family policy on the federal and state levels.
Congress
The biggest outcome of the midterms is that the leadership of House committees will turn over to the Democrats. A few notes on the committees that most impact youth and family services.
Ways and Means: Powerful in many ways, this committee has oversight over implementation of the Family First Prevention Services Act, which passed with bipartisan support from the committee. The law offers states federal reimbursement for services aimed at preventing the use of foster care in some situations, and also limits the use of federal funds to pay for group homes and other congregate care settings.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) is one of the four Democrats currently on the Human Resources Subcommittee at Ways and Means. An original co-sponsor of Family First, Doggett was clearly dismayed that the scope of the law was narrowed to constrain its price tag. He will now have an elevated voice in the accountability process as Family First moves from passed law to implemented policy at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Judiciary: This committee has run point on crafting and marking up Republican plans for immigration reform, including an overhaul of the controversial Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) program.
Through UAC, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) receives custody of Central American youth arriving without parents at the border in search of asylum. The program has been under scrutiny since the number of unaccompanied minors surged in 2014, and really became a focal point when the Trump administration began to actually “create” unaccompanied minors with its woefully misled family separation policy.
The gist of the planned UAC overhaul was to give Homeland Security more time to vet asylum claims before handing youth over to HHS, empowering Homeland to turn Central American minors around and send them back home quickly. That plan had no Democratic support in the committee, and presumably is now dead for the time being.
[For more of this story, written by John Kelly, go to https://chronicleofsocialchang...venile-justice/32699]
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