Chapin Hall

Decades of research demonstrate the effectiveness of economic and concrete supports—money and programs—in reducing child maltreatment and keeping families together. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), also known as HR1/2025 tax reconciliation, significantly affects major human services programs like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as Food Stamps) and Medicaid that can help prevent involvement with the child welfare system. Chapin Hall Chief Strategy Officer Miranda Lynch-Smith and Chapin Hall Senior Policy Fellows Dr. Krista Thomas and Uma Ahluwalia wrote a policy brief to provide a set of recommendations for how child welfare agency leaders can effectively serve children and families within the OBBBA implementation context.  

Lynch-Smith’s expertise in interpreting and leveraging federal human services and economic mobility laws, Dr. Thomas’s insights in guiding systems to use evidence to shift to innovations that strengthen families, and Ahluwalia’s years leading local child welfare system make them key partners to contextualize the law for child welfare audiences and identify ways to act based on it. Chapin Hall Media Manager Colleen Sharkey sat down with the trio to take a closer look. 

 Q: What are some of the biggest OBBBA changes that child welfare leaders need to know about? 

Lynch-Smith: The law essentially rewrites how the federal government shares Medicaid and SNAP costs with states. For many states, this means they will have to either put in more state dollars to cover health insurance and food assistance for low-income families or make benefit cuts. 

It also adds new eligibility hurdles. Groups who already face instability and stress — including caregivers of youth 14 and older, young people who experienced foster care, and youth and adults who are unhoused — now must prove they are working at least 80 hours a month or participating in approved training or service activities. Many already meet these requirements, but the burden of gathering and submitting documentation is so high that people often lose benefits even though they qualify. 

Both types of changes—the budget shifts and the new documentation rules—increase the risk that families and young people lose access to basic supports like health insurance and food. That creates real economic strain. Child welfare leaders need to anticipate and help prevent those downstream effects, so financial hardship doesn’t escalate into unnecessary child welfare involvement for families or destabilize young people transitioning out of foster care. 

Q: Because the OBBBA doesn’t make direct changes to funding for child welfare programs, people might not understand how cuts to human services programs affect children & families. Can you talk about some of the evidence that shows how programs like SNAP & Medicaid can prevent involvement with the child welfare program? 

Dr. Thomas: Research consistently shows that economic hardship increases the risk of child welfare involvement, while programs offering economic and concrete supports—like cash transfers, housing assistance, and tax credits—strengthen family stability and improve child-level outcomes.  As evidence grows, one thing is clear: addressing child welfare means addressing family economics. Strengthening partnerships across public health, housing, food assistance, and early childhood systems can help families thrive and reduce the need for child welfare intervention. Chapin Hall has many economic and concrete supports resources, including our Evidence to Impact Policy Tool to help agencies analyze policies across their human service programs to identify opportunities to prevent family child welfare involvement via economic and concrete supports.   

We know that access to child care and early childhood education programs is a powerful protective factor for families. A 2014 study found that children who attended Early Head Start had fewer child welfare encounters between ages 5 and 9, compared to those who did not attend. A 2019 study revealed that each additional month that mothers who are low income receive a child care subsidy is associated with a 16% decrease in the odds of a neglect report and a 14% decrease in the odds of a physical abuse report, in the 12 months following receipt of the subsidy.  

Participating in food assistance programs, such as SNAP and WIC, is associated with lower risk for child welfare system involvement as well. A 2022 study showed states that adopted policy options to expand access to SNAP had lower rates of CPS and foster care outcomes for all forms of child maltreatment and specifically for neglect.  

Regarding healthcare, in 2019, researchers found that Medicaid expansion for adults with dependent children between 2010 and 2016 was associated with a reduction in the screened-in neglect report rate for children under age 6. They estimated that 125,000 fewer neglect cases involving children under age 6 would have been reported between 2014 and 2016 if all states had expanded Medicaid eligibility. Another study in 2022 found that Medicaid expansion in 2014 was associated with a 13% reduction in child neglect reports for children ages 0-5, a 15% reduction for children ages 6-12, and a 16% reduction for children ages 13-17 between 2008 and 2018. 

Alongside Chapin Hall colleagues like Policy Fellow Yasmin Grewal-Kok and Senior Research Fellow Dr. Gretchen Cusick, our team has reviewed decades of research evidence that tells us plainly that economic and concrete supports matter significantly in our efforts to promote safety, stability and well-being and prevent child welfare system involvement.  

Research consistently shows that economic hardship increases the risk of child welfare involvement, while programs offering economic and concrete supports—like cash transfers, housing assistance, and tax credits—strengthen family stability and improve child-level outcomes.

Dr. Krista Thomas

Q: What kind of pivots will this require of child welfare leaders? How can they best adjust to the new policies? 

Ahluwalia: Rather than a pivot, I think one of the strongest and most productive responses from child welfare leaders would be to stay the course and maintain a laser focus on achieving their priority outcomes and executing their mission to keep kids safe by promoting family stability and well-being. Remaining grounded in the mission and continually reinforcing it in communications and support to internal and external partners can help guard against additional volatility that could compromise the quality and availability of services and supports for their target populations. Also, given the law may impact communities in a variety of ways that are not yet known, child welfare leaders are well advised to make sure their community engagement is meaningful, robust, and ongoing. That is the best way to be attuned to the needs of families, figure out where adjustments are needed, and identify the ways in which child welfare can partner with other agencies and communities to meet them.  

I think one of the strongest and most productive responses from child welfare leaders would be to stay the course and maintain a laser focus on achieving their priority outcomes and executing their mission to keep kids safe by promoting family stability and well-being.

Uma Ahluwalia

Q: Can you talk about some of the opportunities OBBBA presents? 

Lynch-Smith: The opportunities here aren’t new funding streams for child welfare. They’re about using this moment to transform how child welfare and other youth and family-serving systems work together, so that young people and caregivers get what they need when they need it. When states face tighter budgets—like in this moment—policymakers feel more pressure to act on the evidence, reduce duplication, and invest in what works. 

That’s where the opportunity sits. The law’s changes can push state leaders to strengthen collaboration across systems by focusing on what families need, not on the limits of individual programs. It reinforces the value of integrated, whole-family approaches like Chapin Hall’s Meeting Family Needs Framework, where child welfare is a partner and catalyst, not the only system carrying the load. 

By making shared responsibility more urgent, OBBBA can spark efforts to reduce redundancy, align funding, and use existing resources more strategically. It’s a moment to rebuild trust with communities, elevate cross-system leadership, and rely on data and evidence to guide smarter investments in family and youth well-being and economic stability. If state leaders choose to lean in, they can use the federal changes as a pathway for making systems work better—together and with communities—to support families. 

It’s a moment to rebuild trust with communities, elevate cross-system leadership, and rely on data and evidence to guide smarter investments in family and youth well-being and economic stability.

Miranda Lynch-Smith

Q: Are there existing programs and funds that could be reimagined in light of this bill? 

Dr. Thomas: Whether it’s reimagined or reexamined, it’s imperative that child welfare and other public agency leaders do a careful analysis of whether they’re fully optimizing the range of programs that have not been impacted by OBBBA that may be currently underutilized.  

For example, there are federal programs established by the Family First Prevention Services Act that are not affected by the OBBBA provisions. We’ve been fortunate to work with jurisdictions and national partners all across the country since Family First’s passage in 2018 to strengthen the focus and investments around prevention services designed to avoid foster care and reduce child welfare system involvement. Family First expanded title IV-E, the sole open-ended entitlement in child welfare, from only supporting foster care and permanency through adoption and guardianship, to also include prevention services and kinship care. While we’ve collectively made considerable progress over the last 7 years, jurisdictions still are underutilizing this critical financial lever. Less than 2% of the $11B jurisdictions claimed in federal reimbursement for title IV-E last year was for prevention, and only 12 jurisdictions are implementing title IV-E funded kinship navigation programs to support their relative caregivers. In times of increasing scarcity, leaders would benefit from a careful analysis of the array of programs and resources available to them to ensure they are being strategically directed to the benefit of families and the outcomes they are trying to achieve.  

Q: How are data and evidence important when considering groups served in individual communities?  

Ahluwalia: Child and family serving ecosystems collect data at the population, the systems and the child and family levels. Each of these tiers of data carry incredible insights informing the development of programming in ways that can have maximal impact. This is true in all instances but also especially critical when faced with any new or critical challenges of funding or policy shifts that require program adjustments.

Before making any new policy or financial decisions, we need to ask ourselves who are the individuals, families, and communities that stand to be most impacted by the OBBBA provisions? In what ways do they intersect with child welfare and how might we need to support them more or differently? Likely some of these important answers lie in existing administrative data, and optimally, public agencies have the infrastructure to link and share data across multiple systems. However, it’s more likely that existing data will yield only partial information, and additional data will need to be collected to generate more comprehensive answers to these questions and make meaning of what we’re seeing in the numbers. Strategically engaging families and communities to gather their experiences and insights is invaluable for ensuring child welfare leaders have both the data and context needed to inform their decision-making and path forward.