Washington has a really bad habit of mistaking paperwork for progress.
In some places, like the billion forms needed to get a driver's license, this is simply annoying. But in programs meant to help children and families, pencil pushing masquerading as actual work is dangerous.
The federal government has produced thousands of pages of guidance and demand endless compliance reviews while still failing to make kids better off.
Trump 2.0 is looking to fix this. Over the past year, the Administration for Children and Families has pushed for commonsense reforms to ensure social services benefit their intended targets.
Some reforms ask states to end the so-called orphan tax and launch a nationwide effort to recruit more foster families. Others eliminate mountains of outdated federal guidance to cut bureaucracy and refocus the agency on results.
All in all, this looks like a very different ACF than we've seen before.
To walk us through all the work going on at the ACF, I’m joined by Alex Adams. He's the Assistant Secretary over at Administration for Children and Families.