On Wednesday, March 15, the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources held a hearing and took the first step toward a reauthorization of the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program. Members from both sides seemed positive in their assessment of the program they were also well informed on how the
A coalition group including CWLA has sent Capitol Hill an updated letter of support of SSBG on Thursday. The letter includes more than 75 national organizations and organizations and agencies from all fifty states. CWLA has created a new resource on the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG). The new resource are state-by-state fact sheets found
Last week the Center on Budget Policy and Priority released an analysis of federal block grants and their negative consequences. The analysis, Block-Granting Low-Income Programs Leads to Large Funding Declines Over Time, History Shows, examined 13 different block grants including TANF, Child Care, SSBG, Housing as well as some other human service funding sources and
The Legal Center for Foster Care & Education has created a guide and factsheet, Roadmap for Foster Care and K–12 Data Linkages, that promotes the cooperation between state and local education and child welfare agencies in the sharing of data. The Center points out that by sharing data, child welfare and education agencies can work
On Thursday, January 19, HHS released the 2015 Child Maltreatment Report. In Fiscal Year 2015, approximately 683,000 children were victims of abuse and neglect. Comparing the national estimate of victims from 2011 (658,000) to the rounded number of reported victims in 2015 (683,000) shows an increase of 3.8 percent. The change in victim counts from
With some proposing that we defund programs that have not been reauthorized, the Congressional Budget Office issues regular annual reports of how many programs have not been reauthorized. Congress frequently fails to meet the window to reauthorize programs. An occurrence that seems more frequent in recent congresses. In January 2016, the CBO released, Unauthorized Appropriations
Evidence is all around that the country is facing another drug abuse crisis. Not surprisingly that crisis is impacting the number of children entering foster care. Child welfare will continue to be effected by increased drug epidemic and that could become even more significant if Congress repeals the ACA, block grants Medicaid and does not
The Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) is a vital source of support for your state ESPECIALLY for child welfare, domestic violence, elder abuse services, and other human services. Speaker Ryan has offered proposals to eliminate all $1.7 billion in human services funding. See how your state spends its SSBG and who they serve in the
On Thursday, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee had positive words for the home visiting program. [the Human Resources Subcommittee will work on] “solutions to help more families climb the economic ladder and escape poverty. We will continue taking action to ensure the programs under our Committee’s jurisdiction are encouraging and rewarding work
The new 115th Congress officially starts on January 3. Behind the scenes discussion have been on-going on using a 2017 budget resolution (left over from last year) to very quickly provide the first budget reconciliation. The process will start this week with the Senate expected to pass a budget resolution this week and the House