Foster Care Rules Are an Attack on Faith Based Families

What Did HHS Change?

The Department of Health and Human Services published a final rule on May 14 that strips the religious exemption for faith-based foster and adoption agencies and forces them to certify adults for placement without regard to sincerely held beliefs about marriage if they wish to keep receiving federal Title IV-E funds.

Washington bureaucrats call this nondiscrimination. Rural Christians call it a shove toward the door. The regulation covers every private agency that takes federal dollars to find homes for children, which means it reaches most of the country. The Administration for Children and Families reports that 328,947 children were in foster care on September 30, 2024. That is a lot of small lives to risk over a culture war scorecard.

The rule does not stop at foster care. Adoption services, kinship navigator grants, and family preservation contracts all fall under the same umbrella. Any provider that believes a child does best with a mother and a father is now told to keep that belief off government property. And the government is everywhere.

Five years ago this month the Supreme Court unanimously held in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia that the city could not exclude Catholic Social Services from foster referrals. The Court said the First Amendment still matters. HHS wrote this rule as if that decision were merely a suggestion.

The timing is no accident. The administration waited until after the November executive order on faith partnerships to publish the rewrite, hoping the headlines would fade before churches noticed. They noticed. So did the state attorneys general who have already filed notice of intent to sue.

Why Should Families of Faith Care?

Faith-based agencies have placed the majority of foster children in many states, and pushing them out would remove beds, mentors, and forever homes from a system already short of each, while forcing Catholics, Baptists, and other believers to choose between their convictions and helping children.

Bethany Christian Services, one of the largest faith-based child welfare providers in the country, reports that it serves children across 29 states. In 2022 it helped place more than 2,700 children. That is not a boutique ministry. That is a major piece of the nation's safety net. When agencies like Bethany shrink their footprint, caseworkers have fewer places to send kids. Kids wait longer. Some age out without a family.

The numbers from the most recent federal report make the danger plain. Only 46,935 children were adopted from foster care in fiscal year 2024, a drop of more than 6 percent from the year before and more than 26 percent since 2019. Adoptions are already falling. Adding a regulatory attack on the agencies that find adoptive homes is like pulling bricks from a crumbling wall.

Supporters of the rule claim it will open more homes. But the practical effect is the opposite. States that shut out faith agencies have seen wait lists grow and provider networks shrink. Illinois lost Catholic Charities placements nearly fifteen years ago. Texas has fought to keep faith agencies open. The results speak for themselves, and they are not close.

Birth parents also lose. Faith-based agencies often provide the counseling, housing help, and post-adoption support that keep families together or help them heal after separation. Strip those services away and the state becomes a cold conveyor belt. That is not progress. That is bureaucracy dressed up as compassion.

What Should Congress Do Now?

Congress should pass legislation reaffirming that faith-based providers may participate in federal foster care programs without being forced to violate their religious teachings, because such a law would protect conscience, preserve placements, and keep the focus on finding safe homes rather than enforcing cultural orthodoxy.

The money at stake is real. The Congressional Research Service estimates that Title IV-E foster care, adoption, and guardianship programs received roughly $9.7 billion in federal support for fiscal year 2024. Taxpayers should not be conscripted into a scheme that punishes the very churches and charities that have carried this burden for generations.

Congress can act this session. A clean conscience protection can be attached to the next health and human services spending bill. It should say plainly that no federal agency may condition a grant on a provider abandoning its religious standards. The Senate should not hide behind committee deadlines. The House should not water the language down.

State legislatures should follow. Texas, South Carolina, and Michigan have already shown that statutory protections work. More states should add mirror language to their own child welfare codes. When both Washington and the states stand up, agencies can stop looking over their shoulders and start looking for parents.

The children waiting in foster care do not care about our political rituals. They need a bed tonight and a family tomorrow. Faith-based agencies deliver both. Washington should get out of the way and let them.