This November, I am proud to celebrate National Adoption Month and also National Adoption Day, an important time to recognize those wonderful parents who have adopted children in need of a permanent, loving home. It’s also a time to remind ourselves of the thousands of children across the country who still remain in foster care, waiting for a family to call their own.
Earlier this year, I was honored to recognize Midland County Probate Judge Dorene Allen as the 2014 Angel in Adoption award recipient from my district. In her 14 years as a judge, she has finalized nearly 700 adoptions, and through this and her prior work she has dedicated her career to serving Michigan’s most vulnerable children. There are many incredible advocates like Judge Allen around the country, and I am grateful for their efforts and for the opportunity we have to recognize them today.
Adoption is not something I’m speaking about just today, but something I have focused on throughout my career in private practice as well as my years in Congress. As an attorney before coming to Congress, I worked with parents and children in the foster care system. In Congress, I have been privileged to meet many adoption advocates as well as youth who have benefitted from adoption. Those sorts of experiences provided much of the background for legislation I have helped craft that has contributed to the landmark changes in adoption policy Congress has approved in recent years.
In 1997, my colleagues and I on the Ways and Means Committee crafted the Adoption and Safe Families Act. That legislation streamlined the adoption process to help more children in foster care quickly move into permanent adoptive homes. It also, for the first time, offered incentives to states to safely increase the number of children adopted from foster care.
It worked. In the decade following that legislation, the number of U.S. children adopted from foster care increased by 71 percent. In the years since, adoptions have continued to remain higher even as the foster care caseload started to decline. Overall, almost 300,000 children have been adopted as a result of the increase in adoptions starting in 1997. One study estimated the federal government saved $1 billion over eight years by ensuring children were adopted instead of remaining in foster care.
In 2001, I worked with my colleagues to pass the historic 2001 tax relief package that expanded the adoption tax credit to $10,000, easing the financial burden of adopting a child. In 2012, we made the adoption tax credit permanent.
In 2003, President George W. Bush signed into law my legislation, the Adoption Promotion Act, to create new financial incentives for states that increase adoptions of older children from foster care.
In 2008 as part of the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act, my proposal to provide equitable access to foster care and adoption services for Indian children in tribal areas became law. This allowed tribal governments to receive funding to administer adoption and foster care programs directly.
And just this year—after many months of hearings, public comment, and bipartisan work between the House and Senate—the President signed into law the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act. This law is designed to reduce child sex trafficking as well as increase adoptions, including among the hardest-to-place children.
Together, these efforts have resulted in more children living in loving, adoptive families. I am grateful for the support I have received from my colleagues in these efforts during my time in Congress, and I am grateful that today we can recognize and honor the most important people in this process—the parents who adopt children, the children who have been adopted, and those children still searching for a loving family.
Children in foster care deserve a place to call home, not for a few months or years, but for good. We have already seen great progress in increasing adoptions in recent years, and I hope that we will continue to see progress in the years ahead.
COMMITTEE on WAYS and MEANS