Executive orders on foster care, addiction treatment, fentanyl, and cannabis

This continues our recap of new executive orders in the last six months.

Foster care

A new Executive Order issued in November created an initiative “Fostering the Future” to be spearheaded by First Lady Melania Trump to improve child welfare and foster systems across the country.

It calls for a modernization of child-welfare tracking systems, including use of artificial intelligence with predictive analytics to improve foster placements, and a state-level grading scale to evaluate outcomes. It also calls for partnerships between state welfare agencies and non-profits, schools, and churches to improve outcomes for those aging out of the foster system.

Some children’s rights advocates worry that increasing faith-based involvement could put LGBTQIA+ youth at risk, and point out that the order doesn’t mention any efforts to maintain or reconnect separated children with their families, despite poverty accounting for a broad portion of child neglect cases. And artificial intelligence has been proven to produce biased results–in 2022 AI was found to flag a disproportionate number of Black children for mandatory neglect investigations in a Pennsylvania county, which social workers disagreed with one-third of the time. Social workers were able to override the tool, but the discovery raised red flags as similar models were spreading across the country. Proponents are concerned about social workers’ personal biases.

Addiction treatment