History

• The ASFA, or Public Law 105-89, was passed by the 105th U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on November 19, 1997. Prior to the passage of ASFA, the reigning federal law on child welfare was the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980---which focused on preserving families and avoiding unnecessary removals of children from their birth parents. According to the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care (Pew), ASFA aimed to deal with some of the major issues facing child welfare systems across the country not covered by the 1980 legislation, most notably the issue of children spending too much time in foster care and lack of effort to find adoptive families for children with special needs.
  
  In addition to congressional and presidential support, former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in her biography cited the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 as "the achievement she initiated and shepherded that provided her with the greatest satisfaction."
  
  

Prioritizing Child Safety and Well-Being

• According to Pew, a key provision of ASFA was to "ensure that child safety, permanency, and well-being are of paramount concern in any child welfare decision." The law did this by requiring states to make "reasonable efforts to preserve and reunify families" while recognizing extenuating circumstances: where parents have subjected their child to chronic abuse, committed murder or have been deprived of their parental rights for a different child.
  
  

Encouraging Adoption

• Previous child welfare laws focused on keeping children out of foster care, which is a fundamental function of child welfare systems in the United States. However, the laws passed prior to ASFA failed to properly motivate states to move children through to adoption with new permanent families if the child could not safely be returned to his birth family. This threatened to allow too many children to languish in foster care and potentially age out of the system without a family. With the passage of ASFA, states could now claim between $4,000 and $6,000 more for each child adopted through the child welfare system, as long as the states paid for the health insurance of special needs children.
  
  

Standards

• ASFA created new standards for child welfare systems to adhere to in order to receive federal funding and reimbursements. Among the new standards, the federal government now required states to sufficiently document their efforts to find adoptive families for children in foster care. This legislation established timelines for filing to terminate a child's birth parents' rights and for limiting a child's wait to be adopted after her parents' rights have been terminated. Foster and adoptive parents must undergo criminal background checks before being licensed.
  
  

Funds for Family Preservation

• In 1993, Congress established the Family Preservation and Family Support Services Program, which "provided flexible funding for community-based services to (1) prevent child abuse and neglect from occurring and (2) help families whose children were at risk of being removed."
  
  ASFA renamed this program the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program, and continued funding to preserve and support families to avoid foster care. The program was expanded under ASFA to "specifically include the time-limited reunification services such as counseling, substance abuse treatment services, mental health services, assistance for domestic violence, temporary child care and crisis nurseries, and transportation to and from these services," according to Adoption.com.