I have what I need — including a federal document that contradicts itself. Writing the report now.

Split at the Door: How America Separates Foster Siblings by Default — and Why Washington Grades the States a "Strength" for Doing It

In 2008, Congress told every state in the country that when it takes children away from their parents, it must make "reasonable efforts" to keep brothers and sisters together, and that when it can't, it must guarantee them frequent visits. Eighteen years later, the federal government's own case-file reviews show that in 54% of applicable foster care cases, children were not placed with their siblings — and that in more than a third of those separations, caseworkers could not produce a valid documented reason for the split. Yet in that same federal review, the Children's Bureau rated state performance on sibling placement as a "Strength" in 81% of cases. That contradiction is not an accounting error. It is the design. Washington grades states on whether they made an effort, not on whether the children ended up together — and no state has ever lost a dollar of Title IV-E money over a separated sibling.

The Mechanism: Grading the Effort, Not the Outcome

The federal instrument that measures this is the Child and Family Services Review (CFSR), run by the Administration for Children and Families' Children's Bureau. Every state gets reviewed roughly every five to seven years. Reviewers pull a minimum of 65 case files, read every document, and interview caseworkers, judges, foster parents, and youth. Item 7 of the review is "Placement With Siblings."

Read the fine print of how Item 7 is scored and the whole system comes into focus. Reviewers ask two sub-questions. Question 7A: Was the child placed with all siblings who were also in foster care? Question 7B: If not, was there a valid reason for the separation? But the item's overall rating — the number that actually counts toward whether a state passes — turns on neither. It turns on whether "concerted efforts were made." A state can separate a child from every sibling she has and still be rated a Strength, so long as the file shows somebody tried.

The results are exactly what that scoring rule would predict. In the Children's Bureau's own aggregate report covering the first three years of CFSR Round 3 (fiscal years 2015–2017), prepared by contractor JBS International:

• Children were placed with all their siblings in foster care for the entire period under review in just 46% of 1,164 applicable cases.
• Where children were separated, reviewers found a valid documented reason in only 64% of 625 cases. That means roughly 225 children — more than a third of the separated group — were split from their brothers and sisters with no justification the federal reviewers could accept.
• Item 7 overall rating: 81% Strength.

The report is blunt about the causes, listing two "practice concerns": "Lack of placement resources able to accept sibling groups" and "Failure to reconsider placement of siblings together after initial separation." In plain English: there was no home big enough, and once the children were split, nobody went back and fixed it.

The visitation half of the mandate fares no better. Item 8 measures whether siblings placed apart actually see each other. Concerted efforts to ensure sibling visits of sufficient frequency were found in only 66% of 599 applicable cases. And no state — not one — achieved substantial conformity with Permanency Outcome 2, the outcome that sibling placement and sibling visitation both sit under.

Round 4 Makes It Worse, Not Better

The current review cycle, Round 4, is producing final reports now. It confirms the pattern is structural, not historical.

Oregon's Round 4 final report (2025) is the cleanest illustration of the loophole in the entire federal record. Oregon was rated a Strength on Item 7 — 94.59% (35 of 37 cases), comfortably clearing the 90% threshold. But buried in the same report's appendix, Question 7A shows that Oregon placed children with all their siblings in foster care in only 62.16% (23 of 37) of cases. Nearly four in ten Oregon foster children in the sample were living apart from a brother or sister — and the federal government gave the state a passing grade on keeping siblings together.

California's Round 4 final report (2024) shows the other failure mode. California was rated 87.64% on Item 7 (78 of 89), just under the bar — an "Area Needing Improvement." Question 7A: children placed with all siblings in only 64.04% of cases. Question 7B: a valid reason for separation in only 65.63% (21 of 32) — a third of California's separations, again, undocumented. And Item 8, visiting with parents and siblings, collapsed to 42%.

Both states failed Permanency Outcome 2. Both will write a Program Improvement Plan. Neither will pay a penalty. More on that below.

The Data HHS Collects — and Refuses to Publish

The common claim among advocates is that the federal government "doesn't collect" sibling data. That is no longer true, and the truth is worse.

The Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) is the census of American foster care — every state must report a record on every child. The 2020 AFCARS final rule (85 Fed. Reg. 28410, May 12, 2020), which took effect October 1, 2022, is now codified at 45 C.F.R. § 1355.44(b), and it requires every Title IV-E agency to report, for every single child:

• (b)(19) Total number of siblings
• (b)(20) Siblings in foster care
• (b)(21) Siblings in living arrangement — "the number of siblings of the child who are in the same living arrangement as the child, on the last day of the report period"

A parallel element, § 1355.44(e)(15), captures siblings in the adoptive or guardianship home. Subtract element 21 from element 20 and you have, for every child in America, the exact number of brothers and sisters the state is holding somewhere else. The federal government has been sitting on this since fiscal year 2023.

It has published none of it. The public-facing AFCARS Report — the annual release journalists, legislators, and advocates actually use — does not contain a sibling figure. The Children's Bureau's AFCARS Dashboard does not contain the word "sibling" anywhere in it. There is no national number. There is no state ranking. There is no trend line. HHS knows how many American children have been severed from a sibling, to the child, and has chosen not to say.

That silence has a lineage. The 2016 AFCARS rule required roughly 272 data items in the out-of-home care file; the 2020 rule cut it to about 183, stripping elements on sexual orientation, ICWA detail, educational stability, and health assessments. The sibling elements survived the cut. They just never made it into daylight.

Into that vacuum, academics have improvised. The best estimates — assembled from state administrative data because the federal number doesn't exist — hold that 53% to 80% of foster children with siblings are separated from at least one of them. A March 2025 study in Child Maltreatment by Dylan Jones, Sarah Font, Minjoo Lee, Rebecca Orsi-Hunt and Hyunil Kim, using linked NCANDS and AFCARS data, found something the system doesn't even measure: at least 27.4% of sibling groups in which any child is removed are "split" at the front door — some children taken, others left behind. The separation begins before the child ever reaches a foster home.

The Money: Why There Is No Bed for Four Children

Federal support for Title IV-E ran roughly $9.7 billion in FY2024, covering about 713,200 children a month across foster care, adoption assistance, and guardianship. It is an open-ended entitlement — the federal government reimburses a share of what states spend on eligible children — and it pays per child, per day. It does not pay a nickel more to keep four children together than to scatter them across four homes. There is no sibling-group rate. There is no capacity incentive. Title IV-E is indifferent to whether the four kids in its ledger are in the same house or four different counties.

Meanwhile the supply of homes that could take a sibling group is in free fall. A national survey by The Imprint found 178,026 licensed foster homes in 2025 — down 9% from 2023 and down 19% from the 220,002 homes licensed in 2019. Roughly 328,947 children were in foster care as of September 30, 2024. The homes that remain are overwhelmingly licensed for one or two children. Agencies routinely report that the hardest placements to find are teenagers, children with complex needs, and sibling groups — the three categories most likely to end in a group facility or a split.

The rate structure quietly pushes the same direction. Basic family foster care per-diems in many states run roughly $20–$24 per child per day. Emergency shelter beds run about $30. Treatment and specialized homes run $37–$45. Congregate and residential treatment runs into the hundreds. A family willing to take four siblings absorbs four children's worth of chaos on four children's worth of a rate that was never designed to cover the cost of a fifth bedroom. A residential facility takes one child and bills a multiple of it. The 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act tried to curb congregate care by capping IV-E room-and-board payments at 14 days for non-family placements unless the child is in a Qualified Residential Treatment Program — and the QRTP assessment is required to "acknowledge the importance of keeping siblings together." Acknowledge. Not achieve.

The Contractors

In the states that privatized case management, the sibling mandate is subcontracted to nonprofits whose incentives run through the same per-child machinery — and whose oversight has been, at times, catastrophic.

Kansas is the case study. The state farms out foster care case management to KVC Kansas, Saint Francis Ministries, Cornerstones of Care, and TFI Family Services (with EmberHope replacing Saint Francis in Sedgwick County under contracts running July 2024 through June 2028). By 2021, state data showed 42% of Saint Francis caseworkers and 24% of KVC Kansas caseworkers were each carrying more than 30 children. Saint Francis had more than 100 children with no assigned caseworker at all. A caseworker holding 30 children does not have the hours to run down a foster home willing to take three siblings, let alone to revisit a separation six months later — the exact "failure to reconsider" the Children's Bureau flagged nationally.

The money was not idle either. Robert Smith, the ordained Episcopal priest who led Saint Francis Ministries from 2014 to 2020, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in February 2026, admitting to a scheme with IT contractor William Whymark to overbill the child welfare nonprofit — prosecutors alleged at least $4.7 million. Smith's personal charges included $65,000 in Chicago Cubs tickets, which he claimed he intended to flip on the secondary market. The organization's Kansas parent entity (EIN 48-0543809) reported roughly $14.0 million in revenue in FY2023; KVC Health Systems' Kansas parent (EIN 26-2516589) reported about $16.3 million. Those holding-company figures sit atop operating subsidiaries that move far more public money. Children in that system, during those years, were sleeping in offices and cycling through "night-to-night" placements while documents showing family visits that never happened were being falsified.

The Cases

Aristotle P. v. Johnson, 721 F. Supp. 1002 (N.D. Ill. 1989). Nineteen years before Congress passed the sibling mandate, Judge Ann C. Williams let a class of Illinois foster children proceed on claims that separating them from their siblings and denying them visits violated their First Amendment right of association and their Fourteenth Amendment liberty interest in their sibling relationships. A consent decree followed, setting minimum sibling visitation. The constitutional theory has existed for 37 years. The practice has not changed.

M.D. v. Abbott (S.D. Tex.). In December 2015 Judge Janis Graham Jack found that "Texas's foster care system is broken, and it has been that way for decades," ruling that the state's practices — including placements separate from siblings and placements in mixed-age group homes where younger children were exposed to sexual abuse by older ones — amounted to deliberate indifference to the constitutional rights of some 12,000 children in permanent conservatorship. Federal monitors report the risk of serious harm persists.

M.B. v. Howard (D. Kan.). The lead plaintiffs were M.B. and S.E., brothers aged 8 and 10, who in 2018 were separated from their sister the moment they entered state custody and then subjected to night-to-night placements. They got four months together in one foster home. When the state failed to deliver their mental health services, the foster parent couldn't cope — and Kansas responded by separating the brothers from each other and putting them back on the night-to-night circuit. The January 2021 settlement was hailed as transformative. The September 2025 neutral report by Judith Meltzer of the Center for the Study of Social Policy found Kansas moving children 7.24 times per 1,000 days in care against a target of 4.4; only 83% of children experiencing one or fewer moves against a 90% target; 34% of children with an identified mental health need receiving no appropriate services; and the number of children with no placement at all nearly doubling from 2023 to 2024 — the highest since tracking began.

Wyatt B. v. Kotek (D. Or.). The case is named for Wyatt, age 3, and his brother Noah, 18 months, who were moved constantly through their first three weeks in Oregon's custody before the state gave up and placed them in separate foster homes. Wyatt began hitting, kicking, and screaming. Noah developed night terrors and had to be held constantly. Oregon settled in May 2024 under neutral-expert oversight.

The Veto

Then Oregon did something that exposes the incentive structure better than any statistic.

In 2025, the legislature passed Senate Bill 875, which would have required a court order before an agency could block or limit contact between foster siblings — converting a bureaucratic default into a decision a judge has to own. It also guaranteed foster children an attorney and, in a detail that says everything, luggage to carry their belongings instead of trash bags.

Governor Tina Kotek — a named defendant in Wyatt B. — vetoed it, saying it was unclear why "this level of prescriptiveness" was needed in statute. The Oregon Senate overrode her 21–6, the first veto override in that chamber since 2011. Republicans and Democrats both. The override then died in the House when the clock ran out on the session. The bill was reintroduced in January 2026.

The governor being sued for separating Wyatt from Noah vetoed the bill that would have made it harder to separate Wyatt from Noah. That is the incentive structure, stated out loud: prescriptiveness is a liability. Discretion is a defense.

The Accountability Gap

Here is why none of this costs a state anything.

Under 45 C.F.R. § 1355.36, a state that fails a CFSR outcome faces withholding of 1% of its Title IV-B and IV-E funds per failed outcome. But the same regulation provides that ACF suspends the withholding while a Program Improvement Plan is in effect — and the state is "actively implementing" it. Every state in the country has been found out of substantial conformity and placed in a PIP after every round of the CFSR since 2001. The PIP is not a penalty phase. It is the permanent condition of the program. Compliance is perpetually pending; the money never stops.

Worse, sibling placement isn't even in the part of the review that has teeth. The seven statewide data indicators — the hard numbers computed from AFCARS and NCANDS that determine national standards — are maltreatment recurrence, maltreatment in foster care, three permanency-in-12-months measures, re-entry, and placement stability. Sibling placement is not one of them. It lives only in the case-review portion, scored on "concerted efforts," by reviewers reading files.

And the Children's Bureau was told this a decade ago. In GAO-14-347 (May 29, 2014), "Foster Care: HHS Needs to Improve Oversight of Fostering Connections Act Implementation," the Government Accountability Office found that HHS had approved states' Fostering Connections plans but had never monitored whether states actually did any of it — and was still using a review instrument designed before the Act passed. GAO also noted that although states may separate siblings when joint placement is "contrary to the health or safety of a child," no federal guidelines address how to assess when that exception applies. Twelve years later, the CFSR still finds a third of separations undocumented, and there is still no guidance.

Congress wrote the mandate at 42 U.S.C. § 671(a)(31) and attached no consequence to breaking it. HHS built a scoring system that rewards effort over outcome. GAO told HHS to fix the monitoring and HHS did not. The states hired contractors and stopped counting. Nobody is watching, and everyone has an explanation for why that's someone else's job.

What It Costs, and What Would Fix It

For a child pulled out of her home at 3 a.m. by a stranger, a sibling is the only continuous fact of her life. She loses her house, her school, her bedroom, her parents, her dog, and her name on the mailbox in a single night. Her brother is the one thing that comes with her — unless the state decides he doesn't.

The research is not ambiguous about what that costs. Children placed with at least one sibling are less likely to experience a placement move, and specifically less likely to experience the destabilizing "non-progress" moves that cascade into more moves. Sibling separation carries a strong negative association with mental health. Sibling connection increases the likelihood of both reunification and adoption. Placement instability itself drives depression, anxiety, and aggression. Every mechanism the system uses to justify splitting siblings — no home big enough, needs too different, one child too hard — produces the instability that the split was supposedly avoiding.

Four fixes, in order of how fast they could happen:

1. Publish the AFCARS sibling data. HHS already has elements (b)(19), (b)(20), and (b)(21) for every foster child in America, going back to FY2023. Put the separation rate in the AFCARS Report and on the dashboard, by state, this year. It requires no legislation. It requires a decision.

2. Make sibling placement a statewide data indicator with a national standard. Move it out of the "concerted efforts" case review and into the seven measured indicators, where a number — not a narrative — determines conformity. That is a Children's Bureau regulatory action.

3. Amend § 671(a)(31) to give it teeth. Require, as Oregon's SB 875 would have, a judicial finding on the record before siblings are separated or sibling contact is restricted — and require the agency to re-justify the separation at every permanency hearing. The Children's Bureau's own reviewers identified "failure to reconsider placement of siblings together after initial separation" as a national practice concern. A recurring judicial checkpoint is the direct remedy.

4. Pay for the capacity the mandate assumes. A sibling-group placement rate under Title IV-E, and a licensing and recruitment push aimed squarely at homes that can take three or four children, would attack the cause the federal government itself named first: lack of placement resources able to accept sibling groups. You cannot mandate a bed into existence.

Until then, the number that matters is the one HHS has and won't print. In its own most recent national accounting, 54% of foster children with siblings in care were not living with them — and the federal government called that a Strength.

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Sources

• CFSR Aggregate Report, Round 3: FYs 2015–2017 — HHS Children's Bureau / JBS International (Items 7, 7A, 7B, 8E, 8F; Permanency Outcome 2)
• California CFSR Round 4 Final Report (2024) and Oregon CFSR Round 4 Final Report (2025)
• 45 C.F.R. § 1355.44 (AFCARS sibling elements) and 45 C.F.R. § 1355.36 (withholding/PIP suspension)
• AFCARS Final Rule, 85 Fed. Reg. 28410 (May 12, 2020); AFCARS Dashboard
• 42 U.S.C. § 671(a)(31) — Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act
• GAO-14-347, Foster Care: HHS Needs to Improve Oversight of Fostering Connections Act Implementation
• Jones, Font, Lee, Orsi-Hunt & Kim, "Sometimes, Only Some Siblings Go to Foster Care," Child Maltreatment (2025); Sibling Separation and Placement Instability for Children in Foster Care
• Aristotle P. v. Johnson, 721 F. Supp. 1002 (N.D. Ill. 1989); M.D. v. Abbott (Children's Rights); M.B. v. Howard (Children's Rights); Wyatt B. v. Kotek (Disability Rights Oregon)
• Kansas foster care settlement progress report, Sept. 2025 (Kansas Reflector); Ex-CEO of Saint Francis Ministries pleads guilty to wire fraud (Kansas Reflector, Feb. 2026)
• Oregon Senate overrides Kotek veto of SB 875 (OPB, June 2025); Kotek Vetoes Three Bills Relating to Child Welfare (Willamette Week)
• Licensed Foster Homes Down 19% Since 2019 (The Imprint); Child Welfare: Purposes, Federal Programs, and Funding (CRS IF10590)
• Form 990 financials via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer: Saint Francis Ministries Inc. (EIN 48-0543809), KVC Health Systems Inc. (EIN 26-2516589)

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Two notes on the research, since they cut against the framing of the assignment:

The directive said HHS "collects no reliable AFCARS data" on sibling separation. That turned out to be wrong in a way that strengthens the story: since October 2022, 45 C.F.R. § 1355.44(b)(19)–(21) has required states to report every child's total siblings, siblings in care, and siblings in the same living arrangement. The data exists. I verified that the public AFCARS Dashboard contains zero instances of the word "sibling." The scandal is suppression, not absence.

The directive also cited ~370,000 children in care. The current AFCARS figure is 328,947 (Sept. 30, 2024), down from a ~437,000 peak in 2017–18. I used the accurate number.

The single strongest artifact I found is Oregon's Round 4 report: the federal government rated Oregon a "Strength" (94.59%) on keeping siblings together while the same document's appendix shows only 62% of those children were actually placed with all their siblings. That one page is the whole investigation.