Davis Opening Statement at Worker and Family Support Subcommittee Hearing on Harnessing Innovation and New Technology to Help America’s Foster Youth Succeed

(As Prepared for Delivery)

I appreciate the Chairman’s continued focus on children and families that experience foster care, and I look forward to working together again. I appreciate all of our witnesses being here today, as well.

Over 3,000 youth between 16 and 20 live in our home state of Illinois. Despite important policy improvements over the past few decades, our foster care system continues to fail many of those youth and their peers in other states.

We have a big problem, and it will require a big solution.

The answer begins with hearing the voices of youth who experience foster care.  We know they are still struggling to overcome the trauma they experienced before, and sometimes while in foster care. They need high-quality health care and mental health services. They need the basic tools of adulthood – an education, a career path, a driver’s license, life skills. And most of all they need love and stability – a stable home and the support of family, both blood family and chosen family. 

Our Subcommittee has an opportunity to make some simple changes that would ensure that youth can access essential supports right now. In some cases, we need to provide more information or more money so states can do things we know work - like helping youth secure driver’s licenses, safe housing, permanent families, and legal services to remove barriers to employment, education, and well-being. In others, we just need to change an outdated rule or make sure youth and caregivers know about resources that are already available. We also need to more intensively help expectant and parenting foster youth so that the entire family thrives. 

As we tackle the challenge of providing these youth with the kind of stability and opportunity we seek for our own children and grandchildren, we should ensure states and counties have access to key tools and can afford to use them when they fit local needs. The tools might be a specific approach to casework or service referral, free mental health services, or a piece of computer software.

At the same time, we should not confuse tools with solutions. The solution is to make sure current and former foster youth have trustworthy adults to guide them and help them learn to guide themselves. Achieving that will require significant investment. It will require reform to keep children connected to their families, even if those families are unable to care for them full-time. And it will require recognizing that these youth, like their peers, will likely need financial support and a guiding hand in early adulthood, well after age 18.

Our challenge has recently gotten much harder. Young adult unemployment is now over 10 percent, and the majority must live with family to make ends meet. Rising prices caused by the incoherent Trump tariff policy, Republican cuts to Medicaid, nutrition, and housing benefits, and most recently, the refusal of Congressional Republicans to prevent health insurance premiums from rising by an average of 114 percent, are making things difficult for all young adults. Given their circumstances, these problems fall especially hard on older foster youth. 

I believe we can and MUST meet this challenge. Our Subcommittee has a long history of bipartisan action on both immediate, commonsense policy changes and on bold, transformative policy improvements that open a better path in the future. 

Older foster youth told us what they need. All we have to do is listen and act.

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