Dave Camp: “I want to thank the chairman of the Human Resources Subcommittee for yielding and for his leadership on this very…”

“I want to thank the chairman of the Human Resources Subcommittee for yielding and for his leadership on this very important issue. I rise in support of this legislation, which is designed to encourage the adoption of more children from foster care. I spent much of my career promoting adoption of children by loving parents because every child deserves a loving and safe home. As an attorney in private practice, I worked with parents and children in the foster care system. Those sorts of experiences provided much of the background for changes in landmark adoption legislation I and my colleagues on the Ways and Means Committee crafted in 1997 called 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. {time} 1745 Overall, almost 300 children have been adopted as a result of the increases in adoptions since 1997. One study even estimated that the Federal Government saved $1 billion over 8 years by ensuring children were adopted instead of remaining in foster care.…”