The American foster care system has long been a quiet disaster. Outcomes for youth leaving care are scandalous: according to the White House fact sheet, only about half finish high school, fewer than 5% obtain a four-year degree, roughly one in five experiences homelessness after leaving care, and only about half are steadily employed by age 24. Caseworkers are overloaded, information systems are archaic, and in some jurisdictions qualified foster families are turned away because they hold traditional religious beliefs about sex and marriage.

Which is why it's a welcome development that the Trump White House has made a big deal out of a new EO, "Fostering the Future for American Children and Families." The administration rolled the drum about it, and it got a big unveiling ceremony with the President, flanked by the First Lady, who will lead the initiative.

What does the EO do and is it just feel-good comms?

First, it launches a “Fostering the Future” initiative, led by Melania Trump, to build partnerships between federal agencies, universities, businesses and charities, with a focus on youth who are transitioning from care into adult life. An online platform will connect these young adults to housing, education, apprenticeships, scholarships, mentoring and financial-literacy resources, with a mandate to reprogram underused federal funds toward these purposes and to add flexibility to existing Education and Training Vouchers so they can be used for short, career-oriented programs as well as traditional degrees.

Second, the order goes after the invisible plumbing of the child-welfare state: data and technology. It instructs HHS to modernise state child-welfare information systems, encourage the use of AI-assisted tools for recruiting and matching foster families, and publish an annual national scorecard. States will be measured on concrete outcomes: reducing unnecessary entries into care, shortening investigation times, cutting placement disruptions and accelerating permanent family placements. Advocates like the Youth Law Center, which is not a natural ally of this White House, have cautiously welcomed this focus, arguing that better data, if handled with transparency and attention to privacy, can finally force systems to respond to what happens to real children rather than to paperwork. 

The most contentious and, for many supporters, most important piece concerns religious freedom. The order explicitly condemns policies that bar foster or adoptive parents and agencies because of "sincerely held religious beliefs or adherence to basic biological truths" and directs HHS and the White House Faith Office to push back against such rules and to expand partnerships with churches and other faith-based organisations. Christian families in states like Vermont and Oregon tell couples they are "unqualified" to foster any child because they believe that sex is immutable and that marriage is between a man and a woman. Unsurprisingly, Christians have always been disproportionately represented among candidates for fostering, and so, apart from the unconstitutionality and immorality of it, it should make a big practical difference.

Will this have serious impact? We will see. Much depends on state and local policy, and there's little the Federal government can do—or indeed, any government, given the thorny personal issues involved. Still, government should still do the best job it possibly can.

The last big round of reform to foster care was fifteen years ago, with reforms such as extended foster care to age 21 and guaranteed Medicaid until 26. Since then, the grim statistics have barely budged. Housing voucher pilots, apprenticeship schemes and piecemeal scholarships exist, but they are fragmented and often hard to access for a young adult without stable family backing. Meanwhile, anti-Christian bigotry has been shrinking the pool of available homes even as children sleep in group homes, police stations and hospital corridors.

Implementation will depend on whether HHS actually rewrites regulations, whether Congress cooperates on funding and tax incentives, and whether states accept or resist the new scorecards and religious-freedom guidance. But if the administration follows through, the likely impact is not trivial. More coherent support for education and work could mean thousands more former foster youth with degrees, trades and stable jobs. Stronger partnerships with churches and community charities could mean more actual families and fewer institutions. Better data and transparency could give governors and legislators less excuse when outcomes fail to improve.

In that sense, “Fostering the Future” fits into a broader Trump project that can sometimes be undernoticed. For all the New Right and caudillo-esque touches of this administration, which are real, many initiatives follow a very traditional conservative template of attempting to re-centre policy around family, local community and religious institutions, rather than ever-expanding bureaucracies. This especially calls for that. Abandoned children we will always have, and there is only so much the Federal government can do. But choosing to put those children at the centre of a national initiative, and to treat their futures as a priority rather than an afterthought, is not nothing. For the boy who does not end up homeless at 19 because a local parish couple was finally allowed to foster him, or the young woman who gets a scholarship instead of a shelter bed, the dry language of this executive order may indeed make the difference between a sunny future or a dark one.

And this is why those of us who work in this often thankless and abstract work of policy do this stuff.

Policy News You Need To Know

#AI #CyberWarfare #Chyna — Striking. Anthropic, a frontier AI lab, has disclosed that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking outfit, labeled GTG-1002, attempted what appears to be the first known cyber-espionage campaign with artificial intelligence not as a tool, but as the operational lead, manipulating its Claude system into running the bulk of an intrusion spree against roughly 30 targets, with several breaches confirmed. According to Anthropic’s detailed after-action report, the human operators merely supervised while Claude, leveraging its general reasoning abilities and automated tool use, carried out an estimated 80–90% of the operation, churning through thousands of requests per second over multiple days—a scale and tempo that would have required a large, highly trained human team in earlier eras. The episode underscores how Beijing is willing to weaponise every cutting-edge technology it can reach, including American-designed AI systems, to feed its well-documented industrial espionage apparatus and intelligence collection against the United States. And more generally that AI will supercharge cyber warfare.

#Pot — We are waiting to see what the Trump administration will do about rescheduling marijuana. Here's a hint. “President Donald Trump’s administration thinks that marijuana use is a public safety hazard,” a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor’s office told the Wyoming outlet WyoFile, as reported by Cannabis Business Times (yes, that's a thing), in connection with new instructions to "rigorously" prosecute cannabis offenses on federal land.  This is obviously good news, and reflects a growing body of research that is finally catching up with the romantic myths about a "harmless" drug. Studies now link high-potency cannabis to significantly increased rates of psychosis, especially among heavy, young users, and warn of rising burdens of cannabis-induced mental illness in jurisdictions that liberalised the drug.  

SEE ALSO: Republicans Just Closed the Strip-Mall Pot Loophole, And We Should Celebrate

#TheEconomyStupid — A new Harris Poll on what it calls the "Income Paradox" finds that nearly one-third of Americans earning at least $100,000 a year say they are financially distressed, and roughly two-thirds of these six-figure households do not consider themselves wealthy; 44% feel just one unexpected bill away from "financial chaos," and many describe themselves as living in "survival mode," a sentiment especially acute in high-cost metros where inflation has eroded purchasing power so badly that an economist estimates it now takes about $175,000 to buy what a much lower six-figure salary did two decades ago. This is the statistical portrait of the emerging "bourgeois precariat": the college-educated, tax-paying constituency that is the backbone of the Mamdani electorate.

#Redistricting — The President has announced that he will "endorse again" any parliamentarian from Indiana who does not support redistricting. Good. The genie can't be put out of the bottle: Democrats are busy redistricting their states, so it really is suicide for red states to not do the same.

#Triangulation — Democrat Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, while a left-wing radical on social and governance issues, has struck an interesting bipartisan note on economic issues, no doubt motivated by the manufacturing-heavy character of the electorate of her state. Which is why this new op-ed of hers in the Washington Post calling for tariffs, albeit executed differently from President Trump's, is interesting less for its substance than for the fact of its existing and being authored by her. That said, she argues that tariffs should be used as a "precise" tool rather than as broad, across-the-board taxes that, she argues, push up prices on everything. She wants focused protection for a few key sectors, especially shielding US automakers (quelle surprise) from Chinese state-backed carmakers, preserving domestic steel as a strategic industry, and building a resilient US semiconductor supply chain. Tariff policy should also coordinate with democratic partners and carve many allies out of tariff regimes instead of treating them like adversaries. At the same time, she calls for lower or zero tariffs on essentials and cost-sensitive inputs such as food and key building materials, to ease the burden on households and reduce the cost of housing and infrastructure. The revenue from tariffs, furthermore, she argues, should be "reinvested" directly in American workers and firms. As we said, it's consultant slop, but the fact of its existing is nonetheless interesting.

#Welfare — Clever move to reduce SNAP fraud: the Trump administration is launching a full-scale revalidation of all beneficiaries. This comes, the admin says, after discovering extensive irregularities, including an estimated 186,000 deceased individuals still receiving benefits, as detailed in a report. Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins, citing both the shocking data and states’ previously unexamined rolls, has ordered every current recipient to reapply, declaring, correctly, that a program originally designed as emergency relief has drifted into a semi-permanent income stream for far too many.

#AI — Bond issuance tied to the AI boom has erupted in the past few weeks: a recent Journal report into debt-financed data-centre projects reports that big tech companies have sold tens of billions of dollars of new bonds since September alone for AI infrastructure, more than double their typical annual pace over the past decade. Drawing on estimates from Morgan Stanley, the article says global financing for data centres and their hardware could reach nearly 3 trillion dollars by the end of 2028. Believe it or not, that's a lot of money, even nowadays. 3 trillion is roughly 2–3% of projected world GDP in 2028, and a bit more than 2% of today’s entire global bond market. People will be talking bubble again.

#Energy — US crude oil production rose to approximately 13.9 million barrels a day, the highest on record. Good to know. When it comes to fossil fuels, deregulation works! When it comes to things like nuclear, however, it's more complicated…

#Conspiracies — In a long Truth Social post, President Trump urged House Republicans to “release the Epstein files” and then drop the subject, casting the current frenzy as a Democrat-engineered diversion, which is certainly true. Trump noted, correctly, that DOJ has already produced tens of thousands of pages on Epstein, that Democrat figures such as Bill Clinton and Reid Hoffman are under scrutiny, and that the House Oversight Committee can obtain whatever material it is legally entitled to; if anything damaging to him existed, he argued, correctly again, Democrats would have weaponised it already. Hopefully we stop hearing about this sordid story soon…