I have a solid evidence base across statute, federal award records, nonprofit financials, case law, state audits, and investigative reporting. Here is the report.

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The Vanishing Point: How 40,000 Children a Year Cross State Lines Into a Supervision Gap That No Agency Owns

Every year American child welfare agencies file roughly 40,000 requests to move children across state lines — to grandmothers in another state, to non-custodial fathers, to adoptive homes, to for-profit residential facilities a thousand miles from the courthouse holding the case. The instrument governing those moves is the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children, drafted in 1960, enacted as state law in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and administered not by any government agency but by an association housed inside a private 501(c)(3) trade group in Arlington, Virginia. Under the compact's Article V, the sending state keeps legal jurisdiction and keeps drawing federal Title IV-E reimbursement for the child; the receiving state does the supervision, gets none of the money, and — until it signs a specific form — has no obligation to supervise at all. There is no national database of ICPC placements, no public count of denials, no published tally of interstate placement disruptions, and no federal reporting of children who are injured or die after being sent across a state line. A child moved under the ICPC is, in the most literal administrative sense, in between: still on one state's books, physically in another's, and reliably counted by neither.

The Compact That Isn't a Federal Law

The ICPC is not a federal statute. It is a uniform act that each jurisdiction passed separately, which means it exists 52 times over as ordinary state law, interpreted by 52 sets of courts. The Third Circuit held in McComb v. Wambaugh, 934 F.2d 474 (3d Cir. 1991), that the ICPC is construed as the state law of the enacting state — and, critically, that it does not apply when a child is placed with a natural parent across state lines. Arkansas, California, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Washington courts have largely agreed. Arizona went the other way in Arizona Department of Economic Security v. Leonardo, holding the compact does reach placements with out-of-state parents. New York's high court revisited the question again in Matter of D.L. v. S.B., 2022 NY Slip Op 05940.

The compact administrators' own association has taken the position that McComb is "unsound" — which is a remarkable posture, because the association is not a court and has no authority to overrule one. The practical result is that whether a child sent to a parent in another state receives an ICPC home study, a background check and any supervision at all depends entirely on which courthouse the case sits in. Same statute, same facts, opposite outcome.

Layered on top of the compact text are the "ICPC Regulations" — Regulation 1 and 2 governing home studies, Regulation 7 governing expedited placements with parents and relatives, Regulation 4 governing residential placements. These regulations decide where children live. They are not federal regulations. They were not promulgated under the Administrative Procedure Act. They went through no notice-and-comment rulemaking, appear in no Federal Register, and are published on the website of a private membership association. The original 1960 compact contains no express rulemaking authority — establishing one is among the stated goals of the revised compact that has spent two decades failing to pass.

Article V: The Clause That Manufactures the Gap

The mechanism is worth stating precisely, because it is not an accident or an implementation failure. It is the design.

Under Article V, the sending agency "shall retain jurisdiction over the child sufficient to determine all matters in relation to the custody, supervision, care, treatment and disposition of the child." The sending agency also retains financial responsibility. The receiving state's obligation runs to conducting the home study and reporting back — and state policy manuals are explicit that the duty to supervise does not attach until the receiving state signs and returns Form 100A approving the placement.

So consider the interval. A child is physically living in State B. State A holds jurisdiction but has no caseworker within 1,500 miles. State B has a caseworker down the street but no legal obligation and no funding stream. If someone calls a hotline about that child, State B's intake screener sees a case belonging to State A. State A's screener sees a child outside its territory. The report can be closed by both as a jurisdictional mismatch, and no investigation is ever opened. That is not a hypothetical failure mode; it is the predictable output of splitting jurisdiction from proximity and attaching the money to jurisdiction.

The gap widens further in what the compact calls an illegal placement — a child moved before the receiving state approves. State guidance describes the consequence bluntly: when a child is placed illegally, "there is no supervision, financial support, or medical coverage" for that child. And the enforcement backstop is largely theoretical. As one analysis of the compact put it, "there are no precise sanctions for those who bypass the ICPC," and "legal imposition of penalties has been rare." A violation is nominally grounds for suspending a child-placing agency's license and is nominally punishable under both states' placement laws. In practice, since 1980, the observable remedy has been a handful of court orders returning children to the sending state.

The Money: Sending States Collect, Receiving States Work

Federal support for Title IV-E activities was roughly $9.7 billion in FY2024, rising to an estimated $11.319 billion in FY2025, per Congressional Research Service analysis. Title IV-E pays foster care maintenance payments for eligible children and reimburses 50 percent of state administrative and training costs. In an average FY2024 month, one-third of the 328,947 children in foster care drew a IV-E-supported maintenance payment.

Because Article V keeps financial responsibility with the sending state, the sending state continues to claim IV-E maintenance and administrative reimbursement for a child who has physically left its jurisdiction. The administrative claim is the important one: it reimburses case planning, case management and "supervision" — activities the sending state, by definition, cannot perform in person once the child is in another state. Meanwhile the receiving state absorbs the cost of the home study, any courtesy supervision it agrees to provide, and every hour its caseworkers spend on a child who does not appear in its own IV-E claim.

The incentive structure is exactly backwards. The state with the money has no proximity. The state with proximity has no money. Nothing in the compact requires the sending state to pass through any portion of its federal administrative match to the receiving state that is doing the actual work — and receiving-state ICPC units are chronically starved as a result. Indiana, which had 11,457 children in foster care and 6,212 entering care in 2022, has run its entire interstate compact function with a reported one to two full-time employees, with average ICPC processing exceeding 120 days.

Congress has twice tried to buy compliance rather than compel it. The Safe and Timely Interstate Placement of Foster Children Act of 2006 (P.L. 109-239) imposed the 60-day home study deadline and offered states a $1,500 incentive payment for each home study completed within 30 days — an incentive that expired after federal fiscal year 2010 and was never renewed. The Family First Prevention Services Act (P.L. 115-123, 2018), which absorbed the Modernizing the Interstate Placement of Children in Foster Care Act, appropriated $5 million in grants — available only through FY2022 — to help states connect to an electronic interstate case-processing system, and set a mandate that states use one no later than October 1, 2027.

Note the asymmetry. Roughly $11 billion a year flows through Title IV-E. The total federal investment in making interstate placement work faster and safer has been a $5 million one-time grant pool and a per-home-study bounty that lapsed sixteen years ago.

The Private Administrator and Its Federal Retainer

The Association of Administrators of the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (AAICPC) was created in 1974 and consists of the compact administrators from all 52 jurisdictions. It does not have its own staff, offices or infrastructure. It "obtains its Secretariat Services as an affiliate of the American Public Human Services Association" — APHSA, EIN 36-2166948, a private nonprofit membership and advocacy organization for state and local human services agencies, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.

APHSA reported roughly $16.3 million in revenue against $17.7 million in expenses in fiscal 2024, with $9.17 million in assets and $6.34 million in liabilities. Its president and CEO, Tracy Wareing Evans, reported salary of $318,998 and total compensation of $358,555 on the organization's 2023 Form 990.

The AAICPC's operating money comes from two places. The first is dues assessed on the states themselves. New Hampshire's Governor and Executive Council records show AAICPC annual membership dues of $11,300 for calendar year 2025, a figure that includes travel and registration for one voting member to attend the annual AAICPC business meeting. If comparable across 52 jurisdictions, that is on the order of half a million dollars a year in public funds flowing to a private association — paid by the same state agencies the association's compact is supposed to hold accountable to one another.

The second is federal money, awarded without competition. APHSA has run the National Electronic Interstate Compact Enterprise (NEICE) since it began as a pilot in November 2013, funded through the Office of Management and Budget's Partnership Fund for Program Integrity Innovation and administered by the HHS Children's Bureau, under grant number 90XA0151. HHS has kept renewing it on a sole-source basis:

• Federal Register 2024-20827 (Sept. 13, 2024): notice of intent to award a within-scope, agency-initiated non-competitive supplement with extension to APHSA for AAICPC.
• Federal Register 2025-16752 (Sept. 2, 2025): notice of intent to award a sole-source cooperative agreement of up to $1,600,000 to APHSA for AAICPC, for a 12-month period of performance running September 30, 2025 to September 29, 2026, for further national implementation and support of NEICE.

Federal award records show APHSA receiving roughly $19.3 million in federal grants and cooperative agreements across HHS and USDA programs, including a $12.39 million HHS award under CFDA 93.652 and the $1.6 million FY2025 award under the same program number. APHSA states plainly that state membership and NEICE connection fees "are currently not adequate to meet the full operational costs of managing the national system" — meaning the compact's infrastructure runs on a recurring federal subsidy to a private trade association, renewed annually without competition.

The conflict is structural rather than personal. APHSA's institutional mission is to represent state human services agencies — to advocate for them, convene them, and defend their policy interests in Washington. The AAICPC's institutional mission is to make those same agencies answer to each other for what happens to children they ship across state lines. The referee is housed inside the players' association, and paid by both the players and the league office.

What Failure Looks Like

The Hart children. Six Black children adopted out of the Texas system by Jennifer and Sarah Hart, who then moved the family through Minnesota, Oregon and Washington. The family was investigated in each state. Sarah Hart pleaded guilty to domestic assault in Minnesota in 2011 for striking one of the children, receiving a 90-day stayed sentence. In July 2013, three months after the family arrived in Oregon, that state's Department of Human Services produced a 30-page report cataloguing abuse allegations from both Minnesota and Oregon and noting that five of the six children were drastically undersized — Devonte, then 11, stood about 4-foot-2 and weighed 57 pounds, the build of a typical eight-year-old. Washington opened its own investigation in 2013 and closed it unfounded. In the three days before Jennifer Hart drove the family off a California cliff in March 2018, Washington's Department of Social and Health Services was trying and failing to make contact. A jury later found the deaths intentional. Every state saw a piece. None held the file. The Washington Post's account was titled, precisely, "How adoption and support programs failed the Hart siblings and ushered them to their deaths."

Sequel Youth & Family Services. More than 40 states sent children to facilities operated by this Alabama-based for-profit chain, according to a 2020 APM Reports investigation documenting punching, kicking, choking and sexual assault by staff. At Clarinda Academy in Iowa, at least 358 California foster youth and juvenile offenders were placed after 2015; at points, out-of-state teens made up 20 to 25 percent of residents. Youth there described feeling forgotten by the caseworkers and courts nominally charged with monitoring them — which is what Article V's split of jurisdiction from proximity produces at scale. California ordered more than 130 children pulled from all out-of-state facilities in December 2020. Clarinda closed in February 2021. A San Francisco Chronicle investigation concluded that California's lack of oversight "kept these facilities in business and allowed unconscionable harm to children across the nation."

Private re-homing. Reuters' 18-month investigation "The Child Exchange," published in September 2013, documented parents advertising adopted children to strangers on internet forums and transferring custody with little or no government scrutiny. In a single forum over five years, a child was offered up roughly once a week; children in 34 states were advertised, at least 70 percent of them adopted from abroad. The ICPC is the mechanism that is supposed to make such transfers impossible. It was simply routed around, because nothing detects a bypass in real time. Four states — Wisconsin, Louisiana, Colorado and Florida — passed restrictions in response. Forty-six did not.

Kent County, Michigan. After a mother scalded her nine-month-old daughter — an assault a judge called "deplorable," resulting in a minimum four-year sentence — the child's placement with out-of-state relatives stalled in the ICPC pipeline. Michigan's Office of the Child Advocate published findings in February 2026 recommending that the state set a hard deadline of 30 days for child-placing agencies merely to complete and submit the ICPC packet after a relative is identified. MDHHS conceded the delay. That such a recommendation was still necessary in 2026 — that there was no deadline at all on the front end of the process — is the finding.

Background checks. Federal placement standards require out-of-state child abuse registry clearances only for states of residence within the past five years. More than four in ten American adults have lived in more than one state. A caregiver with a substantiated maltreatment history six years old and one state over clears.

The Data That Does Not Exist

The most widely cited figure in this field — roughly 40,000 ICPC home study requests a year — traces to an American Bar Association analysis from 2014. That it remains the number people use, twelve years later, is itself the story.

The timeliness picture is equally thin and equally damning: only about 30 percent of ICPC home studies are completed within 30 days, and only 45 percent within the 60 days federal law requires. Roughly 25 percent take 61 to 90 days, and 30 percent take more than 90. The Safe and Timely Act's own text contemplates that home studies not completed within 75 days jeopardize Title IV-B and IV-E funding. There is no public record of that penalty being meaningfully applied to any state.

Meanwhile, AFCARS — the federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, the government's primary child welfare data instrument — does not surface out-of-state placement counts in its public dashboard. And a January 2026 assessment from the Texas Alliance of Child and Family Services found that even NEICE, the $1.6-million-a-year federally subsidized system built expressly to move ICPC data, "does not allow for expansive data collection," is not fully integrated by all states, and therefore cannot drive process or policy change. Its own recommendation is for a centralized national ICPC database that would let all member states "uniformly collect, track, analyze, and report data."

So the ledger reads: no public national count of ICPC placements. No public count of denials, or the reasons for them. No public count of placements that disrupt. No public count of children harmed or killed in interstate placements. Even the count of how many states have adopted the replacement compact varies by source — 11, 13, 20, 21 — depending on who is asked, which is a fair summary of the entire information environment.

Twenty Years in Committee

The people who run the compact have known it is broken since at least 2004, when an APHSA policy resolution directed a full rewrite. A final draft of the revised ICPC circulated in November 2005. APHSA began helping states adopt it in March 2006. The revised compact would narrow the compact's applicability, set enforceable timeframes, establish clear rulemaking authority, clarify state responsibilities, strengthen protection for family relationships, and — for the first time — give an aggrieved family a forum to appeal a placement denial.

The revised compact takes effect only when 35 states enact it, and then only 12 to 24 months after the 35th. In 2026, Kansas Governor Laura Kelly signed House Bill 2557, making Kansas the 21st state. At the pace of the last two decades, the fix agreed to in 2005 will not govern a single child before the middle of the next decade. Children born the year that draft circulated are now adults.

The federal mandate that states use an electronic interstate case-processing system arrives October 1, 2027. There is no published penalty schedule for missing it.

What Would Actually Close the Gap

The failures here are legible and the remedies are not exotic:

Make the placements visible. Add out-of-state placement to AFCARS as a mandatory, publicly reported data element — counts, destination state, placement type, days to home study, denial and the reason for denial, disruption, and any fatality or near-fatality. The compact's opacity is not a technical limitation; it is a reporting requirement nobody has written.

Pay the state doing the work. Carve out a Title IV-E administrative match payable directly to the receiving state for ICPC home studies and supervision. As long as the money follows jurisdiction rather than proximity, receiving-state ICPC units will stay at one to two people.

Give the deadline teeth. The 75-day IV-E consequence in the Safe and Timely Act already exists on paper. Replace it with an automatic, graduated reduction in the sending state's IV-E administrative claim for every day a placement runs past deadline — applied by formula, not by discretionary enforcement action.

Move rulemaking into daylight. Rules that determine where a child in state custody lives should not be written by a private trade association. Put ICPC rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act or a federally chartered body with published dockets, comment periods and judicial review. If HHS is going to fund the compact's operations on a sole-source basis, it can condition that funding on public rulemaking and public data.

Close the hotline loophole by statute. Require that any maltreatment report concerning a child in an ICPC placement be accepted and investigated by the state where the child physically is, with mandatory notice to the sending state within 24 hours. No report about an interstate child should ever be closeable as "wrong jurisdiction."

Resolve the parent question in federal law. Congress can end the McComb split in a sentence, and should — either bringing placements with non-custodial parents fully inside the compact with an expedited track, or excluding them and replacing the protection with a mandatory federal safety check. What cannot continue is a system where the answer depends on the zip code of the courthouse.

Thirty-nine percent of children in American foster care are now placed with relatives or kin, up from 26 percent in 2007. Kinship is the direction of national policy, and kin are frequently in another state. Every year, the ICPC bottleneck sits more squarely on top of the placement type the entire field says it wants. A compact written in 1960, administered by a private association, governed by rules no agency promulgated, enforced by penalties nobody imposes, and measured by data nobody publishes is now the mechanism standing between tens of thousands of children and their grandmothers — and the mechanism that decides whether anyone checks on them once they get there.

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Sources: - Federal Register — Intent to Award Sole Source Cooperative Agreement to APHSA for AAICPC (Sept. 2, 2025) - Federal Register — Non-Competitive Supplement with Extension to APHSA for AAICPC (Sept. 13, 2024) - APHSA — Association of Administrators of the ICPC · Revised ICPC · ICPC Regulations · ICPC Policy Brief · NEICE - APHSA Form 990 — ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer (EIN 36-2166948) - New Hampshire Governor & Executive Council agenda — AAICPC dues (Feb. 5, 2025) - P.L. 109-239, Safe and Timely Interstate Placement of Foster Children Act of 2006 · Wisconsin DCF implementation memo - H.R. 4472, Modernizing the Interstate Placement of Children in Foster Care Act · FFPSA overview - CRS — Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (RL32070) · CRS — Child Welfare Funding in the President's FY2027 Budget (R48912) · CRS — Child Welfare: Purposes, Federal Programs, and Funding (IF10590) - The Imprint — Can We Please Fix The Interstate Placement Of Children In Foster Care? - ABA Child Law Practice — Foster Kids in Limbo: The Effects of the Interstate Compact - TACFS — Connected Across States: Advancing the Interstate Compact for Children & Families (Jan. 2026) - Washington Post — How adoption and support programs failed the Hart siblings · OPB — Hart Parents Intentionally Killed Adopted Children, Jury Rules - APM Reports — 'Youth were abused here': Sequel facilities · SF Chronicle — California sent vulnerable children to out-of-state facilities - Reuters "The Child Exchange" — Senate HELP testimony of Megan Twohey · NPR coverage - WOOD TV — After baby scalded by mom, child welfare system slow to vet new home · Michigan Office of the Child Advocate - Kansas Governor's Office — Kelly Signs Bipartisan Bill Updating Interstate Foster Care Compact · Kansas DCF testimony on HB 2557 (2026) - ACF — 2024 AFCARS Dashboard · National Council For Adoption — AFCARS 2025 Update - National Council For Adoption — Understanding the ICPC · Lewis & Clark Law — Parents and the ICPC · Matter of D.L. v. S.B., 2022 NY Slip Op 05940 - NEICE Support Desk — ICPC Home Study Evaluations and Decision Deadlines

Two notes on sourcing. Reported counts of states that have enacted the revised ICPC conflict across sources (11, 13, 20, 21) depending on date and author; the Kansas Governor's 2026 announcement of Kansas as the 21st state is the most recent official figure. The ~40,000 annual home-study requests figure is the most recent publicly available national estimate and dates to 2014 ABA analysis — the absence of a current federal number is itself a finding of this report, not an omission from it.