The bill
Recruiting Families Using Data Act of 2025
HR. 579, 119th Congress.
Sponsored by
Rep. Feenstra, Randy [R-IA-4]
ID: F000446
Follow the money
The bill
HR. 579, 119th Congress.
The sponsor
Every bill has someone who introduced it. That name is where the paper trail starts.
The money
25 itemised contributions to this sponsor, pulled from FEC filings.
The alignment
This bill's text tracks the "Introduction" section, p. 515-517 of the Mandate for Leadership.
Track this bill's progress through the legislative process
Latest Action
Received in the Senate and Read twice and referred to the Committee on Finance.
March 4, 2025
📍 Current Status
Next: Both chambers must agree on the same version of the bill.
1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.
2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.
3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Another exercise in legislative theater, courtesy of our esteemed Congress. Let's dissect this farce, shall we?
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The Recruiting Families Using Data Act of 2025 (RFUDA) claims to improve foster and adoptive parent recruitment and retention by leveraging data-driven approaches. How quaint. The real purpose is to create a bureaucratic behemoth that will justify more funding for "family partnership plans" and "foster family advisory boards." Because, you know, what's needed in the foster care system is more administrative overhead.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill amends the Social Security Act by adding new requirements for state plans, including:
* Developing a "family partnership plan" that involves various stakeholders (because we all know how well groupthink works). * Collecting and reporting data on foster family capacity, congregate care utilization, and demographics. * Creating foster family advisory boards to improve recruitment and retention.
These changes will undoubtedly lead to more paperwork, more meetings, and more opportunities for bureaucrats to justify their existence.
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The usual suspects:
* Foster and adoptive families (who will be subjected to more bureaucratic hoops). * State governments (which will receive more funding for administrative purposes). * Child welfare organizations (which will benefit from increased funding for "technical assistance providers"). * Lobbyists (who will profit from advocating for these changes).
**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill is a classic case of treating the symptoms rather than the disease. The foster care system is broken, and RFUDA does nothing to address the underlying issues:
* It doesn't provide meaningful support for foster families or children in care. * It doesn't address the root causes of child neglect and abuse. * It doesn't streamline the adoption process.
Instead, it creates more bureaucratic red tape, which will lead to:
* Increased costs (because, you know, administrative overhead is always a good use of taxpayer dollars). * Decreased efficiency (as states struggle to implement these new requirements). * More opportunities for corruption and cronyism (because who doesn't love a good government contract?).
In conclusion, RFUDA is a textbook example of legislative malpractice. It's a solution in search of a problem, designed to benefit special interests rather than the people it claims to help. Bravo, Congress. You've done it again.
Rep. Feenstra, Randy [R-IA-4]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
No PAC contributions found
No committee contributions found
This bill has 2 cosponsors. Below are their top campaign contributors.
ID: B001296
Top Contributors
10
ID: N000193
Top Contributors
10
Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.
Showing 58 nodes and 31 connections (51 secondary connections hidden)
Total contributions: $198,000
Showing top 22 donors by contribution amount
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.
— 482 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise sociological understanding of what it means to be a father—not a gender- neutral parent—from social science, psychology, personal testimonies, etc. ADMINISTRATION ON CHILDREN, YOUTH, AND FAMILIES (ACYF) l Allocate funding to strategy programs promoting father involvement or terminate parental rights quickly. ACYF is currently considering different programs to encourage parents, especially fathers, to engage with their children in foster care. While these program ideas and initiatives are still in the early planning stages, promoting responsible parenthood to reintegrate children or at least keep a consistent male figure in the minor’s life is crucial. At the same time, in cases where the father or mother does not make a sincere or serious effort to be involved in the child’s upbringing, termination of parental rights for children in foster care should be swift. OFFICE OF HEAD START (OHS) l Eliminate the Head Start program. Head Start, originally established and funded to support low-income families, is fraught with scandal and abuse. With a budget of more than $11 billion, the program should function to protect and educate minors. Sadly, it has done exactly the opposite. In fact, “approximately 1 in 4 grant recipients had incidents in which children were abused, left unsupervised, or released to an unauthorized person between October 2015 and May 2020.”68 Research has demonstrated that federal Head Start centers, which provide preschool care to children from low-income families, have little or no long-term academic value for children. Given its unaddressed crisis of rampant abuse and lack of positive outcomes, this program should be eliminated along with the entire OHS. At the very least, the program’s COVID-19 vaccine and mask requirements should be rescinded. ADMINISTRATION FOR COMMUNITY LIVING (ACL) l Support palliative care. Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is legal in 10 states and the District of Columbia. Legalizing PAS is a grave mistake that endangers the weak and vulnerable, corrupts the practice of medicine and the doctor–patient relationship, compromises the family and intergenerational commitments, and betrays human dignity and equality before the law. Instead of embracing PAS, policymakers should focus on the benefits of palliative care, which works to improve a patient’s quality of life by alleviating pain and other distressing symptoms of a serious illness. HHS ACL should survey their programs to ensure that they are supporting vulnerable persons of age or disability and are not facilitating or encouraging participation in PAS. — 483 — Department of Health and Human Services l Readdress the National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers. While in theory the strategy aims to support family members with duties to care for older family members, the plan is overly focused on racial and “LGBTQ+ equity.” The strategy should be examined to establish an efficient plan to support caregivers and their families. There should also be a review of its COVID-19 policies. HEALTH RESOURCES AND SERVICES ADMINISTRATION (HRSA) l Congress should allow CMS to use the 340B data that HRSA collects rather than having CMS conduct its own survey, especially in view of the U.S. Supreme Court’s American Hospital Association v. Becerra decision.69 The legislation should also create penalties for those who do not respond to HRSA’s data collection. l Legally define the locus of service as where the provider is located during the telehealth visit rather than where the patient is. With such a definition, states could continue to reserve their powers to establish the standards for licensure and scope of practice. The providers could ensure continuity and consistency of care no matter where their patients might move while maintaining the licenses that make the most sense for them. Americans are far more mobile and technologically advanced today than they were when most health care laws were written. Telehealth has become increasingly important, particularly during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also has great potential in rural and other areas where there are shortages of health care providers. HRSA’s Office for the Advancement of Telehealth includes a program known as the Licensure Portability Grant Program, which bolsters state efforts to reform licensing laws to maximize telehealth flexibility. HRSA does not have the authority through this office to dictate licensure laws; that power has typically been reserved to the states. However, telehealth across state lines, when permitted, is interstate commerce, which can be regulated by the federal government according to the Constitution. l Restore Trump religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate (also a CMS rule). HHS should rescind, if finalized, the regulation titled “Coverage of Certain Preventive Services Under the Affordable Care Act,” proposed jointly by HHS, Treasury, and Labor.70 This rule proposes to amend Trump-era final rules regarding religious and moral exemptions and accommodations for coverage of certain preventive services under the ACA. Preventive services include contraception, and
— 482 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise sociological understanding of what it means to be a father—not a gender- neutral parent—from social science, psychology, personal testimonies, etc. ADMINISTRATION ON CHILDREN, YOUTH, AND FAMILIES (ACYF) l Allocate funding to strategy programs promoting father involvement or terminate parental rights quickly. ACYF is currently considering different programs to encourage parents, especially fathers, to engage with their children in foster care. While these program ideas and initiatives are still in the early planning stages, promoting responsible parenthood to reintegrate children or at least keep a consistent male figure in the minor’s life is crucial. At the same time, in cases where the father or mother does not make a sincere or serious effort to be involved in the child’s upbringing, termination of parental rights for children in foster care should be swift. OFFICE OF HEAD START (OHS) l Eliminate the Head Start program. Head Start, originally established and funded to support low-income families, is fraught with scandal and abuse. With a budget of more than $11 billion, the program should function to protect and educate minors. Sadly, it has done exactly the opposite. In fact, “approximately 1 in 4 grant recipients had incidents in which children were abused, left unsupervised, or released to an unauthorized person between October 2015 and May 2020.”68 Research has demonstrated that federal Head Start centers, which provide preschool care to children from low-income families, have little or no long-term academic value for children. Given its unaddressed crisis of rampant abuse and lack of positive outcomes, this program should be eliminated along with the entire OHS. At the very least, the program’s COVID-19 vaccine and mask requirements should be rescinded. ADMINISTRATION FOR COMMUNITY LIVING (ACL) l Support palliative care. Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is legal in 10 states and the District of Columbia. Legalizing PAS is a grave mistake that endangers the weak and vulnerable, corrupts the practice of medicine and the doctor–patient relationship, compromises the family and intergenerational commitments, and betrays human dignity and equality before the law. Instead of embracing PAS, policymakers should focus on the benefits of palliative care, which works to improve a patient’s quality of life by alleviating pain and other distressing symptoms of a serious illness. HHS ACL should survey their programs to ensure that they are supporting vulnerable persons of age or disability and are not facilitating or encouraging participation in PAS.
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.