A groundbreaking new report from The Daily Caller exposes the backstory behind the Biden-Harris administration’s regulation on foster care rules for children who identify as LGBTQ, and underscores the inherent threat that transgender orthodoxy poses to the parental rights of moms and dads who reject the idea that children can be “born in the wrong body.”
In April, the Administration for Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services released a final rule for agencies to fully implement on or before Oct. 1, 2026. The HHS agency’s first released a version of the rule in September 2023, and updated it in response to public comment.
Katelynn Richardson and Megan Brock, writing for The Daily Caller, reported that the new rule cites federally funded research from activists at the National Center for Youth with Diverse Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity & Expression. This “SOGIE Center” itself is run by many of the same people who ran a study aimed at connecting kids who identify as LGBTQ in foster care with “affirming” caretakers.
That study, conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland, received a five-year, $10 million federal grant at the end of President Barack Obama’s tenure. The researchers established the National Quality Improvement Center on Tailored Services, Placement Stability and Permanency for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, and Two-Spirit Children and Youth in Foster Care. That entity, “QIC-LGBTQ2S,” selected four implementation sites: Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, Cuyahoga County in Ohio, the state of Michigan, and Prince George’s County in Maryland.
According to the Daily Caller, federal officials drafting the foster care rule under Biden-Harris looked to the Cuyahoga County site as the model for infusing gender ideology into foster care and social services.
HHS officials praised the county’s “AFFIRM.ME” model, which ran in the county until 2021 and has since been implemented in other Ohio foster care programs.
The model includes four interventions: the “Safe Identification Initiative” identifies young people as LGBTQ; the “AFFIRM Caregiver Initiative” convinces parents to support their kids’ claimed identities; the “Youth Acceptance Project” helps kids find “affirming” adults in........