Foster care is a temporary living arrangement for children who cannot remain safely in their own homes. For nearly every child who enters foster care, a first goal of the child welfare agency is to ensure necessary services are identified, and provided, so that the child can quickly and safely return to his or her parents. Most children who leave foster care do so to be reunited with parents or other family members. For some children, however, this is not possible. In those cases, the child welfare agency must work to find a new permanent home for these children and this may be accomplished through adoption or legal guardianship. As the U.S. Constitution has been interpreted, responsibility for the protection of children and the well-being of children and their families, is considered primarily a state duty. However, Congress has long sought to assist states in improving their child welfare services. In exchange for federal funding to support provision of foster care and other child welfare services, states must meet certain federal requirements. Under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, states, territories, and tribes who meet those requirements are entitled to claim partial federal reimbursement for the cost of providing foster care, adoption assistance, and kinship guardianship assistance to children who meet federal eligibility criteria. The Title IV-E program, as it is commonly called, provides support for monthly payments on behalf of eligible children, as well as funds for related case management activities, training, data collection, and other costs of program administration. In FY2011, states (including the 50 states and the District of Columbia) spent $12.4 billion under the Title IV-E program, and received federal reimbursement of $6.7 billion, or 54% of that spending. At the federal level, the Title IV-E program is administered by the Children's Bureau, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Administration for Children and Families (ACF), Administration on Children, Youth, and Families (ACYF). At the state level, the child welfare agency, which is often a part of the state's human services or social services department, administers the Title IV-E program. Some state agencies administer the program centrally, while others supervise the administration of the Title IV-E program by counties. In either case, the state child welfare agency is the recipient of the federal Title IV-E funding and is responsible for ensuring that the Title IV-E program is administered in accordance with federal policy. Roughly two-thirds of the Title IV-E dollars spent in FY2011 supported provision of foster care. Further, the very large majority of children who receive Title IV-E adoption assistance were previously in foster care, as were all children who receive Title IV-E kinship guardianship assistance. This report begins with a brief discussion of why children come to the attention of the child welfare agency and how they may subsequently enter foster care. It next outlines the requirements states must meet to receive federal Title IV-E funds; the kinds of assistance and activities that can be provided with Title IV-E dollars, and on whose behalf those dollars may be spent; and the way that federal funding is authorized for this program. Finally, the majority of the report focuses on Title IV-E program eligibility criteria and spending that is specific to each of the program's three components: foster care maintenance payments, adoption assistance, and kinship guardianship assistance. In response to the mandatory and voluntary reports of child abuse or neglect, public child protection (or child welfare) agencies annually conduct an estimated 2 million family investigations involving some 3 million children. The purpose of these investigations is to determine whether abuse or neglect of a child has occurred, or is likely to occur, and, as necessary, to provide services to ensure children are safe and that their families are able to care for and support them. The most common concern that brings children to the attention of child welfare agencies is neglect (either a lack of supervision or a failure to provide for the child's basic needs). Physical abuse is less frequently alleged, followed by sexual abuse, or emotional abuse. In most cases, investigative caseworkers determine that children may safely remain in their own home. (This is true without regard to whether the investigation determines that abuse and/or neglect occurred.) A national survey of children in families investigated for abuse or neglect found that approximately 4 to 6 months after the investigation, 87.1% of the children were living at home (either because they were never removed or because they had already been reunited), 6.1% were living in informal kinship arrangements, and the remaining 6.3% were in formal out-of-home placements (including 2.4% in a formal kin care arrangement, 3.4% in foster family care, and 0.5% in a group setting). Investigative caseworkers frequently identify certain underlying factors that directly lead to the child abuse/neglect investigation and/or might jeopardize the ability of that family to safely care for and support a child. These include high stress in the family (e.g., unemployment, drug use, poverty, or neighborhood violence), low social support, trouble paying for basic necessities (e.g., food, shelter, clothing, electricity or heat), substance abuse by the caregiver, a history of domestic violence and/or of child abuse or neglect against the primary caregiver, mental health problems of the caregiver, a recent history of arrest of the primary caregiver, and other factors. In nearly every case, these risk factors are more likely to be identified in families from which children are removed from the home following an investigation as compared to those in which the children remained living in the home. There was no statistically significant difference between children removed from the home and those remaining in the home with regard to two factors: history of domestic violence against the primary caregiver, or current domestic violence against that caregiver. Figure 1 shows presence of risk factors in a national sample of families investigated for child abuse or neglect, by whether the child was living in the family home, or outside that home, approximately four months after the investigation. Each family may be identified with one or more risk factors. The Title IV-E program funds foster care maintenance payments to provide direct financial assistance for children who are placed in foster care for their safety. Foster care, however, is a temporary living arrangement and for nearly every child who enters foster care, the first goal of the agency (and as spelled out in federal policy) is to reunite children with their parents. Figure 1 gives some sense of the challenges that child welfare agencies face in meeting that goal. As part of required case planning for children in foster care, Title IV-E funds are used to assess what services and supports may be needed to enable reunification and to plan for provision of those services. However, Title IV-E may only pay for that work when it is done on behalf of a child who meets Title IV-E eligibility criteria. Title IV-E funding may not be used to pay for any of the services identified as necessary to enable reunification, nor may it be used to provide post-reunification services to ensure the continued success of the family. To support those child welfare purposes, states may rely on funding under Title IV-B of the Social Security Act (both Subpart 1, the Stephanie Tubbs Jones Child Welfare Services Program and Subpart 2, the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program). They may also use other federal funding streams that are not wholly dedicated to child welfare purposes but may be used to support child welfare goals. Most states rely on the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant (Title IV-A of the Social Security Act) and the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) (Title XX, Subpart 1 of the Social Security Act) to support their child welfare programs. For some children, returning home is not possible and the goal for the child welfare agency with regard to these children is to find them a new safe and permanent home. To facilitate this, Title IV-E funds ongoing adoption assistance and, in states that elect this option, kinship guardianship assistance, as a way to encourage and sustain legally established, new permanent families for children. Under Title IV-E, states provide direct financial assistance to eligible children after they leave foster care for adoption or kinship guardianship. However, as is true with children who are reunited with their parents, states may not use Title IV-E funds to provide post-adoption or post-guardianship support services to those families or their children. Again, the child welfare programs under Title IV-B, as well as TANF and SSBG (to the extent they are available to the child welfare agency) may be used for these purposes. Finally, some youth leave, or are expected to leave, foster care because they reach the age at which the state ends foster care support (often age 18), rather than because they return to their families or are placed in a new permanent family. Title IV-E includes unique support for services to these youth. That support is authorized under the Chafee Foster Care Independence Program. Although included in Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, the Chafee program has separate requirements and funding distribution rules and is outside the scope of this report. For more information see CRS Report RL34499, Youth Transitioning from Foster Care: Background and Federal Programs , by [author name scrubbed]. The Title IV-E program is jointly funded by the federal government and the states. All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and one tribe (Port Gamble S'Klallam) participate directly in the Title IV-E program. This means they are entitled to seek federal reimbursement for a part of the cost of providing foster care, adoption assistance and kinship guardianship assistance on behalf of children who meet federal eligibility criteria.