The Child Support Enforcement (CSE) program is a federal/state program that is designed to promote self-sufficiency of families in which one of the biological parents is living outside of the home. The program achieves its mission by trying to ensure that noncustodial parents meet their financial responsibility to their children. States are responsible for administering the CSE program (directly or through local CSE agencies and family or domestic courts), but the federal government plays a major role in dictating the primary design features of state programs, funding state and local programs, monitoring and evaluating state programs, providing technical assistance, and giving direct assistance to states in locating absent parents and obtaining child support payments. The CSE program was created by Congress in 1974 with two primary goals: (1) reducing public expenditures for actual and potential welfare recipients by obtaining ongoing support from noncustodial parents (i.e., welfare cost-recovery), and (2) establishing paternity for children born outside of marriage so that child support could be obtained. The December 1974 Senate Finance Committee report on the CSE legislation stated, "The problem of welfare in the United States is, to a considerable extent, a problem of the non-support of children by their absent parents." It also stated that the result of a new federal-state CSE program would be to lower welfare costs to the taxpayer and to deter fathers from abandoning their families. The CSE program (Title IV-D of the Social Security Act) was enacted in January 1975 ( P.L. 93-647 ). All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands operate CSE programs and are entitled to federal matching funds. For every dollar a state spends on CSE expenditures, it generally receives 66 cents from the federal government. To qualify for federal matching funds, each state's CSE plan must be approved by the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). States also are eligible to receive incentive payments, based on certain performance indicators. Since 1975, the federal administration of the CSE program has been in the OCSE, which was originally located in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), renamed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 1979. From the beginning, the OCSE has been required by law to review and approve state CSE plans, establish standards for effective state CSE programs, provide technical assistance to the states, assist them with reporting procedures, maintain records of program operations and child support expenditures and collections, audit state CSE programs, and prepare and submit an annual report to Congress. The annual report to Congress has always included collection, expenditure, and caseload data; Section 452(a)(10) of the Social Security Act stipulates that certain data must be included in the annual report. The CSE program provides seven major services on behalf of children: parent location, paternity establishment, establishment of child support orders, review and modification of support orders, collection of support payments, distribution of support payments, and establishment and enforcement of medical support. CSE services are provided to both welfare and nonwelfare families. Collection methods used by state CSE agencies include income withholding; intercept of federal and state income tax refunds; intercept of unemployment compensation; liens against property; reporting child support obligations to credit bureaus; intercept of lottery winnings; sending insurance settlement information to CSE agencies; authority to withhold or suspend driver's licenses, professional licenses, and recreational and sporting licenses of persons who owe past-due support; and authority to seize assets of debtor parents held by public or private retirement funds and financial institutions. Moreover, federal law authorizes the Secretary of State to deny, revoke, or restrict passports of debtor parents. All jurisdictions also have civil or criminal contempt-of-court procedures and criminal nonsupport laws, and federal criminal penalties may be imposed in certain cases. Federal law also requires states to enact and implement the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act (UIFSA) and expand full faith and credit procedures, and it provides for international enforcement of child support. In FY2015, $28.6 billion was collected at a combined federal/state cost of $5.7 billion. Thus, in effect, $5.26 in child support was collected for every dollar spent. While the extensive reforms made to the CSE program in 1984, 1988, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 2006 have helped to significantly improve child support collections and increase the number of paternities established, the CSE program has generally been considered a highly respected and valuable program since its beginning in 1975. It has made significant progress in achieving its original goals of reducing public expenditures for actual and potential welfare recipients by obtaining ongoing support from noncustodial parents, and establishing paternity for children born outside of marriage so child support could be obtained for them. Many commentators agree that the mission of the CSE program has changed over the years. It began as a welfare cost-recovery program, but the Child Support Enforcement Amendments of 1984 ( P.L. 98-378 ) broadened the mission to reflect service delivery. The criteria for making incentive payments to the states were broadened in 1984 to include collections for nonwelfare families. Some commentators assert the service-delivery goal was reemphasized in 1996 legislation, which established the "family first" policy. To help ensure that former welfare recipients stay off the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) rolls, the "family first" policy requires that such families are to receive any child support arrearage payments collected by the state before the state and federal governments retain their shares of collections. Reforms enacted in 2006 ( P.L. 109-171 ) extended the "family first" policy by providing incentives to states to encourage them to allow more child support to go to both former welfare families and families still on welfare. Additionally, the sharp decline in the cash welfare rolls and reduced expenditures on cash welfare since the mid-1990s helped shift the program from recovering declining costs for a smaller population to collecting and paying child support to nonwelfare families. For the past 32 years (since the 1984 amendments), the CSE program and major changes or modifications to it have consistently had bipartisan congressional support. This report examines CSE caseload, collection, and expenditure data over the period FY1978-FY2015 (FY1978 is the first year of complete data and the data for FY2015 are the most recent available). It also presents more detailed data on collections, expenditures, paternity establishment, child support order establishment, cost-effectiveness, and program financing impacts on the federal government and the states for various years during the period. All of the tables in this report are based on data from OCSE, obtained from the OCSE website. The information is taken from state-submitted reports on program status sent to OCSE quarterly for financial data and annually for statistical data. Readers should note that the 38-year trend data for CSE collections and caseload have been disaggregated into two categories: TANF cases and non-TANF cases. Before 1997, TANF cases were Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) cases and non-TANF cases were non-AFDC cases. In FY1999, OCSE started classifying the CSE caseload into three categories—current TANF assistance, former TANF assistance, and never TANF assistance. Also, note that the tables that display TANF cases, collections, or expenditures include Title IV-E foster care cases as well, even though they may not labeled as such. Table 1 presents a summary of child support program statistics for the nation as a whole over the 38-year span from FY1978 through FY2015. Child support payments collected by CSE agencies increased from $1 billion ($3.5 billion in 2015 dollars) to $28.6 billion (an eight-fold increase, adjusting for inflation). The number of children whose paternity was established (or acknowledged) through the CSE program increased by 1,237%, from 111,000 to 1.484 million; and the number of child support obligations established increased by 223%, from 315,000 to 1.016 million. The CSE caseload expanded from 4.146 million to 14.745 million, an increase of 256%. CSE expenditures also increased significantly, from $312 million ($1.042 billion in 2015 dollars) to $5.749 billion (a more than five-fold increase, adjusting for inflation). Expenditures per case increased from $75 ($250 in 2015 dollars) to $390 (a 56% increase, adjusting for inflation). Figure 1 shows CSE collections and expenditures over the 38-year period from FY1978 through FY2015. The CSE program is estimated to handle about 60% of all child support cases; the remaining cases are handled by private attorneys, by collection agencies, or through mutual agreements between the parents. All of the data in this report are exclusively CSE program data. The CSE program serves both TANF and non-TANF recipients. In FY2015, the CSE system handled 14.7 million cases, of which 6.9 million (47%) were families who had never been on TANF, 6.3 million (43%) were former-TANF families (i.e., no longer on TANF and therefore non-TANF cases), and 1.6 million (11%) were families who were receiving TANF assistance. OCSE defines a CSE "case" as a noncustodial parent (mother, father, or putative/alleged father) who is currently or eventually may be responsible under law for support of a child or children receiving services under the CSE program.