Latest action: Referred to the House Committee on Ways and Means.
Referred to one or more standing committees for review, hearings, and possible markup.
Specific committees not parsed from action data.
The committee may hold hearings, amend the bill, or let it die without action.
Next: Reported
Full chamber floor — Speaker / Majority Leader controls scheduling
Prevents poverty alone from being considered child neglect in legal cases.
The problem
Child welfare agencies may remove children from homes based solely on family poverty, treating economic hardship as grounds for neglect without considering actual child care quality.
The proposal
Establishes that poverty or low income cannot be the sole basis for determining child neglect in legal proceedings and child protective services decisions.
The impact
Affects low-income families, child welfare agencies, and children by potentially reducing removal from homes due to poverty while maintaining protections against actual abuse.
Prevents families from losing custody simply because they are poor. This keeps children with parents who provide adequate care but lack financial resources. Reduces unnecessary family separation based on economics alone.
May lower unnecessary placements in foster care system, reducing costs and strain on overburdened agencies. Keeps children in existing family networks when possible. Allows agencies to focus resources on actual abuse and neglect.
Creates clearer definitions of neglect that focus on care quality rather than income level. Provides consistency in how child protective services apply rules across different cases and regions.
Children benefit from remaining with families when safe and cared for, even if those families have limited money. Recognizes that poverty does not automatically indicate poor parenting or unsafe conditions.
Could make it harder to remove children from genuinely dangerous situations if poverty-related deprivation is involved. Agencies might hesitate to act in cases involving both poverty and actual neglect, fearing legal challenges.
Workers must distinguish between poverty and actual neglect, which can be difficult in practice. May require extensive case-by-case evaluation and training, increasing costs and complexity for agencies already stretched thin.
The bill does not define exactly where poverty ends and neglect begins. This ambiguity could create legal disputes and inconsistent application across different jurisdictions and cases.
May expose agencies to lawsuits if children remain in harmful situations that agencies were uncertain about due to the law's restrictions. Could make workers hesitant to intervene when necessary.
Generated by AI from the bill text. Not a prediction and not legal or policy advice. The percentage is the model's own rating of each item — self-reported, and not a measure of how accurate it is.
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Individual contributions, grouped by employer · FEC
Where their individual donors work · 2026 cycle
Money from people who work there, not from the company. Not tied to this bill.
Itemized individual contributions via FEC, grouped by the employer each contributor self-reported. Companies and unions cannot contribute to federal candidates from their treasuries, so these totals are money from people who work at an employer — never from the organization itself. They are campaign contributions covering a full election cycle and are not connected to this bill.
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