WASHINGTON -- February 17 -- Just as Congress begins consideration of President Bush's 2006 budget proposal, the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) today released new national and state fact sheets on child abuse and neglect that pull together important details for the budget debate.

In its proposed budget, the Administration has made policy choices that leave the nation's most vulnerable children at risk, said MaryLee Allen, director of CDF's Child Welfare and Mental Health Division. The plan would jeopardize the already precarious situation of abused and neglected children with proposals to end a longstanding federal guarantee of help to provide them safe foster homes, she said. It also would cut Medicaid in ways that may harm children with special needs who are in the child welfare system and freeze funding for most other child welfare programs.

"The administration should be increasing, rather than trying to end, the federal commitment to protect abused and neglected children," said Allen. "States need increased funding to prevent abuse and neglect, expand specialized treatment, promote pathways to finding permanent families for children and improve the quality of the child welfare workforce."

Based on data from federal and state governments and the work of researchers, the fact sheets:

• Provide data on abused and neglected children, children in foster care, children who have left foster care and children living with kin.
  
• Identify the proportions of child welfare funding that come from federal, state and local sources.
  
• Describe the federal and state funding that supports child welfare.
  
• Highlight expenditures and trends within the Title IV-E Foster Care Program, the single largest source of federal child welfare funding.
  

The national fact sheet and 51 fact sheets for the states and the District of Columbia can be downloaded at http://www.childrensdefense.org.

"We hope the public, children's advocates, and policy makers will use this information to pursue reforms at the national, state and local levels that will help all children grow up in safe and loving families," Allen said.

The Children's Defense Fund's Leave No Child Behind(r) mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.

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