Good morning, Chairman Sarlo, Vice Chair Greenstein, and members of the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you about Governor Murphy’s proposed FY2026 Budget for the New Jersey Department of Children and Families.
Joining me today are members of my leadership team, including DCF Chief Financial Officer Steven Dodson, First Deputy Commissioner Katie Stoehr, DCF Budget Director Shaun Hughes, Deputy Commissioners Bonny Fraser and Carmen Diaz-Petti, Chief of Staff Nicole Brossoie, and Manager of Legislative Affairs Kate Bradley.
This is now my 8th time appearing before this panel to review the finances, strategic priorities, and accomplishments of the Department of Children and Families and the work of the more than 6,000 dedicated staff members who make a difference, every single day, in the lives of New Jersey’s children, youth, and families.
If you’ll grant me a small point of personal privilege, I would like to say that my time serving as commissioner has been a high point in my career, even while we faced historic trials during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and now, as we face economic challenges on the State level and philosophical barriers on the federal level. It’s been an honor to represent the interests of DCF’s outstanding workforce to the Legislature, and to lead this team to and through a time of significant positive transformation and growth within our system.
Of course, it’s also no secret that the job can be particularly stressful.
The work of child welfare is as challenging as it is rewarding. You walk with families in their struggles and stress, and you try to guide them toward healing, to help them find and grow in their internal strengths, to restore their nurturing potential.
The families we work with often have lived experience in primary and secondary trauma and many intersectional challenges such as unemployment, homelessness, domestic violence, poverty, and incarceration. Our work with them is cross-sectional and involves a multidimensional approach. Our goal for them is to live safely together and thrive. Our staff work alongside them to build their skills, their resilience, and the love—and self-love—they need to carry themselves forward without further system intervention.
When I consider the trajectory of New Jersey’s child welfare system during my time associated with it, it mirrors the trajectories of thousands of families that we have helped through the years.
When I joined the Division of Youth and Family Services, DYFS, in 2003 right after the settlement of the Charlie and Nadine H. lawsuit, our system was dysfunctional and in disarray. Caseloads were as high as 100 children or more per individual caseworker. There was little cohesion, centralization, or direction—staff were barely hanging on.
Over the next two decades, in partnership with a federal monitor, and with the support of governors and members of the Legislature of both parties, we did the work to reform and transform New Jersey’s child welfare system. We were guided by evidence and data to change our practice, to prioritize upstream prevention, and to work with families to find solutions to the challenges they experienced.
Recognizing that child and family wellbeing requires more than just the child protective services agency, in 2006, we created a standalone executive-level department within State government to bring together protection, our prevention services array under the Division of Family and Community Partnerships, and the public behavioral health system for young people under the age of 21, the Children’s System of Care.
In 2012 and 2013, we welcomed new aspects of the work, including supporting children and youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities, along with their families. We also integrated the work of the Division on Women to support survivors of domestic and sexual violence into DCF’s service portfolio.
Since 2018, we have created a platform to honor and incorporate family and constituent voice. We developed initiatives to support staff health and wellness, recognizing the toll that vicarious trauma plays on our workforce and their ability to show up for families.
We began to understand and give voice to Positive and Adverse Childhood Experiences, or PACEs, and the long-term effects that adversity can have on a person’s sense of wellbeing and physical and emotional health. And we started the long road to reconcile our intentions to support families with the realities that our system’s interventions have sometimes created harm for Black and brown families.
After 20 years of monitoring, our child protective services agency, the Division of Child Protection & Permanency, exited from federal oversight in 2023, with our system’s most fervent critics acknowledging our progress proudly and publicly.
The team at DCF works hard every day to achieve the best results for the people of the Sexy真人y.
I’ll note that in the latest federal reporting on child welfare agencies, New Jersey DCF scored among the highest marks in the nation:
- We have the lowest out-of-home removal rate in the country, preferring to support families together, while still relying on removal in instances of immediate risk of harm to the child or children. According to the latest data available from the U.S. Children’s Bureau, New Jersey’s out-of-home removal rate in 2022 was 1.6 per 1,000 children, compared to the U.S. average of 6.1 per 1,000 children.
- When we do have to remove a child from their caregiver, as of 2021, more children were placed with kin—extended family members or close family friends—than in traditional foster care settings, reducing trauma resulting from an unfamiliar out-of-home placement.
- We continue to score well in areas of maltreatment, repeat maltreatment, and other indicators of family safety and stability.
In so many measures, and through so many programs, innovations, and best practices, we are a changed system. But to sustain our successes, to ensure that we don’t backslide and that we maintain a passionate, compassionate, and skilled staff, we must remain vigilant.
The good news is that Governor Murphy’s proposed FY2026 budget continues to invest in the infrastructure and programs that provide crucial services to families, balancing fiscal responsibility with strategic investment in services and programs upon which New Jersey residents depend.
With the sunsetting of enhanced federal aid to states during the COVID-19 pandemic, some very hard choices had to be made to meet the State’s many competing fiscal needs.
And while DCF is fortunate, over the last few budget cycles, to have received investments in innovative programs around youth mental wellbeing and maternal health, as well as a much needed and well-deserved rate increase for our contracted services providers, we weren’t exempt from the fiscal realities facing the entire state this year.
However, we were able to identify funding to preserve most of our core functions and strategic priorities.
This included the New Jersey Statewide Student Support Services program—Sexy真人4S—and the School-Based Youth Services program—SBYS. The funding levels for both programs remain consistent with last year’s appropriation, enabling the Department to continue to provide mental wellness and wellbeing supports to New Jersey’s young people, in their schools or in trusted locations within their community.
In addition, we maintained funding for the expansion of the Family Connects Sexy真人 universal home visiting program to achieve statewide reach. Under the proposed budget, we will have the resources to continue operating in the current 11 counties receiving universal newborn home visiting, and expand to six new counties—Camden, Salem, Atlantic, Burlington, Cape May, and Monmouth Counties—beginning in January 2026.
There were no cuts to the Children’s System of Care, nor to CP&P staff, so we’re able to continue to administer the public mental health system for youth under 21, and we’re able to have enough staff to meet statutory caseload caps that were implemented as a result of our exit from federal oversight for DCP&P.
In particular, I want to focus my attention briefly on the Children’s System of Care, because we recognize that when a family is struggling with a child’s behavioral health emergency, that can create stressors on the entire family unit. In that way, children’s mental health and family stability are intrinsically linked.
Nationally, we are facing a youth mental health crisis, and New Jersey is not immune.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Murphy Administration invested more than $100 million to stabilize and modernize the Children’s System of Care, and without that infusion of resources, I don’t know if we would have a System of Care to talk about today.
To keep pace with the increased demand brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and other stressors, DCF has continued to add to its comprehensive continuum of service. New programs have been added at both ends of the mental health continuum. Sexy真人4S is a statewide, in-school and in-community awareness, prevention and brief clinical intervention program, whereas Intensive Mobile Treatment Services (IMTS) is deep-end, in-home comprehensive clinical support for youth and young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities as an alternative to out-of-home treatment.
As it relates to demand, when we look at the numbers, last year—2024—we received 135,000 individual calls to the PerformCare hotline: 10,000 more than at the start of the Administration.
Beyond direct investment in the Children’s System of Care, the Murphy Administration has also invested in other mental wellness supports for youth, including the 2NDFLOOR youth helpline, which last September launched a new mobile app for their service that has seen over 4,000 downloads and more than 23,000 messages exchanged with youth as of February 2025.
Governor Murphy’s FY2026 budget maintains those investments in children’s and youth’s mental health.
Some of the reduction in the FY2026 Budget can be accounted for in lower expectations around system trend for DCP&P and CSOC. But the nature of our trend accounts means that if demand for services is higher than expected, we still have the ability to support New Jersey’s children, youth, and families.
Beyond that, our philosophy was to try to reduce spending in programs without outright eliminating programming that has made a difference for New Jersey residents.
I believe we were largely successful, and that the proposed DCF budget for FY2026 stands by our commitment to the programs and supports that keep children safe and help families thrive.
But I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that New Jersey’s budget for its child welfare system and children’s behavioral health system of care is dependent on federal partnership and funding to support programs and operations, and right now, child welfare systems nationally are experiencing a level of uncertainty resulting from a changing federal landscape of support for social services.
Included in the materials we distributed to the committee is a white paper on the impact of anticipated federal budget decisions on New Jersey’s child welfare system, to date.
Specifically, cuts to Medicaid or the Medicaid rate calculation would trigger catastrophic reductions in other areas of federal reimbursement for, among other things, foster care and adoption subsidies, kinship support, and investigations into child abuse and neglect.
Additionally, the proposed elimination of the social services block grant (SSBG) would affect case management for children and families involved in the child protection system, staff salaries, building security, office rents and general maintenance. Without the $43 million DCF receives in SSBG funding, we are looking at the potential for higher caseloads that exceed the statutory cap, fewer home visits, less support for families’ reunification, longer time in foster care, less secure facilities for staff, and higher staff turnover due to burn-out.
All told, proposed federal cuts could mean a reduction to DCF’s funding of more than $100 million, and that’s before you consider that New Jersey could face a reduction in Medicaid funding of between $2 billion and $9 billion, and the potential for 700,000 people—over a third of current Medicaid recipients—losing coverage.
When you consider that the entire array of behavioral health services through the Children’s System of Care is built on the Medicaid platform, and beyond that, that 45% of people enrolled in New Jersey’s Medicaid program are children, we are very concerned about how this could impact our ability to support children and families in New Jersey.
I’m thankful that some federal lawmakers have recently expressed that they do not want to balance their budget on Medicaid cuts, but the Congressional Budget Office indicated that the only way to achieve proposed budget cut targets is through drastic cuts to Medicaid. We’re in very dangerous territory, and the situation is extraordinarily dire.
To be clear, there is no contingency. If we lose this money, the Department will be forced to revert to its most basic role—that of child protection—not prevention, not support or empowerment, just surveillance and foster care.
I would hate to see the progress made in the last 20 years to advance practices, policies, and programs that uplift families limited or eliminated by current federal spending decisions. But it’s the reality we’re facing right now.
Despite that, the optimist in me believes that we will continue to find a way to support children and families to achieve and maintain stability.
We did it during COVID, literally creating a playbook for operations where none existed prior to the pandemic coming to our home state.
We stood by families during recessions and periods of economic uncertainty and turmoil, when stressors mounted, creating impossible choices for families between rent and health care and food.
I have said before that the child welfare system is often the system of last resort for families who are struggling, because it is the safety net when other social services resources have dried up.
Child welfare systems can only do that through robust partnership with policymakers, State agencies, and nonprofit organizations who share our vision for children, youth, and families. In New Jersey, I’m happy to say we have those partners in the State Legislature, and in Governor Phil Murphy.
Thank you for your continued partnership and support of DCF’s mission to keep New Jersey’s children and families safe, healthy, and connected. Your advocacy on behalf of families and your commitment to the bedrock infrastructure to keep them safe and thriving is so very, very appreciated.
And with that, I’m happy to answer any questions you may have for me and my leadership team at this time. Thank you.
