AIDEN (Advancing Integrated Data for Equitable National Child Welfare)

This bill mandates that the Attorney General develop and distribute a comprehensive survey to all federal offenders, collecting anonymized data on their child welfare intervention history while they were minors. The survey will gather detailed information on experiences such as awareness of interventions, the conditions that led to them (e.g., physical or sexual abuse, substance exposure, domestic violence), and the types of interventions received, like caseworker visits, in-home services, or foster care. It also seeks to understand how foster care cases were resolved, including reunification or adoption, and the support services offenders received during that time, aiming to identify patterns and gaps in child welfare systems. The Attorney General must distribute these surveys during intake for new offenders and within 180 days for existing prisoners, ensuring all respondents are notified that their personally identifiable information will be protected. Annually, the collected data will be reported to the Department of Health and Human Services, which will then share it with state chief executives to help evaluate child welfare agency practices and support service frameworks. To incentivize broader data collection, states must also implement substantially similar child welfare intervention history surveys for their own offenders and report the anonymized data to the Department of Health and Human Services to be eligible for Department of Justice grant programs.