Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal podcast.

I am your host, Rafael Menguil.

And today I'm so lucky to be joined by my good friend Naomi Riley.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at AEI, the American Enterprise Institute, as well as IWF, the Independent Women's Forum.

And she is the nation's foremost expert on all things child welfare policy related, which is what we're going to be talking to you all about today.

Naomi, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Ralph. I appreciate it.

So I'm really excited to talk to you about this because I don't think we've ever done an

episode that touches on child welfare issues, which are incredibly important to me.

And I just think greatly underappreciated in the broader policy space.

It's just something that not a lot of people pay a ton of attention to.

So I want to start with just some, you know,

broad overviews here to give our viewers a sense of like, what is the child welfare system? What does

it exist to do? How expansive is it? So why don't we start there with just to sort of, you know,

explain the logic of having a separate system that's tasked with providing for child welfare and what that

means?

Sure.

Well, I mean, primarily a child welfare agency and child welfare agencies are run by states.

Typically, it's not federally run.

The job is to protect children from abuse and neglect, largely protecting them from parents

who cannot or will not care for them.

And so we have, you know, child protective services, which investigates reports that come in of

...