70% of ICPC interstate home studies miss the 30-business-day deadline, trapping children in temporary placements while a willing relative waits in another state

When a child in foster care has a relative willing to take them in but that relative lives in a different state, the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC) requires a home study in the receiving state before the child can be placed. Federal policy requires completion within 60 days. The ICPC's own internal standard is 30 business days. Yet only 30% of home studies are completed within 30 business days, and only about 45% are completed within the 60-day federal requirement. Roughly 30% take longer than 90 days. Approximately 40,000 children per year are subject to this process. Why it matters: A child removed from their home in New York may have a loving grandmother in Florida ready to take them in, but the child sits in a stranger's foster home for 3-6 months waiting for Florida to complete paperwork. So the child bonds with a temporary foster family only to be uprooted again when the interstate placement is finally approved. So the child experiences yet another placement disruption — which research shows costs 4-6 months of emotional and academic growth per move. So children who could have been in a stable kinship placement from day one instead accumulate trauma from multiple transitions. So some relatives give up waiting and the child loses that family connection entirely. The structural root cause is that the ICPC is a voluntary compact between states with no federal enforcement authority. The receiving state has no financial incentive to expedite home studies for children who are not their residents. ICPC offices are chronically understaffed — the same caseworker shortage that plagues the rest of child welfare. There is no shared interstate IT system; requests are often still transmitted by mail or fax. The compact contains no penalties for missed deadlines and no mechanism for the sending state to escalate delays.