Blake Moore

Every year in Utah, hundreds of children move into foster care. Most will find their way home, or into the arms of a relative, or a family that adopts them.

But a smaller group, older, quieter, easier to overlook, ages out of the system entirely. They turn 18 with no family waiting, no savings and no cushion for the ordinary mistakes that adulthood requires room to make.

None of them made the choices that put them through this system.

The Utahns who struggle most are rarely the ones anyone is watching closely. Society builds systems to protect children from foster care, then this simple safety net for the ones who fall through. We largely stop asking what happens after the kids land in the net, while some fall through the netting. Aging foster youth are the forgotten even among the forgotten.

Last year, according to the Utah Division of Child and Family Services, 2,863 children received foster care services statewide. More than a third were between 14 and 18 years old, meaning a substantial share of Utah’s foster youth are approaching a perilous cliff edge: legal adulthood, with none of the family support, hands-up or certain privileges most of us take for granted.

Congress recently took a meaningful step for children generally. Included in last year’s Working Families Tax Cuts were “Trump Accounts,” with Utah’s Congressman Blake Moore among those who helped secure the program. It gives eligible newborns a $1,000 seed investment, with room for family and other contributions to grow tax-advantaged over time. It is a good and hopeful idea: that every child, regardless of where they start, has value and deserves the chance to build something.

But foster youth are inherently excluded from the deeper promise of this new “baby bond.” They typically lack a parent positioned to make ongoing contributions every year, while states and charitable foundations trying to pick up the mantle of an aging foster teen are limited in how much they can give.

So while parents can make yearly, tax-free contributions to their child’s Trump Account, a foster teen may have nothing but the seed money given the day they were born, with little opportunity to catch up to their peers. The youth who need this program most have the least practical way to benefit from it.

Congressman Blake Moore’s Foster Youth Investment Act fixes that gap. It designates foster youth as a “qualifying class” so that states and philanthropic partners, the people and institutions built to look out for kids without parents to do it, can contribute beyond the standard caps and help build a real account. The bill does not create a new bureaucracy. It simply lets the people already showing up for foster kids give them the same platform to success every other child in America has been offered.

Moore has built a record on this kind of work, from the Working Families Tax Cuts to other pro-family provisions that recognize raising children is hard work worth supporting.

The Foster Youth Investment Act fits that pattern. It’s a realistic, targeted fix that ensures children who’ve fallen through the netting, who are lost in the mountains like the proverbial sheep, get a step up and a chance to choose a better life.

Utah’s faith and advocacy communities have always understood that the measure of a society is how it treats children who have no one else advocating for them. Foster youth aging into adulthood this year, and every year after, deserve better than a cliff edge at 18 and a good luck wish. They deserve the same chance to build something that we are, rightly, extending to every other child in this country. Congress should pass the Foster Youth Investment Act and bring Utah’s foster kids home to be celebrated.