President Trump expressed support at the National Prayer Breakfast February 7 for allowing adoption agencies that discriminate against LGBT people or others to claim a religious exemption. The very next day, the Washington Postreported that Trump’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year includes language to ensure such groups can still receive federal funding.

These developments come on the heels, just last month, of the revelation that an official of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services granted South Carolina a waiver that allows it to funnel federal funds to foster care agencies that refuse to consider potential parents who are Jewish or of other identities, like LGBT people, who do not align with the religious beliefs espoused by the agency.

In his speech before the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event sponsored by some members of Congress, Trump said, “my administration is working to ensure that faith-based adoption agencies are able to help vulnerable children find their forever families while following their deeply held beliefs.” He pointed to a heterosexual couple in the audience who had recently adopted children in Michigan.

“Unfortunately, the Michigan adoption charity that brought [that couple’s] family together is now defending itself in court for living by the values of its Catholic faith,” said Trump.

Trump did not provide details, but the agency he referred to was St. Vincent Catholic Charities, which has refused to place children with two same-sex couples. In September, a federal judge said a lawsuit on behalf of the same-sex couples by the ACLU could proceed in its challenge of the state’s policy of allowing adoption agencies to discriminate based on sexual orientation if the agencies claim such adoptions would violate their religious beliefs.

The February 8 Washington Post article said, “In a 2020 draft budget request that has not been made public, the Department of Health and Human Services is seeking broad authority to include faith-based foster-care and adoption groups, which reject LGBTQ parents, non-Christians and others, in the nation’s $7 billion federally funded child-welfare programs.”

The Post article noted that “HHS’s Office of Civil Rights argues in the draft proposal that some of the country’s oldest religious agencies in places such as Boston, Philadelphia and Washington have gone out of business because of nondiscrimination requirements that are themselves discriminatory.”

But Emily Hecht-McGowan, former chief policy officer of Family Equality Council, told Mombianin 2017 that the closing of these agencies because they refused to place children with LGBT parents has made “no discernable impact” on children finding homes.

Hecht-McGowan said these agencies did not make many public placements to begin with. In Boston, Catholic Charities’ own annual surveys showed that nationally, they finalized 2,000 to 2,500 adoptions per year between 2008 and 2011 (when they stopped reporting this data), only about four percent of all adoptions in the state during that time period. And the agencies that closed transferred all their cases to other agencies. When Illinois cancelled its contract with Catholic Charities in 2012, the percentage of adoptions performed by public child welfare agencies in the state went up four percent. The reasons why are unclear, but the data does not support the idea that shuttering agencies that refuse to obey non-discrimination laws reduces the number of placements.

The latest Trump administration actions come after 10 states (Alabama, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Virginia) have already implemented legislation that allows similar discrimination in child services. And the laws allow the discrimination against both potential parents and against the children and youth seeking homes.

The American Bar Association just weeks ago adopted a resolution that “Opposes laws, regulations, and rules or practices that discriminate against LGBT individuals in the exercise of the fundamental right to parent.” And a federal court last July ruled in a Philadelphia case that government-contracted child welfare agencies do not have a right to exclude same-sex couples or others from fostering children if they (the prospective parents) don’t fit an agency’s religious beliefs.

The U.S. House in September rejected an amendment that would have allowed discrimination by taxpayer-funded child service agencies to be enshrined in federal law. The Every Child Deserves a Family Campaign, a project of the Family Equality Council, continues to work for children and youth in foster care and against such discrimination at the state and federal level. And 95 members of the U.S. House signed a February 13 letter to HHS expressing “strong opposition” to the South Carolina waiver, calling it “despicable taxpayer-funded discrimination.”

Meanwhile,the need for families remains urgent. There were nearly 443,000 children in foster care in the United States in FY 2017, with 123,000 of them awaiting adoption, according to HHS data, up from just over 436,000 and 116,000 in FY 2016. And children who lack permanent homes have added risk of major difficulties in transitioning to a healthy adulthood, according to the Movement Advancement Project’s Issue Brief, “License to Discriminate.” On an economic level, the longer children are in care, the greater the costs to the child welfare system.

And a study in the February 2019 issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, confirms other evidence that LGBT youth are overrepresented in unstable housing and foster care, which “points to a need for protections for LGBTQ youth in care and care that is affirming of their sexual orientation and gender identity.”

Couple all that with the fact that 3.8 million LGBT millennials are considering expanding their families in the coming years, with 2.9 million actively planning to do so, many through adoption, according to a recent study by Family Equality.

Family Equality is encouraging people to call their Members of Congress and urge them to sign on to the February 13 letter, ledby U.S. Reps. Katie Hill (D-CA)), Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), and Angie Craig D-MN), opposing government-sanctioned discrimination in foster care.

This article first appeared at mombian.com.