Many of these children taken from their homes are placed with adoption agencies whose main concern is to get the child placed under a roof and other than the 30 hrs of training for fosters and sometimes finger print checks there's little else done to check on backgrounds of fosters. Yes there is a shortage of foster homes all over the country but the reason is they are removing too many children for inane reasons for the simple reason it helps to subsidize state coffers.

Children are seen as a free commodity which in turn enables them to receive an avg. of 85k per child for a period of 18 months. The 85k helps to cover judges salaries, case workers, social workers, therapists, court appointed attorneys, foster families, visitation transporters, etc etc etc So the state can employ an inordinate amt of people and only a portion of their salaries come out of the state coffers because the Fed IV-E funding (85K per child) subsidizes them. Two years ago ( the last official report) the state of Louisianna received an 80% return for all the expenses incurred for operating their CPS system. The state of AZ received a 67% subsidy. It's a complicated financial structure where the states receive from 50%-80% for their expenses. For example administrative costs are reimbursed at 50% whereas a group home placement would return 75%.

States have caught on to this and some have hired Maximus a consulting firm to maximize their returns so what has happened is states reduced the line items that returned a smaller subsidy and have put their sights into those that give a higher return. Lockheed Martin is now getting into this consulting business for child welfare just as Maximus has done. Here's an article that explains it better and you can scroll down to the part about Rev Max to understand it better than I've explained. http://blog.liftingtheveil.org/2014/01/09/arizona-6000-uninvestigated-cps-cases-and-the-revmax-project/