text: “We must continue to remove barriers to adoption whenever we can,” President Donald Trump wrote in a proclamation to declare November National Adoption Month, “so that the love and care of prospective adoptive parents can be directed to children waiting for their permanent homes.” 
   
   That sentiment, apparently, did not translate into the House GOP’s tax overhaul bill. The proposal, unveiled Thursday, eliminates the adoption tax credit, which exists to help reduce financial barriers to adoption. The credit essentially helps subsidize costs — sometimes in the tens of thousands for private or international adoptions — for agency and attorney fees, travel, and post-adoption services, such as retrofitting a home for a child with special needs. 
   
   But adoption advocates had been bracing for the end of this credit. In December, House Ways and Means Chair Kevin Brady (R-TX), one of the architects of the tax overhaul bill who is also a father to adopted kids, spoke at the Heritage Foundation about tax reform, and he mentioned the adoption tax credit as an example of a provision that could be eliminated. Michaela Sims, a lobbyist and spokesperson for the Save the Adoption Tax Credit working group, said these organizations had feared this since Brady’s speech. But, she told me, “when I saw that in black and white today, it positively took my breath away.” 
   
   “It’s stunning to me that this package that is supposed to be pro-family eliminates the adoption tax credit, which is definitely not pro-family,” Sims added. “At the minimum, it’s a tax increase for families who choose to adopt. But at maximum, it could have a chilling effect on adoption.” 
   
   Republicans first championed the “pro-family” adoption tax credit 
   
   The adoption tax credit was created as part of the Small Business and Job Protection Act of 1996. The legislation won bipartisan support, and President Bill Clinton signed it into law. But the idea for the credit emerged from Republican Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract With America.” The Family Reinforcement Act, as it was named, called for “tax incentives for adoption,” among other proposals. 
   
   Republican Susan Molinari, a former representative from Staten Island who sponsored one version of the adoption tax credit in the House, commented to the New York Times in 1996 about Clinton’s backing of this and other social policies: "It's President Clinton starting to get in shape to sound like candidate Clinton again with several conservative pro-family positions staked out." 
   
   What is the adoption tax credit exactly? 
   
   The tax credit Clinton signed offered up to a $5,000 credit to families, or $6,000 for those who adopted a child with special needs. The credit has gone through a few iterations since then. In 2017, adoptive households were eligible for a maximum credit of $13,570. (The amount now adjusts annually for inflation.) Most foster, private, or international adoptions are eligible — but only for taxpayers below a certain income limit. According to the Tax Policy Center, in 2017 the credit starts phasing out for households earning $203,540 and cuts off completely for those with incomes of $243,540 and higher. 
   
   Yet households that are solidly middle and upper middle class tend to benefit the most from this adoption tax credit. According to IRS data from 2014, taxpayers with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000 represented 35 percent of all filers and were awarded about 60 percent of all tax credit dollars. 
   
   As that chart above makes clear, lower and lower middle class households often don’t reap the tax incentives of adoption. That’s because the credit is currently nonrefundable, which means if adoptive parents don’t earn enough to owe federal taxes, they aren’t eligible. In 2010 and 2011, a provision in the Affordable Care Act actually made the adoption tax credit refundable, allowing families to get the credit even if they didn’t owe taxes. That all changed, again, with the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which made the credits permanent (well, “permanent”) but nonrefundable. 
   
   Adoption advocates have been fighting to make these credits refundable once again — and lawmakers have introduced bipartisan bills in the House and Senate this year to do just that. Now these groups are battling to save it. 
   
   “Penny wise, pound foolish” 
   
   The number claiming the adoption tax credit is relatively tiny — just 0.005 percent of all taxpayers in 2014. That same year, the average credit for each taxpayer was $4,802 across all income levels. (The max credit was $13,190 in 2014.) Which means getting rid of the nonrefundable adoption tax credit will likely add up to just a few hundred million dollars in government savings. 
   
   And that’s a savings that could end up costing the government in the long term, specifically when it comes to foster care adoptions, said Mary Eschelbach Hansen, an expert in US social policy and economics professor at American University. “My work has shown that a dollar spent to support adoption of kids from US foster care returns $3 in benefits to society,” she said. A large portion of that comes through government savings, she explained — “things like reduced criminal justice, reduced special education that accrue to the children who are removed from, by definition, to insecure foster care to secure families.” 
   
   “Ditching that tax credit is penny wise and pound foolish,” Hansen added. “That’s the most essential thing to understand about this proposed change. Every dollar you save in tax credits now is going to cost you dollars somewhere else.” 
   
   Richard Barth, the dean of the University of Maryland School of Social Work has done similar research, which showed that kids who remain in foster care saddle the federal and state governments with significantly higher costs — an amount that’s much higher than the relatively modest tax cuts. “Adoptive families are a huge resource,” Barth said, “The tax credit is an investment in attracting them to a long and arduous and sometimes quite expensive role as parents.” 
   
   Of course, Hansen emphasized that this applies for kids adopted out of the foster care system, rather than private or international adoptions. Public adoptions are not as costly upfront (and some families are eligible for ongoing assistance), but those kids tend to be older and more likely to have special needs that can strain finances, Hansen explained. The tax credit frees up money for services like special education or occupational therapy — things insurance doesn’t always cover. “It’s not only they’re less likely to be adopted,” Hansen said of getting rid of the credit, “it’s that if they are adopted, they’re less likely to get the services they need if parents don’t have the adoption-year financial support. If you kick that can down the road, it can have bad consequences for the overall success of the adoption.” 
   
   The adoption tax credit probably doesn’t go far enough — but getting rid of it altogether would be worse 
   
   Bringing kids from foster care to stable homes generally yields a net positive — for the individual kids, and for society at large. Private and international adoptions may work differently, but the idea itself — providing a kid a stable home — should be pretty uncontroversial. And that private adoption process can easily put a financial strain on families, with the cost spiking as high as $30,000 said Josh Kroll, a project coordinator of the Adoption Subsidy Resource Center at the North American Council on Adoptable Children. Some families have to take out loans to meet those costs. “This,” Kroll said of the credit, “would help them repay that quicker.” 
   
   Experts say those benefits would be even more substantial if the credit were refundable — which, again, would mean taxpayers could get the full amount of credit, regardless of how much they owe in taxes. The same goes for families who adopt from foster care: According to a 2011 study from the Department of Health and Human Services, about half of those adopting kids from foster care are low-income families — which means they might not be able to take full advantage of the adoption credit in its current form. A refundable credit would also help families adopt more than one child at once, keeping siblings together and the family unit intact. 
   
   Which is why advocates, even as they weren’t shocked by the GOP’s latest tax reform plan, were staging a fight to make that credit refundable. Two separate bills were introduced in the Senate and the House this year. The House bill is sponsored by Rep. Diane Black (R-TN), who also now supports the GOP tax plan that would nix the credit entirely. 
   
   Today we took action to overhaul our tax code & provide relief to American families for the first time in 31 years → https://t.co/ntJEmMYZNx — Diane Black (@RepDianeBlack) November 2, 2017 
   
   Schylar Baber, the executive director of Voice for Adoption, said the adoption tax credit has traditionally had “longstanding support from both Republicans and Democrats going way back.” He pointed to the Congressional Coalition of Adoption, which he noted included conservative members. 
   
   Rep. Brady told the Washington Post that the adoption tax credit in its current form wasn’t working because families didn’t earn enough to qualify, or didn’t itemize, and that the new plan would give “families more in their paychecks.” The GOP tax overhaul does outline a modest increase to the child tax credit, which would benefit adoptive parents — but only after the fact. Sims said that increase was great but not enough. “We’re talking about kids not having a home and not having a permanent family,” she said. “Last time I checked, that was very pro-family.” 
   
   The consequences of cutting the adoption tax credit are still hard to predict — and the bill remains just that. “We don’t know what the final thing will look like. It’s hard to say,” Kroll said. “It will probably make it harder for lower- and middle-income families to adopt, especially privately and internationally. That’s the thing that’s probably the clearest.” 
   
   Baber called the elimination of this tax credit a significant loss for the adoption community. “The question is,” he said, “who’s not going to be adopted because of it?” ||||| Adoption is hard. If you’ve adopted a child, you know. If your close friends or family members have adopted a child, you know. The most marvelous result — an orphaned, abandoned, or abused child finding a home — is typically preceded by years of uncertainty, red tape, and staggering expense. 
   
   You can work through bureaucracies for months, only to have a judge change his mind at the last instant. You can patiently and faithfully care for a birth mother, and she can exercise her proper and unquestioned right to keep the baby. You can work through foreign countries only to have a nation change its laws and slam the door in your face. To meet an adoptive family is to meet a family with a story — one that often involves prevailing in the face of adversity and almost always involves financial strains that few other families understand. 
   
   How much does it cost to adopt? An Adoptive Families Magazine survey of 1,100 families who adopted children from 2012 to 2013 found that the average family spent $34,093 on independent adoptions and $39,966 if they went through an agency. My family adopted our youngest daughter in 2010, and those numbers match our experience. 
   
   Even for upper-middle-class families, that’s a staggering amount of money to spend, and the expenses are often concentrated within the span of a few months in a single year. Agency fees, legal fees, travel expenses — they all pile up. So families often seek help. They raise money from family and friends. They appeal to churches. They go into debt. 
   
   There is, however, one thing that helps these families, and it helps a lot: It’s called the adoption tax credit, a $13,570 non-refundable credit that phases out for truly high-income families. 
   
   It doesn’t cost the government much — according to the Tax Policy Center, the so-called “tax expenditure” (forgone revenue) from the credit totaled $300 million in 2015 — but it makes adoption affordable for thousands of families. I know. It helped my family immensely when we adopted. It’s helped other adoptive families we know. It can be the financial difference that makes adoption possible. 
   
   And the newly released Republican tax-reform plan would abolish it entirely. 
   
   This Republican Congress may well end up funding Planned Parenthood while abolishing the adoption tax credit. That’s intolerable. 
   
   There’s nothing malicious about this. It’s just wrong. Representative Kevin Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is the father of two adoptive children. Spend much time talking to folks on the Hill and you’d be surprised at the number of adoptive families or families in the adoption process. Brady defends the GOP proposal by noting that the Republican plan will put more money in middle-class families’ pockets each and every year. He accurately observes that a non-refundable credit is of minimal benefit to lower-income families. 
   
   But some taxpayers would have to sock away their tax savings under the new Republican plan for decades to match the benefit of the adoption tax credit. Plus, considering the tax credit’s minimal budget impact, the choice shouldn’t be either a larger standard deduction and child tax credit or an adoption tax credit. We can have all of those things without coming close to breaking the budget. 
   
   What’s more, the credit is one of the government’s most important pro-life policies. It’s a declaration that the pro-life ethic doesn’t stop (as the Left is so fond of arguing) at birth, but also extends into making certain that every child is a wanted child. It’s a way for the federal government to be an agent of relief and assistance in a process that’s too long, too difficult, and too expensive. 
   
   As things now stand, though, this Republican Congress may well end up funding Planned Parenthood while abolishing the adoption tax credit. That’s intolerable. Not even President Obama went that far. For a brief time during the Obama administration, the adoption credit was fully refundable. What did the IRS do? It deluged adoptive families with audits. Allegedly concerned with fraud, in one year it audited a staggering 69 percent of returns that claimed the credit. A 2011 GAO report indicated that the IRS “had not found any fraudulent adoption tax credit claims.” 
   
   My family was caught in that dragnet. The audit lasted for months, and it required me to dig through adoption receipts that were sometimes written in Amharic. It was frustrating, infuriating, and fruitless. I think, at the end of the day, my refund was adjusted by a few dollars. But if I had to choose between an Obama-administration audit and the abolition of the tax credit, I’d take the audit every time. 
   
   There is much to like about the Republican tax plan. It provides necessary relief to millions of American families, and it introduces a far more rational and sound corporate-tax structure. But it’s still a work in progress. It needs changes, and one of the first changes it needs is easy, inexpensive, and pro-life. Save the adoption tax credit. It’s helped give hundreds of thousands of children loving homes. It should help do the same for hundreds of thousands more. 
   
   READ MORE: 
   
   The GOP’s Tax Plan Is a Decent Start 
   
   The GOP’s Tax Dilemma 
   
   The Great and Misunderstood Challenges of Adoption 
   
   — David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney. ||||| The House Republican tax bill is drawing fire from the right because of a provision that would completely eliminate a tax credit for adoptive parents. 
   
   Religious groups, as well as House and Senate conservatives, say that by eliminating the credit, the proposal goes against the GOP’s “pro-life” platform. 
   
   The House’s chief tax writer has defended the removal of the credit, but it could pose yet another hazard to overcome as the bill moves forward. 
   
   “Being pro-life means being pro-adoption. Congress must remember this as we work through the details of tax reform in the coming weeks,” Sen. Ben Sasse Benjamin (Ben) Eric SasseGOP senators introduce bill to prevent family separations at border The Hill's Morning Report — Sponsored by PhRMA — Defiant Trump meets with House GOP amid border blowback Sasse: Trump should end 'wicked' family separation policy MORE (R-Neb.) tweeted Friday. 
   
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   Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.), the head of the House Republican Study Committee caucus, also came out in support of the credit on Friday. 
   
   “Tax Bill is strong but needs to include adoption tax credit. Providing a home for a child that is unwanted or special needs is pro-life!” Walker tweeted. 
   
   The credit is a one-time tax refund available for parents who adopt from foster care, internationally or through private domestic adoptions. It can be applied over the course of five years. For 2017, the federal adoption tax credit was $13,570. 
   
   An adoption can cost as much as $40,000 if a family uses a private agency, according to a survey from Adoptive Families Magazine. 
   
   Adoption advocates are also urging the provision be removed. The groups say if the bill passes with the provision intact, it will be harder and more expensive for American families to adopt. 
   
   “We are deeply concerned by the elimination of the adoption tax credit within the House Republicans’ tax reform proposal,” the Adoption Tax Credit Working Group said in a statement. “Billed as a framework to help American families, it does exactly the opposite by cutting a credit designed to help American families adopt children.” 
   
   House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady Kevin Patrick BradyLawmakers, businesses await guidance on tax law On The Money: Trump imposes B in tariffs on China | China blasts 'fickle' Trump, promises payback | Trump to name consumer bureau director next week Trump announces tariffs on billion in Chinese goods MORE (R-Texas) defended the elimination of the credit during an event on Friday hosted by Politico. 
   
   “There are tough choices, when you look at medical expenses, student loan, the adoption tax credit, something near and dear to me,” said Brady, who is the father of two adopted children. 
   
   “These are tough calls and the call is this, do we want a tax code that has special provisions you may use once in your life or do we want a tax code that lowers rates and you get help every year of your life?” 
   
   David French, a senior fellow at the conservative National Review Institute, wrote in an op-ed that the credit is “one of the government’s most important pro-life policies.” 
   
   “As things now stand, though, this Republican Congress may well end up funding Planned Parenthood while abolishing the adoption tax credit. That’s intolerable,” French wrote Friday. 
   
   House Republicans a day earlier unveiled their long-awaited proposal to overhaul the tax code, a key legislative priority that the party and President Trump hope to pass before the end of the year. If successful, it would be the first tax-reform package enacted since 1986, but some on the right are voicing concerns. 
   
   Fiscal hawks are complaining about how the legislation could boost the deficit, and moderates are worried that the bill disproportionately benefits the wealthy. 
   
   There's also the potential for conservatives to include a repeal of ObamaCare's individual mandate in the package, which could be a particularly fraught fight.
target: – The tax overhaul in the works has drawn controversy over possible changes to 401(k) plans and deductions for homeowners, but another, lower-profile topic has emerged as a sore point. The House plan unveiled last week would eliminate a one-time tax break for families that adopt children. The break can be a substantial one—it's $13,570 in 2017, which can take the sting out of adoption costs that can approach $40,000 if done through an agency, per the Hill. The issue has become a flash point on the right because conservatives equate the credit with supporting pro-life, pro-family values. "Being pro-life means being pro-adoption," tweeted GOP Sen. Ben Sasse. "Congress must remember this as we work through the details of tax reform." Now the Washington Post highlights a different wrinkle: The House's top tax writer has two adopted sons. Rep. Kevin Brady, chair of the House Ways and Means panel, has called his adoptive kids the "biggest blessing," but he defends the credit's elimination. It's "not working," he tells the Post, saying that some families can't claim it because they don't pay enough in taxes or don't itemize. A piece at Vox notes that the credit is indeed "nonrefundable," meaning that parents who don't make enough to owe federal taxes aren't eligible. Those in the middle or upper-middle class, making between $100,000 and $200,000, claim the credit the most. Brady argues that tax overhaul will help all families in a more general sense by, say, increasing the child tax credit. Still, expect the issue to remain contentious. Congress "may end up funding Planned Parenthood while abolishing the adoption tax credit," writes David French in the conservative National Review. "That’s intolerable."