April 2024 CSQ
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percent or more staffing cuts. OCSS also<br />
experienced significant funding cuts. My<br />
staff and I anxiously monitored new hire<br />
data. The program was not really back on<br />
its feet until 2012.<br />
Coming into office, I wanted to establish<br />
the vision, consensus, and policy<br />
framework for a family-centered program.<br />
My predecessors had laid the groundwork<br />
through policy guidance, grant projects, and<br />
initiatives like PAID. Texas was pioneering an<br />
impressive family-centered program model, and<br />
several other states and counties had implemented grant-funded initiatives.<br />
The problem was that these grant initiatives often were not seen as part of<br />
the “real” child support program, and were not sustained when the grant<br />
ended. I wanted to integrate family-centered policies and practices into the<br />
program. But with the fiscal crisis, few people were in the mood to hear<br />
about an upcoming shift in federal priorities.<br />
I remember one cab ride to a conference in 2010. My cabdriver told me that<br />
he could not make enough money driving cab during the recession to pay<br />
his child support. He wanted to go back to school to get an HVAC<br />
certificate. He said he regularly saw his children, and his former wife<br />
supported his plan. However, the county attorney had threatened him with<br />
jail if he quit. I told his story at the conference. The story was not wellreceived.<br />
Have a Plan B. I spent the recession years trying to describe the families I<br />
knew and the type of approaches that would work. I also focused on<br />
changing the language we used. To draw the picture, I borrowed familycentered<br />
principles and language from the child welfare field. I sketched out<br />
the “bubble chart” for a presentation slide. Much to my surprise, it became<br />
our logo. We began drafting the 2016 Flexibility, Efficiency, and<br />
Modernization rule early in the first term. As the program restabilized after<br />
the recession, federal, state, county, and tribal child support agencies<br />
engaged in extensive discussions about the program’s future. We stepped<br />
up federal research to deepen the evidentiary basis, including CSPED,<br />
Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC), and<br />
Parenting Time Opportunities for Children (PTOC). We modernized our