The World and Everything in It: July 29, 2026

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Good morning!

Questions on COVID today. What did Dr. Anthony Fauci know privately, and how did it differ from what he said publicly?

NICK EICHER, HOST: Fauci’s expected on Capitol Hill this morning and Hunter Baker is here to talk about that and more on Washington Wednesday.

Also today World Tour on Ukraine’s effort to keep its advantage against Russia.

Later the hunt for apple varieties long believed to be extinct.

BENSCOTER: We brought back some history that we thought was lost.

And WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney on compassion and lost childhoods.

MAST: It’s Wednesday, July 29th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

MAST: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

SOUND: [Choir singing]

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Graham funeral » Leaders from around the world gathered inside the Washington National Cathedral Tuesday to remember the late U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham.

President Trump said the son of South Carolina was an optimist with a fighting spirit who became one of the most important men in Washington.

TRUMP:  He took his duty seriously without taking himself too seriously. He was unwavering in his principles but always willing to listen. He always wanted to listen.

And a short time earlier at the Capitol:

SOUND: [Military band]

U.S. servicemembers carried Graham’s flag-draped casket to the center of the rotunda surrounded by Senate and cabinet leaders.

Vice President JD Vance, a former Senate colleague of Graham’s, remembered him as a happy warrior “who could disagree with you without being disagreeable.”

VANCE: I choose to remember Lindsey Graham as a person who could fight with you on one issue, but fight for you on another issue

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Graham never apologized for being pro-life or for standing by his values.

THUNE: It didn't matter to Lindsey whether an issue was popular or unpopular, whether he had the full support of his colleagues, or whether he was standing alone

Thune called Graham a dear friend and recalled traveling the world alongside him.

THUNE: Rest in peace, my friend … I look forward to the days … when you make us all laugh again  

A public service will be held this morning in South Carolina at the State House in Columbia.

Zelenskyy at White House » Ukrainian President Volydymyr Zelenskyy, after attending Graham’s funeral, met at the White House with President Trump. The two leaders talked about Ukraine making its own weapons amid Russia’s ongoing invasion. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin reports:

KRISTEN FLAVIN: Trump agreed at a NATO summit this month to allow Ukraine to build its own Patriot missile interceptors. Kyiv has been pressing for more of those for many months.

In the Oval Office they worked through the details. Zelenskyy called it a good meeting and added that the diplomatic push needs new life.

The interceptors matter beyond Ukraine. The war with Iran has reportedly strained American stockpiles, and analysts say more Patriot production would take pressure off U.S. supply.

Zelenskyy also met with Lockheed Martin, which builds the interceptors, about trading technology in both directions. He says his country has a lot to share with the nations helping Ukraine.

For WORLD, I'm Kristen Flavin.

Netanyahu at White House » Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also met with President Trump at the White House Tuesday before attending Lindsey Graham’s funeral.

It was the first meeting between the two leaders since the start of the Iran war.

Ahead of that meeting, Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon said Israel remains grateful for its “deep partnership with the U.S.”

DANON: We fought shoulder to shoulder against Iran, and we are prepared to continue supporting the US in pursuing peace and stability in the region

Afterward, Netanyahu called the meeting excellent, one of his best conversations with the president.

Trump wants a deal with Tehran, while Netanyahu thinks it best to continue the fight and bring the current regime to its knees.

Israel's defense minister says his country wants to strike Iran's oil and power plants. Washington has said no, largely over concerns about oil prices.

Iran latest » Mediators in recent days have cited progress toward getting US-Iran peace talks back on track. And President Trump said Tuesday morning:

TRUMP: This is actually a good time to make a deal for them. If they don't make a deal, then I go back and I finish the job

It's unclear where the president's threshold lies before dialing up the airstrikes once again.

A senior U.S. official says Iran fired ballistic missiles at an American base in Jordan Tuesday. CENTCOM says all of the missiles were intercepted calling it an attempted surprise attack.

It's the first missile attack on American troops since Trump paused strikes on Iran.

Trump has been specific about what finishing the job could look like.

TRUMP: The bridges are gonna be gone literally in less than a … I would say in two hours, most of the bridges, the major bridges will all be gone, and the power plants in one day. And, you know, if I can avoid doing that, I'd like to do that

Saudi Arabia says Iran-backed militias in Iraq launched drones at Saudi oil facilities for a second straight day. Air defenses shot them down.

Senate SAVE Act push » The clock is ticking for Senators to wrap up business before a five week August recess, but President Trump and some Senators say they need more time.

WORLD’s Harrison Watters reports from the nation’s capital.

HARRISON WATTERS: Senators are scheduled to head home in two weeks. But some Republicans, including President Trump, are calling on Majority Leader John Thune to cancel recess so they can pass stronger voter verification rules in the SAVE America Act. Senator Marsha Blackburn told Newsmax:

BLACKBURN: We will stay here weekends and until we can get this passed.

WATTERS: In June, the SAVE America Act came close to becoming law as an amendment in a bill to fund immigration agencies. But all Democrats and four Republicans voted against it. Texas Senator John Cornyn told reporters on Tuesday the math hasn't changed.

CORNYN: ...we don’t have the votes to pass it, no longer how long we stay, and we’re not going to change the filibuster.”

WATTERS: Majority Leader Thune is more concerned about passing a short-term funding bill to keep the government open until after the Midterms.

The Senate is stalled working on a third budget reconciliation bill.

Before leaving town last week, the House passed short-term funding through December. But spending authority runs out two months from now, unless Congress extends the deadline.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Harrison Watters in Washington.

Teen gets life without parole for killing four at Georgia school » A Georgia judge handed down his sentence Tuesday to a teenager who killed four people in a shooting at Apalachee High School.

Barrow County Superior Court Judge Nicholas Primm told the 16-year-old defendant Colt Gray:

PRIMM:  Planning, fantasizing about, visualizing and executing a school shooting puts you in an unredeemable moral wasteland. Your crimes do reflect permanent incorrigibility, and I will sentence you to life without parole for each of the malice murders that you committed.

Gray had pleaded guilty to charges including murder in the 2024 shooting.

Investigators testified that Gray idolized other mass shooters and studied their methods before the attack.

I'm Kent Covington.

Coming up, how did Dr. Anthony Fauci private thoughts about the COVID-19 pandemic differ from what he said publicly? Plus World Tour.

This is The World and Everything in It.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday, July 29. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Washington Wednesday, and joining us is Hunter Baker. He is a senior fellow at the First Liberty Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy. Good morning.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: Issue one today, Hunter: revisiting the Fauci Ouchy. Former White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci finds himself this morning in the waiting room, awaiting a hearing in front of his great nemesis, Doctor Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky. Senator Paul plans to question him using Fauci’s own pandemic diaries—that’s more than 1,000 pages covering the first reports from Wuhan all the way through Fauci’s retirement in 2022.

MAST: Those diaries contain plenty about Fauci’s TV appearances, favorable press coverage he received, and relationships with political power players and cultural hotshots like Barbra Streisand—that’s the embarrassing stuff. But the most consequential entries concern the origin of COVID-19. Early in 2020, scientists told Fauci that laboratory manipulation and an accidental release were plausible possibilities. A year later, Fauci wrote that advocates of the lab leak hypothesis were distorting reality, and he complained that Congress would keep hassling him about it. Well over six years on, scientists still have not reached a consensus on the origin of the virus. Hunter, this hearing is just hours away, and if you can set aside the personality material and the fixation on media coverage, what do you see as the most consequential discrepancy between what Fauci knew privately and what he said publicly?

BAKER:  I think the biggest thing is the consensus that existed in the epidemiology community. There’s a fantastic book called In COVID’s Wake by a couple of Princeton political scientists. For me, maybe the biggest revelation was this understanding that the entire medical community had thought about this sort of thing ahead of time, and that they had settled firmly on the idea that non-pharmaceutical interventions—all the kinds of things that we did—were useless and maybe even counterproductive. Yet we pursued all of those things and therefore radically interfered with American life, cost the government trillions of dollars, shut down schools, interfered with the studies and maturation of young people, and radically interfered with the American economy.

EICHER: Hunter, I don’t expect at the conclusion of this hearing to find that the scandal is necessarily that Fauci reached the wrong scientific conclusion. Scientists do, after all, get things wrong. Do you think the deeper problem really is that he helped to discredit a plausible hypothesis and, more than that, play character assassin to the scientists and journalists who pursued it, while privately knowing that the evidence was actually unsettled?

BAKER: I think there are a lot of problems with the way that he conducted himself in the middle of this. I won’t try to be a substitute expert, but one thing is clear: he worked very hard to try to prevent anybody from really exploring the lab leak possibility and publicizing that. In addition, when well-credentialed people tried to argue that the response was the wrong response, he was part of that group that tried to intimidate them, potentially interfere with their existing status in the expert community, and maybe their academic positions. For whatever reason, he felt a real need to try to manage this thing in a particular direction. I think the reality is, it’s a sensitive issue. People disagree over it as strongly as anything else in my life, other than whether you can lean an airline seat back. But I think they got this thing wrong and that the costs and the benefits were not well managed. I think he never really conceded that.

MAST: Hunter, Fauci was formally an adviser, but elected officials, governors, journalists, and much of the public treated him as though scientific expertise gave him authority to decide questions involving schools and businesses, as Nick mentioned, but also churches, travel, and ordinary civil life. We never had a funeral for my grandmother, who died in March of 2020. When does expert advice become the exercise of political power?

BAKER: A lot of people blame Fauci for this. They blame Collins. I have always thought of it a little bit differently. I don’t think that Fauci and Collins were right about a lot of these things, but they really were not in power. I think what happened is that our political leaders deferred to Fauci and Collins to an unacceptable degree. I was present at a meeting where Collins openly said, “Look, we were only thinking about this thing through the medical lens. We were not really considering the effect on children’s education, the effect on the economy, or other related things.” That was really the revelation for me, because who was supposed to be thinking about those things? Fauci and Collins were not trained in government. Our elected leaders, members of the cabinet, and other folks like that were the ones who were supposed to figure that out. They gave it all to Fauci and Collins, and that was a mistake.

EICHER: Interesting. Not trained in government, but certainly trained in politics. Now I want to get to the exit question here. We could talk all day about Fauci. How do elected leaders, Hunter, obtain the advice of these experts without transferring governing authority to this expert class, whom voters cannot remove?

BAKER: This is really a major 20th-century and now 21st-century type of question. When you look at a president like Woodrow Wilson, who really was one of the inventors of the academic field of public administration, he wanted a government that was run by experts. He really didn’t want it to be such an electoral kind of affair. Certainly, we have done a lot of things to empower experts within the government, and with the global epidemic, we saw that everybody wanted to defer to experts. Why? Of course, they’re experts in that matter, but we have all seen the movie where the expert knows the right thing and the political leaders don’t, and they lead us into disaster. In this case, we learned that the experts are not infallible and they can, in many cases, offer bad advice.

MAST: Hunter, moving on to issue two, we’ll call this one “Democracy with No Brakes.” The Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA, have now supplied a case study for the argument you made in a WORLD Opinions column this week. You argue that Americans increasingly no longer understand the Constitution’s purpose, so they view its restraints as defects: federalism, two houses of Congress, staggered elections, separation of powers, and an independent judiciary all make political power difficult to exercise—and deliberately so.

EICHER: Now, Hunter, the DSA’s new national program is almost a point-by-point rejection of that constitutional design. It calls for a new democratic constitution, abolition of the Senate and Electoral College, and replacement of the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. It also proposes proportional representation and public ownership of major corporations and industries. That is the structural part. There are also demands for open borders, amnesty for illegals, no more ICE, defunding the Pentagon, prisons, and on and on—like a right-wing fever dream. That is not merely an economic agenda operating within the existing constitutional order; it’s a proposal for a fundamentally different order.

MAST: Hunter, here’s the question: Do you think today’s Democratic Socialists may have skipped civics class entirely, or is it more that their leaders, at least, understand the constitutional structure quite well? It’s just that they affirmatively reject it. In other words, is civic ignorance really the problem, or are we witnessing a collision between two fundamentally different meanings of a democratic society?

BAKER: I think both things are there. My opinion is that if we quizzed the members of Congress, we would find that many of them have an appalling ignorance of certain fundamental realities of our Constitution, our founding, and the philosophy behind why things were constructed the way they were. There’s that. But then, yes, there is an understanding of how our government works and a desire to overcome all of those restraints. Certainly there is. But here’s what I would say to you about this: Normally, when you propose something radical, it’s because you’re failing. It’s because a company’s gone bankrupt. It’s because nothing works anymore. Performance is terrible. We’re still the leading nation in the entire world; we still have the longest-running written Constitution in the history of the world. I don’t think there’s anything that suggests we need to overhaul the whole thing. I think we may need some reforms. I actually think that most of the reforms are in the people—how they think and what they do—but I don’t think the engine that we call the Constitution needs to be overhauled in the way that has been suggested.

MAST: Last issue today: cities without children. America’s large cities are not necessarily losing people, but what they are rapidly losing is children. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that the number of children under 18 in large cities fell 6% over the past decade, compared with the 1% decline nationwide. Among children under five, the urban decline exceeded 15%. Two-thirds of the 38 cities studied lost children, and some cities gained population while their child populations fell.

EICHER: Families cite housing and childcare costs, safety, schools, and general quality of life. The Journal also pointed to a growing number of adults deciding that children would require financial and lifestyle sacrifices they simply do not want to make. Hunter, what does a city lose when it loses its children?

BAKER: We think about God’s charge to human beings, and part of that is to be fruitful and to multiply. I think that having children, raising them, providing for them, taking them through the stages of life, mentoring them, parenting them—these are all core, core, core human activities. I think that as more of us become more disconnected from that, we’re going to see a different life for people. I think it’s going to have a certain unreality to it. I always go back to “The Life of Julia,” that campaign ad for the Obama administration. You have this atomized person, Julia, whose partner in life is really the government, and that’s where we’re going. If we continue to dissolve our normal bonds and responsibilities, cities will be like a place where human beings engage in economic activity and maybe not much else.

MAST: Hunter Baker is a senior fellow at the First Liberty Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy. Hunter, thank you so much.

BAKER: Thank you.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: World Tour.

In Ukraine, summer has brought fast-moving changes, from the battlefield and global diplomacy to the streets of the capital of Kyiv.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Ukrainian forces fighting Russia may be gaining an edge—but a political crisis and weeks-long protests have meant ongoing challenges.

WORLD correspondent William Fleeson has this week’s World Tour.

AUDIO: “Odna, Yedina, Svobodna Ukraïna!” – “One and only, free Ukraine!”

WILLIAM FLEESON, CORRESPONDENT: Chants like these have echoed across Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities since mid-July. That’s when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired defense minister Mykhailo Fédorov. The dismissal came after an apparent power struggle between Fédorov and the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi.

Ukrainians took to the streets over Fédorov’s dismissal. Many felt his tech-focused strategies were working in the years-long conflict.

After his firing, Fédorov held a press conference – and sharply criticized Syrskyi.

FEDOROV: [UKRAINIAN] Instead of figuring out how to defeat Russa—which is the commander-in-chief’s task—he has figured out how to split the country.

Fédorov says here that Syrskyi managed not to defeat Russia, but to divide Ukraine instead.

Days later, Zelenskyy reversed course – sort of. He removed Syrskyi from his position as armed forces chief. Meanwhile, Fédorov is still holding out for his old job, but Zelenskyy has yet to budge.

The conflict between the two leaders is as much a matter of policy, as a clash between generations.

The popular Fédorov is a 35-year-old tech leader known to butt heads with the older Syrskyi. Many Ukrainians see Syrskyi as a symbol of outdated battle tactics, and attitudes, left over from Ukraine’s days as part of the Soviet Union.

For many Ukrainian civilians, politics have become personal… as their fathers, husbands, and brothers serve at the front.

BOHDANOVSKA: If our government could support more [the] army, and think more about people than about their victory or their money, my brother could be alive.

That’s Tetiana Bohdánovska, a protester in Kyiv. She held a hand-made, cardboard sign urging Fédorov’s return.

The protesters also want to protect recent gains on Ukraine’s side of the battlefield – and deep within Russia. With new, long-range drones, Ukraine can now strike targets up to 1,800 miles away.

Ukraine has spent months hitting Russian oil terminals. Oil exports help Russia fund the war.

Additionally, widespread fuel shortages have also brought the war closer to home for ordinary Russians. Ukraine’s attacks have focused especially on Crimea, a shipping hub. Damaged oil depots have left people waiting for hours at gas stations across Crimea and other, former Soviet regions.

Following the strikes, Russian online searches, like “When will the war end?” and “How to leave Russia?” hit record levels.

AUDIO: [RUSSIAN] Man, I just wish this war would end… So many people are dying, so many businesses are suffering.”

This man laments that people are dying and businesses are suffering.

Russia has responded by ratcheting up strikes on civilian targets across Ukraine. June became the bloodiest month for civilian casualties in more than four years. The United Nations says nearly 300 civilians were killed, and almost 1,800 wounded.

Meanwhile, Zelenskyy’s relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump has warmed in recent weeks. The two met at the White House yesterday morning, before the Washington funeral of South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, one of America’s biggest Ukraine supporters. A Congressional bill now underway may add new sanctions to Russian groups. The bill was a longtime project of Graham’s.

In an online message, Zelenskyy offered condolences for Graham’s death, calling him a “true friend of Ukraine.” The White House did not immediately release a statement about the meeting, but Zelenskyy thanked the United States for its support, saying the two presidents discussed weapons and diplomacy.

That’s this week’s World Tour. I’m William Fleeson.

NICK EICHER, HOST:Florida man James Grayson McMicken made one cast into the canal behind his home in North Fort Myers.

Then he got a bite, but not the one he wanted.

An alligator jumped from the water, clamped onto McMicken’s right leg and dragged him down the bank. Audio from WINK-TV.

MCMICKEN: I’m going to do everything I can not to die.

McMicken has hunted gators before, so he knew how to survive.

MCMICKEN: I stuck my thumb in one eye, and I just took that fishing pole and jabbed him in that other eye—and jabbed him and jabbed him and jabbed him. It seemed like forever, but ... then he turned loose.”\

McMicken needed stitches to close up the deep wounds to his leg. He’s now starting physical therapy—and hopes to get back to fishing sometime soon—as the fisherman but not as the bait.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, July 29th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: finding the apples that fell far from the tree.

The Pacific Northwest was once home to about 17,000 apple varieties. Early pioneers planted these trees for homestead orchards and hard cider production.

Today, only about a quarter are still cultivated, while the rest have been lost to time.

MAST: But apple enthusiasts have set out to bring some special varieties back.

WORLD’s Emma Eicher spoke to them about the fruit of their labors and has our story.

EMMA EICHER: Roy Druffel and David Benscoter call themselves “apple detectives.” At Druffel’s farm in Pullman, Washington, they sit side-by-side on the back of a pickup truck.

Here’s Benscoter:

BENSCOTER: We kind of figure out the history of the home or where the apple was found, and then we do two types of testing.

Fifteen years ago, Benscoter founded the Lost Apple Project, a nonprofit organization where volunteers travel all over the Pacific Northwest to find the rare fruit.

BENSCOTER: It's just prime lost apple hunting.

So far, they’ve rediscovered many varieties and are growing them here at Druffel’s farm. Walking through the rows of small trees, some are weighed down with green, unripe apples. Here’s Druffel:

DRUFFEL: Now this year, this one is going to be …

BENSCOTER: Right now, it’s a no-name.

DRUFFEL: Yeah, I planted it, and there's not been a DNA of yet, so this year will be the prime example of us not knowing what the tree is. This is going to be a wonderful apple.

But those apples aren’t always “wonderful.”

DRUFFEL: Sometimes it looks really good and sometimes it looks terrible. RD100, that was a really nice looking apple, but it doesn't taste good at all. We're better spitters than we are good at eating apples, but it's pretty fun.

Benscoter says the taste matters because it can be a test for whether the apple is actually lost.

BENSCOTER: When we find a good apple near a homestead or a place believed to be a homestead, we will, first thing we do is taste test the apple, because the pioneers didn't eat bad tasting apples.

Volunteers spend their spare time combing through abandoned orchards and gardens for the lost varieties. If a sample can’t be identified from sight and taste alone, they’ll send the apple to experts for DNA profiling.

Druffel and Benscoter are currently growing 20-25 varieties they’ve found over the years. And they’ve planted many more that remain unidentified—and unnamed.

BENSCOTER: We have had a couple of instances where the experts cannot agree on what the apple is, and so what we'll do in that case is give it a temporary name, and that happened with the Polly Bemis apple.

Polly Bemis was a Chinese-American pioneer who lived in Idaho and had apple trees on her homestead. Now, those varieties are named after her—a solution for when there’s expert disagreement.

Benscoter says while the analysis sometimes produces uncertain outcomes, at least there are still experts to rely on. For now.

BENSCOTER: There's only four apple experts in the United States, and a couple of them I will call elderly. So if we can't get new apple identification experts, it's going to be really tough.

Another challenge: identifying apple characteristics is a skill that few have mastered.

BENSCOTER: There's like 50 different characteristics of an apple. Everything from the seed shape to the length of the stem. And the people that were taught it now mostly learned it from somebody else.

And on top of that, maintaining an orchard requires know-how and adjusting to setbacks. Druffel says he tends the orchard almost every night to trim branches affected by something called fire blight.

BENSCOTER: They haven't been able to find a cure for it. Just one day, you'll see a limb, an outer limb, that looks like it's had fire, been burned.

It takes at least four years for the trees to bear fruit, and during that time Druffel and Benscoter fight off insects, disease, and weather damage. But when they get a taste of success…

BENSCOTER: It's fun, especially when we get the word that we have found a lost apple. That's a hard feeling to replicate. We brought back some history that we thought was lost, and that's a really good feeling.

Benscoter has always kept an eye out for one specific variety: the Walbridge apple.

Early settlers once widely planted the tree across the West, until it mysteriously disappeared.

Tomorrow: the story of the Walbridge.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Emma Eicher in Pullman, Washington. 

NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. When children enter foster care, every decision is supposed to serve their best interests.

EICHER: But those decisions often involve parents, caseworkers, courts, and timelines children cannot possibly understand.

MAST: WORLD Commentator Janie B. Cheaney now on what happens when a system built ostensibly to protect children, loses sight of childhood.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: The three brothers were so little: ages two, one, and barely a week old when taken from their meth-addicted parents. Not many homes would be willing or able to take in all three; this family did without hesitation. Long wakeful nights and screaming fits made for a challenging adjustment, but with loving discipline the boys gradually settled into peaceful routines. Their foster parents became attached: bought clothes and toys with their own money and brought the boys to church. Then the children were abruptly removed for another “trial period” with parents who had done little to reform their ways.

They’re so little. How can they understand the convolutions of an overburdened system?

For most of modern history, homeless children were apprenticed to a trade or placed in orphanages – which, at their best, at least provided food, shelter, and training for productive adulthood. But in 1854 Charles Loring Brace of the New York’s Children’s Aid Society organized the first orphan train, sweeping young indigents off the street and out to new homes in the Midwest. This was the first experiment in foster care. It was successful enough that over the next 160 years, fostering and adoption became the preferred model. So much so that social workers in the developing welfare system were sometimes too hasty to judge a parent “unfit,” and remove children from poor but loving families with little justification.

Policies change, and today the assumed goal of fostering is family reunification. The Family First Prevention Services Act, passed in 2018, directs resources away from adoption toward “parental rehab and support”: namely drug treatment, anger management, counseling, or daycare. It sounds noble, but how it works in practice is the subject of No Way to Treat a Child, published in 2024 by Naomi Shaeffer Riley.

Riley found that adult desires often undermine the best interests of children. In an interview with City Journal, she noted that

RILEY: You have a significant portion of kids, as many as 15 or 20 percent who are in the system for three or four years or more. Those are timelines that work for adults who we're waiting for them to kind of rehabilitate often from drug addiction or mental health issues. But while that happens, the kids' childhoods are being frittered away.

Caseworkers don’t receive adequate training to judge whether a child is in danger from biological parents, and bad calls don’t reflect on their record. Family court is a low-status position attracting the least-qualified judges. Foster parents are burdened with excessive paperwork, restrictive rules, and intrusive questionnaires. They have few rights to be informed or heard, and almost half give up after a year. As Riley explains,

RILEY: A lot of people really quit because they can’t take the system. It treats them like glorified teenage babysitters, not like people who are doing the hard work of caring for our most vulnerable kids.

Anecdotal evidence backs up the failures of the system. To take just one example, a young couple I know recently had to give up a two-year-old they had fostered since she was a newborn, sending her back to parents who were still on probation for child endangerment.

The good news is that the church, which once took the lead in salvaging neglected children, is stepping up again. Colorado-based Project 1.27, named for James’ exhortation to visit orphans in their distress, recruits, trains, and provides support teams for Christian foster parents. So does The Call, in Arkansas. And the Christian Alliance for Orphans coordinates hundreds of churches, ministries, and nonprofits worldwide to “inspire and equip God’s people to care effectively for vulnerable children and families.”

We can’t all be foster parents, but we can all do something. Care for the helpless is still a test of true faith.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Tomorrow: Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony before a Senate panel for his role in the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ll have a report from Capitol Hill. And how one socialist country views New York’s so-called democratic version. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says, “To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul. O my God, in you I trust; let me not be put to shame; let not my enemies exult over me. Indeed, none who wait for you shall be put to shame; they shall be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous. Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all the day long.” —Psalm 25:1-5

Go now in grace and peace.

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