The National Guardianship Program
The bond between parent and child is among the most sacred relationships in human history.
The family is the first school of citizenship, the first sanctuary of love, and the first line of defense against a world that can be cruel and indifferent. The New Nationalists of America (NNA) believe that strong families are the foundation of a strong nation. But we also believe that no child should be sacrificed to a parent's failure, abandoned to a parent's indifference, or condemned to a parent's cruelty. For too long, the American child welfare system has offered the American people a false choice between leaving a child in a dangerous home or surrendering them to a broken system that shuffles them from house to house, often leaving them worse off than they were before. The NNA rejects this false dichotomy. We propose a new path: one that protects children, preserves families where possible, and provides a dignified alternative when preservation is impossible. This policy will restore the promise that every American child deserves safety, stability, and the opportunity to become everything they are capable of becoming.
For every 100 children entering foster care, only 57 licensed homes are available. This chasm forces children to sleep in offices, places teens in hotels, and separates siblings simply because there is nowhere for them to stay. Children often remain in foster care for years, and those who transition out frequently face uncertain futures without the support systems essential to educational, career, and relational success. The current system is overburdened. Caseworkers are stretched thin, foster parents are overwhelmed, and children pay the price. Each year, over 600,000 thousand children are confirmed victims of abuse or neglect; nearly 1,700 die from their injuries. Child abuse and neglect cost the United States over $124 billion annually in direct and indirect costs.
This is not the America we promised our children.
This is not the America we want to leave to the next generation.
The crisis is not merely one of resources, but of philosophy. The current system waits until a child is already traumatized before intervening and too often treats children as problems to be processed rather than souls to be nurtured. Worse still, a perverse incentive structure has been curated in which it is cheaper and easier to leave a child in a dangerous home than to intervene. The bureaucratic inertia of the modern welfare state favors the status quo, even when the status quo is killing children. The NNA proposes a fundamental reorientation of the child welfare system grounded in three principles.
First, the state has a duty to protect the vulnerable. The ancient legal doctrine of parens patriae holds that the state has a sovereign responsibility to protect those who cannot protect themselves. This principle, found within English common law and enshrined in American jurisprudence, recognizes the state as the ultimate guardian of every child's welfare. When parents refuse to fulfill their sacred duty, the state must protect the next generations.
Second, the child's welfare is paramount. No parent has a right to harm their child. No family has a right to neglect them. The American people have a responsibility to ensure that every child, regardless of circumstance, birth, or background, has the opportunity to grow up safe, healthy, and free.
Third, the state must offer a dignified alternative. We propose a third option: when a child cannot safely remain with their parents, the state shall provide a permanent, nurturing home under the novel National Guardianship Service.
The National Guardianship Service will be a new, independent agency within the Department of Health & Human Services, charged with a single mission: Providing permanent, stable, and loving care for children who cannot safely remain with their parents. No child will be removed from their parents without a judicial determination that the parents are entirely unwilling to provide adequate care. Children placed in the Service will be assigned to a homelike community: a small, home environment with trained professional guardians, where children can grow up with stability, continuity, and love. These communities will be familial, with no more than twelve children per home and a ratio of at least one caregiver for every three children. They will be professionally staffed by trained, licensed, and compensated caregivers, integrated with local public schools and community activities, and permanent. Children will remain in the same community until adulthood. Every child in the Service will receive a free, high-quality education through 21, including vocational training and college preparedness. Academic support will include tutoring, enrichment programs, and individualized learning plans. Vocational training provided through the Service will be granted via partnerships with trade unions, community colleges, and private enterprise. College preparation will include access to free community college and university education. The Service’s life-skills training will cover financial literacy and household management, as well as career planning.
The National Guardianship Service will address not only the crisis of foster care but the broader crisis of American childhood, expanding the state's protective role to include a wider range of situations where children are at risk. Child abuse is an epidemic in America. The Service will provide a permanent and safe alternative for children removed from abusive homes. Too often, abused children are returned to dangerous environments when the legal system fails them. The Service will ensure that this does not happen. Siblings will be kept together, as the bond between siblings is often the only stable relationship that an abused child has. The addiction crisis has devastated America’s families, with countless children losing parents to addiction and many more neglected or abused as a result. The Service will provide specialized services for children of addicts, including professional counseling. The incarceration crisis in America has also taken its toll, with approximately 2.7 million children having a parent behind bars. The Service will provide stability for these children, who often face unstable living situations, and when no suitable relative is available, will provide them a permanent home.
Children with disabilities will have access to special education services. Some parents intentionally withhold necessary medical care from their children, often leading to preventable death and suffering; the Service will ensure that all children under its care receive necessary medical, dental, and mental health care. In times of emergency (such as natural disaster, economic collapse, or societal upheaval) the Service will serve as a safety net, maintaining emergency shelters, providing short-term care for children whose parents are temporarily unable to care for them, and permanent placement when parents are permanently unable to do so. For parents who recognize that they are unable to provide adequate care, the Service shall accept voluntary placements on either a temporary or permanent basis, subject to judicial review.
Beyond the immediate crises of abuse and neglect lies a deeper challenge: how does America prepare children who have been removed from unsafe households to become productive, responsible, and patriotic citizens? The current system of foster care offers little more than survival. The NNA proposes a path to excellence. For children who enter the Service at a young age and have no prospect of reunification, we propose a structured developmental program designed to transform vulnerable children into capable, confident, and contributing adults. This Civic Development Program will be organized into three distinct stages, each with its own developmental goals. During the Foundation Years (ages 7 to 13), children will be placed in small, stable groups of 10 to 15 peers of similar age, living together under trained professional caregivers. This stage will focus on safety and stability, basic education in reading, writing, mathematics, and civics, daily physical activity, character formation in honesty, responsibility, respect, and perseverance, and community integration. Children will remain in stable cohorts throughout their time in the program, thereby curating bonds of loyalty and shared purpose that can replace the isolation experienced by children from fractured homes.
During the Apprenticeship Years (ages 14 to 19), the Program will shift toward preparation for adulthood. Here, the Program’s goals will expand to include advanced academic curriculum, hands-on vocational training in trades and professions through partnerships with organized labor and American companies, leadership development through mentoring younger children, in-depth study of American history and the Constitution, physical fitness programs, and the development of habits of cooperation and mutual aid within the Service’s communities.
During the Transition Years (ages 20 to 25), the Program will prepare young adults for independent life. Participants will receive support for higher education or career placement, financial independence training, assistance finding stable housing, encouragement for continued community service, and ongoing mentorship. Those who complete the program will be expected to serve their communities, contribute to the nation's prosperity, and pass on the values they have learned to the next generation.
This Program’s philosophy will recognize the whole child in mind, body, and character. It will reject the reduction of education to mere test preparation and embrace the classical ideal of education as the formation of the complete citizen. Physical education will not be optional. Children must value their health and discipline, and the importance of teamwork. Beyond the importance of American history, or the principles of the Constitution, children will also learn the duties of citizenship, understanding that they are members of a nation with a shared history and single, common destiny.
This policy is designed to address the abject failure of the American child welfare system to protect its most vulnerable. But it is also based upon a far deeper conviction regarding the nature of our Republic. The NNA believes that the strength of a nation depends on the character of its citizens, and character is formed in families, in communities, and in the institutions that shape the rising generation. When families fail, the state must step in as a partner and, when necessary, as a guardian.
For generations, the nuclear family has been treated as a private institution beyond public accountability. This has allowed abuse to fester in the shadows, neglect to go unchecked, and children to suffer in silence. But we believe, as all Americans do, that no child should suffer because their parents fail them, and that the state, the organized expression of the American people's will, has a duty to step in when parents cannot or will not fulfill their sacred obligation.
This Service is not an attack on the family, but a defense of it, a recognition that the family unit is too important to be left to fail, and that the family is not merely a private arrangement but a public good so vital to the nation's health that the state has a duty to protect it.
Every child deserves to grow up safe, loved, and supported. Every child deserves a chance to become everything they are capable of becoming. And every child deserves an America that will not look away when they are suffering.
We are committed to building that nation. We are committed to protecting the vulnerable, strengthening the home, and ensuring that every American child has the opportunity to pursue the American Dream.
And we believe that only together can we build an America where no child is left behind, no child is forgotten, and no child is sacrificed to the failures of their guardians.
The American Millennium begins with our children.
"In the last analysis, the welfare of the State depends absolutely upon whether or not the average family, the average man and woman and their children, represent the kind of citizenship fit for the foundation of a great nation."
— Theodore Roosevelt
