Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

14. Department of Health and Human Services · Minor

Induce states to adopt a child support payment smartphone app

Not started

479 14. Department of Health and Human Services

“Each state should be induced to implement a high-tech, easy-to-use application to centralize child support payments.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No federal action induces states to implement a centralized smartphone application for child support payments. ACF's Office of Child Support Enforcement - renamed from the Office of Child Support Services on 2025-12-19 - runs the Child Support Portal for employers and state agencies, which predates the window and is not a parent-facing payment application, and its 13,399-URL sitemap contains no state payment-app initiative. The four in-window child support rulemakings on the HHS agenda are about tribal tax offset access, enforcement for unborn children, rescinding the 2024 employment-and-training rule and burden reduction. No appropriation funds such a system.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Searched: Federal Register full text since 2025-01-20 for “child support” with “application” (40 documents, read by title, all Privacy Act, tax offset or state plan notices); the acf.gov sitemap filtered for “child-support” (461 URLs) and cross-filtered for app, portal, mobile, technology and modernization - the only live hits are the employer Child Support Portal pages and an archived 2021 blog post about modernizing state systems.
  • This ask was also covered by one search run across a cluster of neighboring asks in this Chapter.
  • Unified Agenda, checked 2026-09-01. Checked against the full HHS agenda on reginfo.gov (183 active RINs in the 2026 Unified Agenda, published 2026-08-14), not the abbreviated version the Federal Register prints. The nearest entry is recorded here; it does not name this ask’s object, so the Status is unchanged: an agenda entry, like a strategic plan, counts only when it names what the ask asks for.
    • ACF’s two child-support entries are 0970-AD23 (Implementation of Direct Federal Tax Offset Access for Tribal Child Support Programs and Technical Corrections, NPRM 07/2026) and 0970-AD39 (Reducing Bureaucracy and Burden for Child Support Enforcement, NPRM 07/2026). Neither induces states to field a centralized payment application; AD23’s “application” is program access, not software.
Action
create
Object
state child support payment smartphone application
ID
1329