This is part three of a Daily Wire series exposing the Biden administration’s previously unreported efforts to enact radical anti-family policies in the name of protecting transgender-identifying children. In part two, we saw how Biden officials pushed a policy even radical LGBT activists told them to drop. Today, we see that the rule was just the tip of the iceberg. As Biden receded from view and Kamala Harris launched her campaign, Biden officials were laying the groundwork for what they would do if they kept the White House. The plan would have fundamentally changed child welfare across the country — enshrining transgenderism in federal law without a single vote. *** Shortly before the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump’s campaign dropped a game changing ad. “Kamala is for they/them,” the ad warned viewers. “President Trump is for you.” It has since become clear that Trump’s embrace of the transgender issue helped fuel his return to the White House. But what if Vice President Kamala Harris had eked out a victory? Would her administration have continued President Joe Biden’s embrace of radical gender ideology? Would she have walked it back? Or would Harris have taken things even further? A 78-page plan reviewed by The Daily Wire shows how the Biden administration was planning to make affirming transgenderism the national standard within child welfare services without having to pass a single law. The crux of that plan was the creation of the Child Welfare Sexual Orientation Gender Identity and Expression Institute (SOGIE). Funded by a $20 million grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, SOGIE was on track to employ a 40-person team to push transgenderism on child welfare agencies across the country. “This is a comprehensive, detailed strategy to turn child welfare systems in all 50 states into training camps and havens for radical gender ideology,” Laura Hanford, the senior policy analyst at the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing, told The Daily Wire. “Not a word about the major risks of sex-rejecting procedures, or about the comorbidities for gender confusion and its high correlation with sexual abuse, especially in such a vulnerable population.” Even the people behind the plan acknowledged its radical nature. Angela Weeks, a University of Connecticut employee tasked with administering the SOGIE grant, wrote to colleagues in August 2024 that “we wrote a proposal that was innovative, so much so that some other reviewers thought we should tone it down.” But “we chose to go big,” Weeks said, adding that it was “thrilling to see” the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), an agency within HHS, “wanted a contractor who would lead this work in a way that can create real change.” The Biden administration first mentioned the SOGIE Institute in January 2023, when HHS announced it was looking for a contractor to help its Children’s Bureau address the “unique needs of transgender and gender diverse individuals” in child welfare systems. This was pursuant to Biden’s Executive Order 14075, which mandated the federal government “combat unlawful discrimination” and “address the significant disparities that LGBTQI+ youth face in the foster care system.” The SOGIE Institute cited this order in its project work plan, stating it offered an “unprecedented opportunity” to make child welfare services “more responsive” to the “unique needs of [LGBTQIA2S+] youth and their families.” It called President Biden’s LGBTQ+ affirming foster care rule an “inflection point,” charging child welfare agencies to take radical action. In the fall of 2024, the SOGIE Institute set about transforming local and state child welfare agencies across the nation. The draft work plan outlines five years worth of initiatives, including efforts to collect data about the sexual orientation and gender identity of children in foster care, and trainings to help child welfare workers “maximize SOGIE knowledge and practice competencies.” The institute also had plans to handpick child welfare workers from state and local agencies to participate in a “SOGIE Champions” program, where they would participate in a “robust training and coaching program that teaches the skills and knowledge necessary to implement evidence informed LGBTQIA2S+ best practices.” Screenshot from the SOGIE Institute project work plan. Biden officials were particularly interested in recruiting “champions” from child welfare systems in conservative states that opposed President Biden’s LGBTQ+ affirming foster care rule, records show. Liliana Chakrabarti, a child welfare program specialist at the Children’s Bureau, told SOGIE leaders that her staff had created a list of potential allies in 20 states whose attorneys general had opposed the rule, an August 2024 email shows. The SOGIE Institute planned to welcome its first group of “SOGIE Champions” in January 2025. Liliana Chakrabarti did not respond to The Daily Wire’s request for comment. The institute also planned to recruit and train “Lived Experience Consultants” who had been supported by child welfare systems and identified as “LGBTQIA2S+ or are parents or caregivers of LGBTQIA2S+ young people.” These individuals would consult with local child welfare agencies and help them embrace gender affirming policies. The SOGIE Institute only operated for six months. But during that time, the group hosted webinars on “Supporting LGBTQIA2S+ Young People and their Families Receiving Child Welfare Services” and “Ten Tips on Fostering Safety for LGBTQIA2S+ Youth in Foster Care.” The “tips” included using non-gendered language, hanging pride flags in child welfare offices, and introducing yourself using chosen pronouns. The group published a glossary of terms that defined each letter of the LGBTQIA2S+ acronym, saying it would be used “for all the work throughout the Administration of Children and Families” and also provided definitions of terms such as “queer,” “transgender,” and “transition.” “Child welfare is already widely tainted by gender ideology,” Hanford told The Daily Wire. “One can only imagine how much more thoroughly this 20-million-dollar plan would have rotted child protective systems, and how many more families would have been destroyed, had President Trump not won the election and halted the project.” Screenshot from the SOGIE Institute project work plan. The work plan showed one of the long-term goals of the SOGIE Institute was to address the problem of “over-representation of LGBTQIA2S+ in foster care,” but Chakrabarti recommended that the SOGIE Institute focus on a more “realistic” goal. “I think a more realistic long term goal would be: increased satisfaction of services by LGBTQIA2S+ youth in care,” wrote Chakrabarti. Transgender activists believe not supporting a child’s transgender identity is a form of harm and abuse. Parents across the country, including in California, Indiana, and Maryland, have had their children taken away by child welfare services for affirming their child’s sex. In the first part of this series, The Daily Wire reported on an Oregon mom who lost custody because she would not affirm her daughter’s transgender identity. Erin Friday, a lawyer and president of Our Duty-USA, told The Daily Wire that gender-affirming child welfare systems are unnecessarily increasing the number of kids in foster care. “The child welfare system was designed as a safety net for abused children, with family reunification as its primary goal,” Friday said. “It has since morphed into a system that wants to add to the foster care ledger.” “The primary beneficiaries are LGBTQ-affiliated nonprofits that can then seek additional taxpayer funding,” Friday added. “This scheme simultaneously uses the increased numbers to justify the false notion that parents are abandoning their gender dysphoric children.” Under President Trump, HHS has alerted all 50 states that affirming “biological reality” does not constitute child abuse or neglect under federal law. “Removing a child from their home must be based on objective evidence or imminent risk of serious harm. So a state’s decision to break up a family cannot be based solely on a parent’s objection to radical gender ideology or irreversible sex rejecting medical interventions,” said Alex Adams, the assistant secretary for the ACF, in a video published by HHS. Despite this recommendation, few states have clarified their legal code to ensure that affirming a child’s sex is not labeled as a form of child abuse. Many American parents who won’t affirm the transgender identity of their children are at risk of losing custody of their kids to the state. President Trump canceled the $20 million SOGIE Institute contract in January 2025 with Executive Order 14151, which eliminated diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, according to the grant listing. But despite the loss of funding, members of the group have continued to push their views. Before the creation of Biden’s SOGIE Institute, Weeks was the director of a collaborative of transgender activists organizations that provides guidance and training to child welfare agencies implementing gender affirming policies called the National SOGIE Center. Partners of the collaborative include the Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal. The National SOGIE Center has continued to produce LGBTQ+ resources and published a “Coming Out With Care” guidebook in the fall of 2025. PART ONE: SHE WOULDN’T CALL HER DAUGHTER ‘TRANS.’ THE STATE TOOK CUSTODY. PART TWO: THE EVIDENCE PROBLEM AT THE HEART OF BIDEN’S TRANS RULE