1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Every Child Deserves a Family Act . 2. Congressional findings and purposes (a) Findings Congress finds the following: (1) There is a shortage of qualified individuals willing to adopt or foster a child in the child welfare system. As a result, thousands of foster children lack a permanent and safe home. (2) In order to open more homes to foster children, child welfare agencies should work to eliminate sexual orientation, gender identity, and marital status discrimination and bias in adoption and foster care recruitment, selection, and placement procedures. (3) Of the estimated 427,910 children in the United States foster care system, more than 111,820 cannot return to their original families and are legally free for adoption. (A) 53,549 children were adopted in 2015, while 20,789 youth aged out of the foster care system. (B) Research shows that youth who age out of the foster care system are at a high risk for poverty, homelessness, incarceration, and early parenthood. (C) Increasing adoption rates, in addition to establishing permanency and decreasing risk factors for foster youth, can yield annual national cost savings between $3,300,000,000 and $6,300,000,000. (4) Experts agree that in many States, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth experience discrimination, harassment, and violence in the foster care system because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. (5) Approximately 60 percent of homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth were previously in foster care. According to the Urban Justice Center, many of these young people reported that living on the streets felt safer than living in their group or foster home. (6) According to the Williams Institute, an estimated 19 percent of same-sex couple households include children under 18 years of age. (7) The Williams Institute estimates that 3,000,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people have had a child and as many as 6,000,000 American adults and children have a lesbian, gay,