NJ a few years ago had a massive scandal with their Department of Youth and Family Services (DYFS).
Apparently they had lost track of thousands of children that were no longer in their foster homes and not yet 18.
The story has basically been scrubbed from the internet from what I can see.
I tried looking for the story, Google is about useless in finding it so far.
I know someone who works in the Florida department of children. (The name has been rebranded several times and I don’t recall today’s name.) He told me that they are currently “missing” 450 children out of approximately 44,000. The number missing or possibly dead is never lower than that. Yet I can’t find a single mention online. Several years ago when I wrote about this I found more than sufficient information with little effort. Today I can find only the dismal Governor Bush failures at privatization. (Actually, I don’t know that they were failures. I believe they simply didn’t improve the numbers much over the dismal ongoing bad numbers you get with the state running things. I do know this from personal experience; it is almost impossible for grandparents to “rescue” a child from state care. The department gets thousands of dollars for each child each month and THAT is power.)