Mayor Zohran Mamdani has tapped Rebecca Jones Gaston, a former senior Biden Administration official who spent time in foster care as an infant, to be his commissioner of the NYC Administration for Children’s Services.
The mayor plans to announce Ms. Gaston’s appointment in a news release Tuesday, City Hall officials confirmed to NBC New York.
“I am excited to announce the appointment of Rebecca Jones Gaston as the new Commissioner of ACS. She has dedicated her career to building smarter, stronger systems that keep children safe and families together,” Mayor Mamdani said in a statement. “With nearly three decades of experience in this space, she will ensure that we build a city where young people are safe and flourishing, and their families are supported as their most important resources and protectors,” the Mayor said.
Gaston previously served as the commissioner for the Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACYF) in the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services. She also oversaw child welfare systems in Oregon and Maryland.
The mayor’s office said they were impressed by Gaston’s record — for instance, reducing the number of children in foster care by 50% as executive director of the Social Services Administration in Maryland.
While leading ACYF under President Biden, Gaston expanded legal representation for families, protected LGBTQIA+ youth in care, and increased access for kinship caregivers, according to a draft news release reviewed by NBC New York. She oversaw the approval of prevention plans under the Family First Prevention Services Act, the release said, which prioritizes coordinating children to stay with family rather than being placed in foster care systems.
Gaston, who is Black, said in a 2023 panel discussion she was born in Minnesota then adopted and raised by a white family in Iowa. She has previously described herself as “born into the [child welfare] system.”
She will take the helm at an agency reckoning with a disproportionate number of Black and brown children entering foster care, despite dramatic overall reductions in the size of the city’s foster care population in recent decades.
Currently, about 3,000 children a year are found to be facing circumstances dangerous enough that caseworkers and family court judges decide to place them in foster care, according to city data. In 2011, almost 6,000 children entered foster care.
As NBC New York first reported in February, City Hall named an interim commissioner, Melissa Hester, after passing over two previous finalists for the post: Michelle Burrell and Angela Burton. Both were outspoken critics of the outcomes for Black children in foster care.
Burton’s candidacy was especially controversial, having caused some alarm in the city’s child welfare community, multiple sources previously told NBC New York. Burton described herself as “an abolitionist,” having advocated for the abolition of ACS and described the agency as “the family police” in social media posts.
The sources said the Mamdani administration had been made aware of concerns that the quality of child safety investigations and worker morale might erode under a commissioner who had called for ACS to be defunded and abolished.
ACS commissioners have weighed for decades pressure to limit the trauma of separating families with the risks of leaving children in potentially dangerous situations in their homes.
Gaston has also made public statements in the past validating those who have called for the abolition of child welfare systems.
When asked for her interpretation of the abolitionist movement during a May 2023 panel discussion with the National Press Foundation on foster care reform, Gaston said, “It’s really hard to think about anything other than kind of dismantling it entirely and creating something different. Now, while I absolutely agree we’ve got to dismantle major pieces of the system, for me, it’s a balance.”
“Let’s dismantle the pieces that we know are disruptive to families and aren’t yielding the outcomes that we want,” she continued.