(AP Photo/Darron Cummings) Shawnee Wilson holds her son, who was in foster care in Indianapolis due to her opioid addiction., in August 2017. D emocratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon was furious and heartbroken. Nearly three years after Wyden launched an overhaul of the country’s foster care system, the bipartisan legislation he had championed was dying . At 2:47 a.m. on a December morning in 2016, Wyden, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, stepped into the well of the Senate to plead with his colleagues to pass the sweeping Family First Prevention Services Act that he had crafted alongside the committee’s chairman Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican. The measure would free up federal funds to help families at risk of losing their children to foster care. For decades, child-welfare advocates have argued that Washington had created a “perverse incentive ” to tear families apart. Since the federal government started funding child welfare programs in 1961, almost all the...