FreeWIS · why it’s free — the argument, shown
Every dot is one state’s own child-welfare data system — the thing a caseworker has to fight at 2 a.m. to keep a child safe. Bigger dot, more money. The color is where it stands today. This is only the money that’s on the public record, and it’s still billions.
Every number here is cited. States have to win legislative funding for these systems and report it to the federal government — so these are public record, not our estimate. These are the 31 states we could document ($3.22B total); 21 more have no public figure we could document. Tap or hover any state for its source. Dio names its source when it answers a policy question.
The federal government’s own scorekeeper
After ten years and $2.28 billion claimed, 30% of the 75 CCWIS projects started nationwide since 2016 are fully operational — 10% of the new builds.
Builds that reach full operation take 61 months on average.
— ASPE, June 2026 (U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services). National figure; shown as context, not added to the state total above.
Every one of these was going to be the one that finally worked.
They were all sold the same way: this is enormously hard, it takes years and hundreds of millions, trust the people who’ve done it before. It isn’t a story about bad luck. A system that’s hard, slow, and expensive to build is a system that keeps getting paid to be built — and one a small county or a tribe can never afford. The difficulty is the product.
FreeWIS is the counter-argument you can click. It’s built, it runs on synthetic data, and if compliance is your job you can generate a test caseload’s report and check it yourself. Not “could, if.” Now.
The point is not outrage. It is a number nobody can argue with. So:
Every number here is cited to the record. That’s the whole point.
Dots are one U.S. state each, placed at the state's geographic center, sized (√-area) by reported spend on its current child-welfare case-management system effort, and colored by status. Numbers are taken verbatim from our tally of state legislative appropriations for CCWIS (total $3,215.55M across 31 of the 52 states and territories tracked; 21 have no public figure yet; 4 failed or troubled). Connecticut, Maryland, Pennsylvania & Tennessee ($400.6M combined) are dashed because we have not yet verified or separated their figures; the verified-only subtotal is about $2.81B. Figures mix single-year appropriations, per-biennium figures (e.g. Virginia), and multi-year total-project estimates (California's ~$1.7B, the largest single figure), so the total is a documented floor, not a market-size estimate. About 21 of 52 states and territories report no public figure and are shown neutral. The ASPE $2.28B / 30% / 10% / 61-month figures are national context and are not added to the state total. Sources appear with each state. US base map: US Census cartographic boundaries (public domain), albersUsa projection.