Legislative Update from Rep. Iler — June 22, 2026

NC House Passes Dominique Moody Act, Overhauling North Carolina Child Welfare Services

Raleigh, NC — The North Carolina House of Representatives recently passed Senate Bill 280, the Dominique Moody Act, aimed at fundamentally transforming how the state tracks, investigates, and assigns liability in child welfare cases. The bill is named for the six-year-old girl whose death exposed repeated failures by Mecklenburg County social services.

Led by Representatives Allen Chesser (R-Nash) and Carla Cunningham (U-Mecklenburg), the bill introduces advanced data-driven oversight and shifts structural accountability within the state’s child protection laws.

The Dominique Moody Act makes multiple changes, including:


• Predictive Risk Modeling: Launching a proactive pilot program utilizing state-validated data models to detect hidden patterns of abuse or chronic neglect across fragmented, separate reports before serious harm occurs. 
  
• Child Welfare Escalation Team: Establishing a state-level specialist team to intervene and directly assist local counties with child welfare assessments in designated high-risk homes. 
  
• Civil Liability to Agencies: The North Carolina Department of Justice (DOJ) is mandated to deliver a strategy that shifts legal and financial liability over to individual counties when a local department of social services fails to follow state policies or statutory requirements.

“The Dominique Moody Act is about making sure warning signs don’t fall through the cracks and that accountability exists when the system fails vulnerable children,” said Rep. Frank Iler “This legislation takes meaningful steps toward preventing future tragedies.”