"They're not child-welfare experts," said Ms. Kleiser, whose agency has handled 23,000 immigrant cases since its founding five years ago.

Even those child-welfare experts who have almost nothing good to say about the Bush administration's policies toward the poor regard this proposal as innovative and much needed.

Several influential child-welfare experts from both liberal and conservative camps say the vaunted notions of what family preservation can accomplish should be sharply scaled back.

Dr. Zugravescu completed a 10-day visit to Washington, during which she met with Government officials and child-welfare experts, just as her country was thrown once again into political turmoil.

But some child-welfare experts say these changes - the move away from keeping families intact and the push for foster care and adoption - may go too far in the other direction.

But child-welfare experts said that the city would probably lose more than it gains because many families will disintegrate, and the children will end up in the foster care system.

Other child-welfare experts affiliated with hospitals in the city suggested that the decline in deaths could reflect improvements in the emergency medical treatment given severely abused children.

He said that there was a "strong fear" among child-welfare experts that the children born of surrogate-parenting agreements would eventually suffer these problems, but that there were no studies to verify the theory.

The report, prepared by a panel of child-welfare experts, also found sloppy procedures for transferring cases within the city's Child Welfare Administration and inadequate monitoring of troubled families.

Even if the legislation eliminates certain hurdles to adoption, some child-welfare experts said that it was only a first step toward improving the sprawling, fragmented foster-care system, which encompasses a half-million children.