In high school, Sen. Jeff Timberlake remembers being the guy who would stand up to bullies.

A three-sport athlete, he wasn’t afraid to take on all comers if it meant standing up for someone who couldn’t defend themselves.

“If there was a kid in school that got picked on you could count on Jeff, cause I was one of the bigger kids in school, that Jeff was going to protect them,” he said during a recent break in the Senate. “If you were going to pick on them, here, why don’t you try me for a while?”

Now at age 65, the Leavitt Area High School graduate still feels compelled to protect senior citizens, those with disabilities and children. Especially children.

To that end, he is sponsoring legislation that he thinks will improve the state’s ability to protect those who are most vulnerable — children in unstable living situations that have sometimes ended in death.

The bill, LD 779, would establish a new cabinet-level state agency called the Department of Child and Family Services. The commissioner would be appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Legislature.

It would remove services that relate to child welfare from the state Department of Health and Human Services.

A similar bill passed the Senate last session but failed in the House. 

A DHHS spokeswoman said the department has not yet taken a position on Timberlake’s bill, but that the department believes that having the Office of Child and Family Services within DHHS “has improved efforts at preventing and responding to child abuse and neglect.”

That’s because it makes it easier to ensure that families are getting all the services they need, such as “health coverage, nutritious food, and mental health and substance use disorder services, among others,” according to a statement provided by DHHS spokeswoman Jackie Farwell.

Yet Timberlake sees it differently.

An eighth-generation farmer from Turner — he and his family run Ricker Hill Orchards — Timberlake thinks the department would be more accountable if it had a separate commissioner who reported directly to the Legislature.

He points to the four child deaths in the summer of 2021 as raising the issue to a crisis level, one that has sparked an investigation into how the cases were handled and a lawsuit filed by legislators seeking to see the case files themselves.

Timberlake is in his third term on the Government Oversight Committee and is known for asking blunt questions to try to elicit direct answers from state officials.

“Part of the problems in these murder cases, there’s some fault somewhere and nobody’s been able to pinpoint where that fault is,” he said.

The state watchdog office recently began the public release of reviews it’s conducting of the four child death cases. On Friday, the committee will hold a public hearing to take testimony on a recent report on the death of Hailey Goding, 3, who died of an overdose after finding her mother’s drugs.

The state Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability found in that case, DHHS officials followed all proper protocols according to state law.

In the Goding case and the three others under review, the families of the children all had prior contact with DHHS, leading lawmakers to question whether appropriate steps were taken to protect the children.

As a Republican, Timberlake thinks that the child welfare department should be run in a manner similar to the way private businesses are run.

“If we’d had these deaths in a three-month period with a private company, somebody would have been held responsible,” he said. “We’d have had every company in the world in there wanting to know what in the devil went wrong. I think it’s funny that because it’s a state run agency they don’t get treated the same as private industry. And that bothers me.”