Special needs adoptions get the same tax credit. The difference is though that they get the credit whether they spent 10K on the adoption or not. Special needs adoptions are usually cheaper, but they are still allowed to take the entire credit (though not always all in the same tax year).
Domestic adoptions you can only take up to actual expenses (which usually would still run way over 10K). Some private adoptions though could be relatively inexpensive and those situations would not be able to take the full credit.
I wonder if the child must be a part of the foster care system already in order for the credit to kick in.
As a former guardian ad litem for the juvenile courts who re-upped a few years ago, I was amazed by all the changes wrought in the system during my hiatus ... the most dramatic of which were the way kids were now "fasttracked" through the system according to a strict timetable of dispositive dates (not terribly conducive to patching a family, actually) and the way all the best OCS workers had ended up a part of the adoption unit.
The push is definitely to get kids out of foster care ... even if it means termination of the parental rights which, sadly enough, is often warranted.
Thanks very much for the correction.