More with Less? Confronting the New Reality in Public Benefits

The SNAP and Medicaid provisions in H.R. 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed by Congress, include a flurry of changes that will turn up the heat on human services agencies and create additional processes and restrictions that risk kicking people off food and health benefits through administrative churn.

• For the first time ever, states will be subject to paying a share of the cost of SNAP benefits, calculated based on the level of their payment error rate. With billions of dollars at stake, state budgets will be under crushing pressure to keep this highly complex and poorly understood calculation low. The financial implications raise the stakes for how SNAP agencies weigh the balance between more onerous verification requirements and state policy options that promote benefits access.
• States’ fiscal outlooks will be further hampered by an increase in their cost sharing requirements for SNAP program administration, from 50 percent to 75 percent of total costs. Together, these changes could easily more than double the cost for states to run their SNAP programs, at a time when they are being told to drastically improve their performance.
• New Medicaid and expanded SNAP work requirements will add additional reporting burdens on millions of Americans that in turn need to be processed by a thinly stretched human services workforce. A broad body of evidence has shown that many affected individuals are at risk of losing benefits as a result of the administrative burdens to verify work requirements, even if they are eligible.
• Increased frequency of Medicaid eligibility redeterminations for the Medicaid expansion population—from 12 to 6 months—will effectively double the administrative workload for states and the number of opportunities for eligible Medicaid recipients to be disenrolled for procedural reasons.

The implications for human services agencies are an increased workload with fewer resources to meet the demand. The implications for the communities served are more hoops to jump through and more opportunities to fall through the cracks.

This mindset is what guides our work at SteadyIQ. We are proactively looking at the evolving policy landscape, listening to both human services agency leaders and the communities they serve to equip them with technology that rises to the challenges ahead.

For example, as the dust settles on passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, agencies are confronted with what can feel like a stark choice—pass the burden of stricter and more frequent eligibility requirements onto customers or risk financially untenable penalties while drowning staff in paperwork processing. We are building a different path. By leveraging open banking technology that has become the industry standard in the private sector, we can enable customers to unlock their own data, removing the guesswork and burden from income and work verification requirements. In turn, this data can be passed to agencies in a way that enables one-touch case processing with the utmost confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the information. The result? A public benefits system that is easier to navigate, simpler to administer, and worthy of trust.

Resilient leaders navigate adversity by avoiding choices that feel like a zero-sum game. When pressure builds, we can choose to pass that pressure onto others or we can find ways to strategically alleviate it. That’s not to say that the road ahead is easy, nor that we can avoid causing any harm. The convergence of federal policy change and resource constraints is real, but it can be met with clear-eyed leadership, resilient mindsets, and collaborative innovation.

I for one remain unabashedly hopeful for the future because I believe in the people that underpin the human services sector; a community that is mission-driven and grounded in a sense of purpose and justice—but that is also pragmatic and experienced in making the most in a resource-constrained world. And because their work constantly spans individual lives and complex systems, human services leaders have the vision to know what must change, not just what must be managed. This is why, as they yet again are asked to answer the call to do “more with less”, I know they will answer.

Want to talk more? Join me next month at APHSA’s Economic Mobility and Well-Being Conference (EMWB) in Minneapolis, MN. I’ll be presenting alongside Dan Giacomi, Division Director at the Connecticut Department of Social Services; Amber Gillum, Deputy State Director at the South Carolina Department of Social Services; and Jennifer Wagner, Director of Medicaid Eligibility and Enrollment at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, during the session, “Urgent Innovation: Confronting the New Reality in Public Benefits.”