Time To Rethink Human Services As Trump Administration Dumps Costs On Counties

By Chuck Johnson, Minnesota Reformer

November 12, 2025

Sometimes bad news has more bad news buried inside it.

Let’s take the tax and spending bill Congress passed in July. Not only will it cause millions of people across the country to lose their food assistance and health care, but it will also unload a mass of new administrative requirements on states.

In Minnesota, the multiple new mandates — work requirements, additional eligibility and verification requirements – will fall on counties. That’s because in Minnesota, the state sets policy and oversees administration, but the counties do the client contact service delivery part of the job.

In addition to new administrative requirements, the bill reduces federal reimbursement for the administrative costs of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — i.e., SNAP or food stamps — from 50% to 25%. That means counties now have to pay 75% of the cost of running SNAP.

The Minnesota Department of Human Services is estimating that administering the new Medicaid work requirements will cost the state, county and tribes $165 million annually. The new Medicaid eligibility checks will cost another $5 million.

The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families estimates that the state and counties will lose $39 million a year in SNAP federal administrative funding, and increased workloads will push that number higher.

Minnesota counties are raising the alarm.

Exactly how much of these costs fall to counties, however, is ultimately dependent on decisions by the state. The state could provide additional funds to counties to offset some of these costs.

One problem, though: The state is facing a looming budget deficit.

So, if this is a crisis, what’s the opportunity?

Blow up the system.

Or, to put it more nicely, maybe it’s finally time to seriously reexamine the state-county relationship that sits at the core of how we run our human services system.

Minnesota hasn’t really examined the state-county system in over 15 years. DHS and counties have attempted several partnership efforts. These are helpful to state-county relations, but lack the resources needed for serious restructuring work.

The last effort — sparked by a 2007 report from the Office of Legislative Auditor — resulted in little change.

The OLA was primarily concerned with variation in services and outcomes between counties, as well as inconsistency in state oversight.

Let’s start with another issue the OLA explored — the one that drives current concerns: The county role in financing human services.

Minnesota counties have a small role in human services financing, averaging 4-5% of human services spending. But it is not a small dollar amount: $837 million in 2021 (the last year of available data).

Much of this money goes to support the counties’ role in service delivery — eligibility, assessments, case management, etc. Counties also fund a portion of some services, notably large shares of children’s services (child protection, foster care, etc.) and mental health services.

This is a problem. Counties have different taxing capacities, which can result in uneven access to services across the state.

These funding arrangements are largely historic anachronisms — a collection of decisions made over time with no guiding strategy.

And it’s not getting better. Earlier this year, Gov. Tim Walz proposed shifting some of the cost of disability services to counties.

And now the federal government is dumping their budget problem on counties.

Layering more random financing responsibilities on top of this mess seems inadvisable.

But you can’t have the money conversation without having the roles-and-responsibilities conversation. What should the state do? What should counties do?

Minnesota is in the minority among states, one of just 10 or so that has counties deliver services. In most states people go to state offices for services.

Talking with colleagues in other states over the years raised some possible advantages of state administration. For example:

• When service delivery is defaulted to the counties, policy makers may ignore how service delivery impacts the goals of a new policy. With state administration, the people in charge of delivering the services can be more easily engaged in designing the policy.
• State-administered systems can more easily respond to crises or emergencies by quickly reallocating or supplementing staffing and other resources.
• Business processes can be more easily redesigned to fully leverage new technology.

In the current structure, with 87 counties doing any of the things is cumbersome at best. Counties have different staffing capacities and structures, union contracts and IT systems.

And, they are accountable to locally elected officials who don’t set policy, which falls on the Legislature.

None of this is to say the counties are doing a bad job or doing something wrong. I worked with counties for decades, and from front-line workers to leadership, they are dedicated to helping Minnesotans in need.

Counties value their role in delivering services to their communities, and that bond to local communities is an advantage of county service delivery.

And, of course, suggesting the state take on more responsibility for service delivery raises its own set of questions – and healthy skepticism. The failure to prevent fraud in multiple human services programs does not engender confidence in the operational capacity of state agencies, and the state’s failure to improve human services IT systems is a significant problem for counties right now.

But the system may be at a breaking point. And continuing to ignore this — especially in the face of the new federal requirements — is only going to compound the problem.

These sorts of structural and operational issues often fall by the wayside. They are big and complicated, take lots of resources, and have no obvious political constituency.

But counties see the steamroller coming.

And maybe the fraud problem highlights what happens when we don’t proactively deal with basic operational problems.

When I was in state government we’d sometimes talk about “second term issues” — not the flashy policies of the first term, but the meat and potatoes of good government.

We never had occasion to talk about “third term issues,” — but this seems like a perfect fit.

The Minnesota Reformer is an independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to keeping Minnesotans informed and unearthing stories other outlets can’t or won’t tell..