The Department of Human Services (DHS) is a conglomeration of waste, fraud, and abuse. Minnesotans are keenly aware of that fact. How this problem should be remedied, however, is a work in progress. This year, the Senate Health and Human Services Committee spearheaded an effort to get facts from the agency amid whistleblower confessions and firings. A few options to fix the agency’s issues or dissolve it entirely have been floated, however, this legislative session is short and a full transformation of the agency over a couple of months will be impossible. So far, the Senate has heard Senator Rich Draheim’s Senate File 4128 to transfer the handling of certain grant programs from DHS to a third party, and Senator Koran’s Senate File 3929 to require experienced auditors to track and assess expenditures.

SF 4128 removes direct care and treatment from DHS and establishes it as an independent state agency. It requires a third-party auditor to oversee certain grant programs, financial activity, and performance-based budgeting. By the means of a third-party babysitter, this program would remove almost all opportunities for the Department to continue its long history of malpractice. There are proposals that the agency be broken into smaller, more manageable pieces, and this would partially serve that need. We want to know where the abundance of taxpayer money is going and have peace of mind that financial mishandling is virtually impossible.

SF 3929 is a proposal for a full life-cycle audit of DHS. This is similar to the above legislation, but it specifies that eight to nine full-time staff from the Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA) would be designated to the task. OLA is our legislative and citizen watchdog organization for all state agencies. The OLA has full access and subpoena power to execute its tasks, which outside organizations do not. That power gives them access to all information within the agency, which other contracted-third parties may not have. This legislation would provide the critical information needed to guide the legislature on how and where the changes are needed. 

While I think the above are steps in the right direction, complete restructuring needs to occur. The bureaucracy grew to be a monstrosity, sucking every dollar possible from the state while making the jobs of our county providers harder. Complete deletion of DHS sounds great in theory, but without knowing where exactly they went wrong in the first place, we will be without guardrails to prevent it from happening again. It would be much more effective to downsize the agency in a move to restructure. We need to reduce the main agency to a quarter of the size it is now, take the savings that will come from reducing the size and give it to the counties for social services. Counties and individual providers are hands-on, delivering essential services, and they would know best how to handle their funding. The details of liability and legality need to be worked out and will take time. I hope to help build a solid, reasonable plan to restructure DHS. Minnesotans need and deserve an agency that will serve them without danger of waste, fraud, and abuse.

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