Missouri’s social services department has in recent years been reprimanded by a judge for illegally denying food assistance and scrutinized by the federal government for massive Medicaid application backlogs.
And for more than a decade, the agency has vowed to tackle these problems by overhauling the computer systems that help determine whether people qualify for social safety net programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income people.
But needed technology changes are once again on hold, thanks to a barrage of deadlines mandated by Congress this summer as part of President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — most notably work requirements and more frequent renewals for Medicaid.
Instead of moving forward with a long-promised modernization of its eligibility software, the Missouri Department of Social Services must focus its time and staff toward meeting sweeping federal deadlines in Trump’s new law. And that means the integrated SNAP-Medicaid system won’t arrive anytime soon.
Plans to combine eligibility software for SNAP and Medicaid into a single, updated system will have to wait until at least 2028, said Toi Wilde, chief information officer for the Missouri Department of Social Services.
“You don’t want this type of huge, major policy shift that you have going,” Wilde said. “Going into a full implementation of a new system would be extremely challenging [during this shift].”
News of the delay inspired dismay among those who have been battling with the department for years to ensure eligible Missourians get access to benefits they are entitled to receive. What’s worse, advocates say, is that delays come as the department is trying to appeal the 2024 federal court decision that found its administration of the SNAP program illegally denied food benefits to Missourians.
Katherine Holley, an attorney for Legal Services of Eastern Missouri who defended plaintiffs in that lawsuit, said her organization’s clients are still struggling to get department staff on the phone to complete required eligibility interviews.
Clients call the department trying to complete their interview, she said, only to hear that there are hundreds of people in front of them in the queue. One client was recently terminated from SNAP, she said, when a document he submitted to the department online got lost.
“I reached out to the agency, and then they found it, and they opened his benefits back up,” Holley said. “But if he hadn’t reached out to us, he would just be without benefits.”
System struggles
The Missouri Department of Social Services resource center located in Columbia, on April 18, 2023 (Clara Bates/Missouri Independent).The department’s attempt to combine its systems in 2013 ended earlier this year after a decade-long legal battle that cost the state $92.7 million, including interest.
The department contracted with the software company EngagePoint in June 2013 to build a system to meet requirements in the Affordable Care Act and handle eligibility and enrollment for SNAP and Medicaid.
Missouri didn’t expand Medicaid until 2021, but the 2010 federal law required states to make other changes. States had to start using a new method to measure income to determine Medicaid eligibility for most adults, and they had to update their eligibility and enrollment systems to exchange information with the federal marketplace.
The department had big ambitions for its tech upgrades: “a comprehensive, fully integrated, state-of-the-art automated human services eligibility, enrollment and case management system,” according to its January 2013 request for proposals.
But the state terminated the contract three years early, with the new system partially built. Missourians’ SNAP cases stayed in the old system, alongside Medicaid for elderly or disabled Missourians. Only the Medicaid cases subject to new federal income measurement were migrated to the newer system.
Advocates and experts say separate systems can cause problems.
Integrated systems allow people to take fewer steps to apply for and maintain SNAP and Medicaid benefits, which reduces the chance that they’ll be wrongly denied benefits. Well-integrated systems are also better at handling the complexity of overlapping but distinct federal eligibility rules for SNAP and Medicaid so state employees bear less of that burden.
Jennifer Wagner, director of Medicaid eligibility and enrollment at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said integrated systems make it easier for states to offer combined applications for Medicaid and SNAP and for information to carry over across programs when people complete annual renewals or submit changes.
Combined systems streamline state employees’ work, and the savings gets passed down to people accessing the programs.
“From a caseworker perspective, because so much of the eligibility determination keys off each other and uses the same information, you can touch a case much less often,” Wagner said.
Holley said a lack of coordination between Missouri’s SNAP and Medicaid systems has caused clients to lose benefits, partly because annual renewals for Medicaid and SNAP happen on different timelines.
A past client updated their address while renewing their Medicaid coverage, Holley said. The address didn’t transfer to the other system, so that when it was time for the client to recertify their SNAP eligibility, the paperwork was sent to their old address. The client lost their benefits.
“Those systems don’t talk,” Holley said.
Barriers to access
Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the federal SNAP lawsuit said continuing challenges completing annual renewals are part of the reason it’s so important for the court not to let the department off the hook.
While the department argued in its request for an appeal that it had already addressed the harms to the individual plaintiffs in the case by granting them interviews and benefits, the attorneys said plaintiffs are likely to encounter the same denials for failure to interview.
“All of these people want to keep their benefits and are trying their hardest,” Holley said.
One of the plaintiffs, Mary Holmes, lost SNAP benefits during the lawsuit because the department said she incorrectly filled out recertification paperwork, Holley said.
Data the department is court-ordered to submit to the court each month suggest improvements in the number of times people get disconnected when the call center is overloaded. It also shows fewer SNAP applications are being rejected only due to failure to complete an interview.
But Katie Deabler, an attorney from the National Center for Law and Economic Justice who is also representing plaintiffs in the case, said the department hasn’t been submitting data long enough to demonstrate improvements will last.
Deabler, who has worked on SNAP cases in multiple states, said application volumes often vary with the seasons. Applications tend to pick up in the summer and over the winter holidays, when kids can’t receive food in school.
Though the average time someone spends on hold waiting for an interview has decreased from 57 minutes in February to 23 minutes in October, average wait times were slightly up in July, August, September and October from a year ago. That’s in four of the six months where there are two years of data.
The department has fallen short of a benchmark U.S. District Court Judge Douglas Harpool set in May of 90% of all callers spending no more than 20 minutes on hold. In October, that was true of 62% of people waiting for a SNAP interview. The longest anyone spent on hold that month, the department reported, was 2 hours and 22 minutes, down from a peak of 6 hours and 3 minutes in March.
“Agencies that are trying to fix these sorts of big, systemic problems,” Deabler said, “they really can’t just sit back and take a break just because there’s a few months that looked okay.”
“A perfect storm in a terrible way”
Wagner, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the “Big Beautiful Bill” has created “a perfect storm in a terrible way.”
The law requires states next year to begin implementing sweeping policy changes to Medicaid with sharply reduced administrative funding for SNAP and under intense pressure to minimize errors in SNAP payments.
“That means less resources and a ton more work and a lot more severe consequences if the work is not done perfectly,” Wagner said.
Beginning in October 2027, states with SNAP error rates of 6% or higher will have to pay 5 to 15% of the cost of the food benefits they issue. States’ current performance will be used to determine if and how much they must pay.
“So states have not a short timeframe, but a negative timeframe, to affect the error rate that will determine whether the state can maintain the program or not,” Wagner said.
Missouri’s error rate was 9.42% in fiscal year 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Wilde, the state social services department’s chief information officer, said that while the department focuses on implementing the federal law, it’s making changes to streamline staffers’ workflow while planning for the eventual replacement of its systems.
The department has developed a process to automatically transfer some information from SNAP applications into the eligibility system, Wilde said, without requiring “a bunch of manual touches” from staffers, saving about 400 hours of work so far.
“What we’ve been doing,” she said, “is reimagining, in the intermediacy, til different systems…are put in place, what are some low tech solutions that still have big, really good [impacts] and that can help the process?”
Wilde said the department has also upgraded its automated call center technology so Missourians can get more information about their SNAP and Medicaid cases without having to wait on hold.
The department has also started work to allow its call center technology to feed more information to its eligibility systems, Wilde said, in anticipation of more frequent Medicaid recertifications next year.
For Missourians struggling to access needed assistance, the stakes are high.
Deabler said that regardless of pressures from the federal government, the state has a legal responsibility to provide SNAP benefits to people who are eligible.
“States owe the same duty to the people who rely on this program to feed their families that they always did,” Deabler said.
Holley said she and others at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, “keep see[ing] people cycling back through, needing our help again and again.”
“In theory, all of these systems should work to keep people who qualify for benefits…in receipt of them,” Holley said. “They should continue to receive benefits. They’re doing what they need to do. It’s frustrating.”