The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) created complex new eligibility, verification, and accountability requirements across Medicaid and SNAP, with clear spillover into workforce and education programs that serve many of the same people. States will need real investments in technology modernization, process redesign, and data integration to administer these changes at scale.
The timeline to implement changes is tight—but the disruption is also an opportunity. If states treat OBBBA implementation as a forcing function to strengthen statewide integrated data systems, they can meet compliance needs while also building a stronger, smarter, efficient, and effective safety net in other ways: reducing unnecessary paperwork, lowering administrative burden and costs, coordinating service delivery across programs, measuring and improving outcomes, improving program integrity, and reducing fraud and error.
At the center of the opportunity is a simple idea: Big policy changes are the moment to upgrade systems. Specifically, this is a chance to advance how states store, share, and integrate data across HHS, labor, and education—not just for reporting, but to reduce administrative costs by making eligibility and recertification more accurate, faster, and less burdensome. States can do all this while improving outcomes for clients by serving people comprehensively across work, training, education and income support programs. To generate efficiencies and real improvements across programs and leverage new and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, state agencies have an opportunity to lean forward and build systems that collect data once and then use it many times to increase program integrity and better serve beneficiaries.