Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Flashback: Minnesota To Break Up Its Largest Agency: This Is "No" Turning Point for Public Accountability

by


Photo Credit: @StarTribune / Featured: Minnesota Department of Human Services Commissioner Jodi Harpstead


After years of mounting dysfunction, the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS)—the state’s largest agency—is being broken up in one of the most significant government restructurings in recent state history. The move, which will take effect in 2025, reflects a hard reckoning with the agency’s long-standing struggles: financial mismanagement, leadership instability, and systemic breakdowns in oversight.

For years, DHS has operated as a bureaucratic behemoth—managing more than $20 billion annually and overseeing programs that affect one in five Minnesotans. It has been responsible for everything from mental health facilities and substance abuse treatment to adoption, child care, housing, and Medicaid. But this enormous scope came at a cost: silos of miscommunication, oversight failures, and recurring scandals that undermined public trust.


Among the most damning issues were major financial errors. Auditors and investigations uncovered tens of millions in overpayments to health providers, child care fraud, billing mistakes in tribal treatment programs, and an outdated technology infrastructure ill-equipped to manage such a sprawling operation. These weren’t minor bookkeeping issues—they were symptomatic of an organization that had grown too large to govern effectively.


The public fallout became impossible to ignore. In 2019, two top DHS officials resigned abruptly, sparking further investigations. As controversies mounted, calls to break up the agency intensified. Lawmakers across party lines began to question not just the agency’s competence but also the wisdom of concentrating so many essential services under one administrative roof. In response, the Minnesota Legislature passed a landmark restructuring bill in 2023. Under the plan, DHS will be divided into three distinct entities:


  1. The Department of Direct Care and Treatment (DCT), which will oversee the state's psychiatric hospitals, group homes, and other residential treatment programs. This will be the largest of the new departments, with nearly 5,000 employees.

  2. The Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF), which will take over child protection, adoption, early learning, and related family support services. Between 600 to 1,100 staff will be transferred to this new agency.

  3. A refocused DHS, which will shrink in size but continue to manage Medicaid, disability services, housing assistance, and other core social programs.

The restructuring will cost an estimated $4 million annually through at least 2027 to support additional leadership roles, HR departments, and legal infrastructure for the new agencies. Critics have raised concerns about the added administrative cost and the potential for inter-agency communication gaps. But supporters argue that the benefits—greater accountability, better oversight, and more focused missions—far outweigh the risks.


Commissioner Jodi Harpstead, who took over the agency amid its crisis in 2019, has been a vocal supporter of the transformation. She described the early phase of her leadership as “Operation Swiss Watch,” focused on rebuilding trust, strengthening leadership, and enforcing more rigorous internal controls. Under her guidance, DHS has made some strides toward modernization and transparency, but the structural limits of the agency made deeper reform nearly impossible without a fundamental change.


Advocates say the breakup offers a much-needed opportunity to rethink how human services are delivered in Minnesota. Smaller, mission-specific agencies can respond more nimbly to the populations they serve. For example, a department solely focused on children and families will be better equipped to respond to the state’s growing child protection challenges—without being buried under unrelated mandates.


Still, the road ahead won’t be easy. Transitioning thousands of employees, reassigning responsibilities, and ensuring seamless delivery of essential services during the reorganization will require enormous coordination and political will. There’s also the question of oversight—will the new agencies be held to higher standards, or will they replicate the same bureaucratic pitfalls under new names?


The stakes are high. For thousands of Minnesotans—children in foster care, seniors on Medicaid, families relying on mental health services—this isn’t about government restructuring; it’s about the quality and reliability of the services that shape their daily lives. The success of the DHS breakup won’t just be measured by budget audits or org charts, but by whether it leads to real improvements for the people who rely on these programs the most.


In the end, Minnesota’s decision to break up DHS reflects a deeper truth: sometimes, the only way to fix a system that’s broken beyond repair is to start over—thoughtfully, transparently, and with an unwavering focus on the people it's meant to serve.


Rebuttal

Unfortunately, this is not starting over; this isn’t addressing the issue—the common denominator in all DHS’s problems over the last several decades is “the people employed within it,” from appointing governors and commissioners to the type of workforce those commissioners hire, and the refusal of all those above to follow the respective regulations associated with the obligations and execution of each employment task—and the complicity of the State of Minnesota at large to hold these criminals “listed here,” not beyond or outside this list but within these categories of criminals, accountable for dissenting from procedural policy, violating federal, state, and program regulations, and breaking the law.

This is compounded by the fraud hiding behind the Minnesota Paradox, which is a Roger B. Taney–opinionated society that grants and restricts access to legal protection and justice under established laws based on who the plaintiffs and defendants are. This results in a systematically created vulnerable, low–access-to-income society, perfect for placement in DHS and related programs and institutions such as police stations, jails, prisons, courts, hospitals, subsidized housing programs, subsidized energy programs, and subsidized transportation programs, all of which drive funds into the department as well as those institutions—meaning the government funding going in is astronomical. What we have proven again and again for the last two decades is an operation in which the eligible people whom Minnesota has received funding on behalf of are being abused, held without their consent through means of corruption, retaliation, and brute force, while DHS itself is stealing the money.

Systematic discrimination throughout the state has to stop in order to stop DHS failure. Eugenics has to end in order to stop DHS failure. Transparency and structural inclusion of the eligible enrollees has to begin to stop DHS failures. Equal protection and prosecution under the laws has to begin to stop failure in DHS. The problem with making these changes is that, among all states in the nation, Minnesota is the one where equal protection and enforcement under the law has been judicially requested by Black Americans since the 1800s, and Minnesota’s response to that equal participation in the justice system has always been, and remains, the willingness to send the nation into domestic war before allowing that equality to occur. And so, the racist mechanisms that allow medically and financially devastating criminality against Black people to prevail is not in Minnesota culture; rather, it is Minnesota culture. Disabled Black Americans, descendants of chattel slavery, and to a lesser degree Indigenous bodies (women and children), are being fed to these systems at the foundational level. They are fewer in numerical enrollment, but they are forced in through external systemic injustice and held in through coordinated systemic corruption longer, to be systematically and eugenically presented to the public as the face of this problem within a society that has been programmed not to pay attention and to exhibit hostility when it is these specific faces of color. None of this is accidental; it is done to keep the public away from the specifics of what is happening and what needs to change.

Current trending fraud is “proving” all of this factual, as far as what specific populations are having their members systematically fed to these systems, which the current administration, via President Donald Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk’s DOGE, has been the first to indiscriminately bring to the public. Unfortunately, and accurate to historical patterns, “indiscriminately” fell apart as soon as Minnesota and the Department of Human Services were left to their own devices. The public was once again fed blackface to protect DHS internal, majorly white offenders, and preferred “English language learning” populations and shell companies to beguile the American public into believing there were no disabled victims, whilst those disabled victims were systematically having the minimal access to medical treatment they did have stripped and being pushed into homelessness—as DHS funds homelessness, and this will allow all the same actors to demand federal funds to get back to the status quo which Trump’s administration seems to have attempted to disrupt. Unfortunately, Minnesota’s response is historically accurate to the conduct of their Salem days—don’t judicially correct us who created the problems; attack and discard all those who are other.

 References

Hughlett, M. (2024, August 5). Minnesota Department of Human Services to be broken up after years of scrutiny. Star Tribune. https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-department-of-human-services-to-be-broken-up-after-years-of-scrutiny/600286860

Mankato Free Press Editorial Board. (2024, August 6). Breakup of the Department of Human Services is sensible and overdue. Star Tribune. https://www.startribune.com/the-breakup-of-the-department-of-human-services-is-sensible-and-overdue/600287925

Van Berkel, J. (2024, August 5). The Department of Human Services is breaking up. What does that mean for Minnesotans? Star Tribune. https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-department-of-human-services-breaking-up-what-does-that-mean-for-children-families/600350980

CBS News Minnesota. (2023). The startling scale of dysfunction at Minnesota’s Department of Human Services. https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/the-startling-scale-of-dysfunction-at-minnesotas-department-of-human-services/

Bring Me The News. (2023). Gov. Tim Walz to hire outside consultant as he looks at breakup of DHS. https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/gov-tim-walz-to-hire-outside-consultant-as-he-looks-at-breakup-of-dhs


Question: If the employees are afraid, what do you think is happening to vulnerable enrollee's in Medicaid Health Insurance programs that blow the whistle?

 

Related: Leadership Shift at Minnesota DHS: Jodi Harpstead Steps Down Amid Ongoing Reform and Scrutiny

Posted in , , , , , , ,

Post a Comment