State officials weigh automatic enrollment, data and privacy hurdles to expand safety-net access

At a hearing of the California State Assembly Budget Subcommittee 2 on Human Services, agency officials outlined efforts to increase automatic or facilitated enrollment across Medi‑Cal, CalFresh and other safety‑net programs while warning that legal, data quality and technology barriers limit rapid scaling.

Ryan Gillette, chief data officer and deputy director of the Research, Automation and Data Division at the California Department of Social Services, said the department's “vision … is to make application and renewal processes more accessible, straightforward, and integrated across the safety net in a manner that centers client voice and choice.” He described recent analysis showing the state’s major programs reduce poverty and identified gaps where eligible people are not cross‑enrolled.

The departments presented pilot results and technical constraints. CDSS reported that about 900,000 individuals participate in Medi‑Cal, CalFresh and CalWORKs together; CalWORKs recipients are categorically enrolled in Medi‑Cal; roughly 76% of CalFresh recipients are enrolled in Medi‑Cal; and more than 700,000 Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients receive CalFresh. CDSS said an ‘‘in‑reach’’ analysis estimated roughly 2,100,000 people on CalFresh were likely also eligible for CalWORKs; of those, about 878,000 (42%) were already enrolled, leaving roughly 1,200,000 likely eligible but not enrolled.

Gillette described a text‑messaging experiment that targeted likely‑eligible families and found that messaged families were 21% more likely to apply for CalWORKs and 13% more likely to enroll. That outreach produced about 15,000 new applications and roughly 340 new enrollments at an estimated cost of $1.33 per induced application, he said. “We found families that were messaged were 21% more likely to apply for CalWORKs,” Gillette added.

Ying Zheng Huang, deputy director of Health Care Benefits and Eligibility at the Department of Health Care Services, described ongoing Medi‑Cal efforts and the department’s person‑centered approach under CalAIM. DHCS is building Medi‑Cal Connect, an IT platform intended to aggregate data from multiple state entities and managed care plans and to launch a member portal — a “one‑stop shop” for Medi‑Cal members — that DHCS anticipates releasing in phases and aiming to complete the final member‑facing phase in fall 2026.

Huang noted the federal concept of “facilitated enrollment” allows states to automatically enroll people in Medi‑Cal based on eligibility determinations from certain other programs, and said California has used that authority for CalWORKs so that “100%” of those on CalWORKs are enrolled in Medi‑Cal. She said differences in how programs define households and income — for example, CalFresh’s household definition centers on who purchases and prepares food together versus Medi‑Cal’s federal tax‑based rules — complicate cross‑program eligibility calculations.

Brandon Hansard from the Office of Technology and Solutions Integration highlighted the statewide eligibility system CalSAWS and the public portal BenefitsCal, which have been rolled out to support eligibility and case management. He described CalSAWS and BenefitsCal as foundational systems that can be leveraged to reduce friction but warned that federal rules and differing program definitions limit how far a single application can substitute for separate program determinations.

Agency presenters identified three broad barriers to expanding automatic enrollment: data alignment and quality across programs; legal limits on data use and sharing (including federal constraints for CalFresh data); and technology capacity to build consent, recommendation engines and secure data exchanges. Officials stressed the need for stakeholder engagement, client consent mechanisms and additional IT investment to build recommendation and outreach tools that respect privacy and choice.

Committee members pressed agencies on practical steps and what the Legislature could do to institutionalize progress across administrations. Officials suggested clarifying priorities in procurement and contracts, building transition language into legislative or budget actions, and investing in data‑matching and outreach tools as concrete next steps, while acknowledging federal rules as a limiting factor.

The agencies committed to continuing stakeholder engagement and further technical work to measure eligibility overlaps and to develop consented, person‑centered approaches to outreach and prefilled applications. Huang said DHCS and CDSS were committed to “tracking what I would say the penetration or the saturation rates across these programs,” noting that CalFresh‑to‑Medi‑Cal overlap rose from about 80% in 2014 to about 92% in 2025.

The hearing did not produce any legislative votes; members encouraged continued interagency planning and follow‑up during the May revise and budget process.