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Five years after Mississippi officials were exposed for raiding the state’s cash welfare program for the poor, the department in charge of cleaning up the mess does not employ an expert in the program or enough workers to improve its on-the-ground operations, the agency’s top leader said Tuesday.

“We have a sore need for TANF expertise in this agency,” Mississippi Department of Human Services Director Bob Anderson said in a legislative hearing Tuesday, referring to the federal cash assistance program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. “Like every state agency and every business, we have lost a wealth of institutional knowledge. We don’t have a TANF expert at MDHS. I’ll be the first to admit it. We’re looking for a TANF expert. And we need more PINs (budgeted positions) in our county offices to train people to run the TANF program better.”

The Mississippi Legislative Democratic Caucus held its third hearing about ongoing issues in the federal assistance program Tuesday — a four-hour meeting that, because of the Republican supermajority, is not likely to result in any reforms.

Even Anderson, an appointee of Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, acknowledged necessary changes that the Legislature has failed to enact — though the agency can make some improvements on its own with the governor’s approval. Today, less than 10% of people applying for the assistance make it through the application process each month.

“There are barriers. I’ve talked to you about barriers. I’ve talked to the Legislature about barriers. I’ve advocated for some legislative changes around the program at times,” Anderson said as he displayed a complicated flowchart his agency created to illustrate the eligibility determination process. “Just looking at it, it is unbelievable what is required of an applicant and at every turn, you have ‘case denied’ hanging in the balance every time something doesn’t go as it should for that person who is applying. So it is very difficult.”

Part of the problem is a law the Legislature passed in 2017 called the HOPE Act, which created a maze of bureaucratic red tape that is expensive for the department to administer and arbitrarily kicks people off of its programs. Anderson has said the Legislature should repeal the act but lawmakers have not seriously considered his recommendation. 

The amount of the monthly TANF check — a max of $260 a month for a family of three — is also too low to make a meaningful dent in household necessities. In recent years, the state has been spending such a small fraction of its TANF funds that it has accumulated an unused balance of at least $145 million.

“Mississippi has this money stockpiled to misspend because it spends so little on cash assistance,” Sonya Williams Barnes, the Mississippi policy director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said during the hearing.

Lawmakers and witnesses who testified on Tuesday referred to the TANF program as broken.

“I’m going to disagree with you. Our system is not broken. Our system is designed against the poor. If it was designed for them, we would not have poverty. Poverty is by design, and it profits industry leaders immensely in the state of Mississippi,” Rev. Dr. Jason Coker said during the hearing. “… We create this kind of poverty by the policies we create in this very building and the policies we hang out to dry in this very building.”

Republican leadership has not held a similar hearing to discuss improvements to the TANF program. Several pieces of legislation introduced by Democrats in recent years to significantly increase the amount of monthly assistance, require more TANF spending on child care, and remove burdensome requirements for applicants died without consideration.

In 2021, Anderson secured from the Legislature a $90 increase to the monthly amount, which had been stagnant since 1999, and he said he will be requesting another $60 increase next year. Asked by Rep. Zakiya Summers, D-Jackson, why he didn’t request more, Anderson said, “The governor appointed me. The governor can disappoint me by telling me to go home. So I have to operate within a certain framework.”

Since the state only approves about 125 applications, or 9% of those who apply for assistance each month, most of the money goes elsewhere. Mississippi currently only spends about 5% of its roughly $86.5 million annual TANF award on cash payments to needy families, making it one of just 14 states that spend less than 10% of their grant on direct assistance.

The rest of the state’s TANF spending — anywhere from $32 million (2021) to $107 million (2018) depending on how much of the money Mississippi chooses to use in any given year — is what caused trouble in recent history.

From 2016 to 2020, subgrantees — organizations that receive TANF funds to provide programs like workforce development, teen pregnancy prevention, and parenting initiatives — misspent or stole at least $77 million after receiving political blessing and large up-front cash advances.

Headline-grabbing purchases included a $5 million payment towards the construction of a volleyball stadium at University of Southern Mississippi and $2 million in investments in a pharmaceutical startup called Prevacus that claimed to have found a cure for concussion. 

Former NFL quarterback Brett Favre asked welfare officials to fund these projects, and according to text messages first published by Mississippi Today, the athlete communicated about both to former Gov. Phil Bryant, who had authority over the department during the scandal. Favre continues to face a civil lawsuit, but not criminal charges, over these alleged schemes, while Bryant has faced neither.

Seven people have pleaded guilty in the scheme since 2020, including former welfare director John Davis and nonprofit operator Nancy New. None are in prison as they all await sentencing.

On its own without changes to state law, the welfare agency has implemented several reforms designed to reduce favoritism and theft, including reinstating a bidding process for subgrants, removing the director from any decision-making in the awards, switching payments to a reimbursement-only model and requiring more financial and participant data from the organizations.

“I want to tell you it’s a new day in TANF,” said Randy Kelley, director of the Three Rivers Planning and Development District, which currently holds a TANF subgrant. “He (Anderson) demands two things that are high on my list, and I’m proud to tell you this about him. Fiscal accountability. If you don’t have fiscal accountability, you don’t have anything. That’s what happened to the Nancy News and the things y’all are seeing. And he demands program integrity.”

“They look at us so many times, I think I’m in prison,” he joked.

Today, the welfare department awards TANF grants to 21 organizations, including some of the 1960s-era quasi governmental economic development districts such as Three Rivers, which runs a $2.6 million career advancement program.

Three Rivers, located in Northeast Mississippi, began receiving a TANF subgrant in 2020 shortly after officials arrested the former welfare director John Davis and nonprofit operator Nancy New for allegedly stealing $4 million in TANF funds, which marked the beginning of the still unfolding welfare fraud saga.

The day it received the contract, Kelley said the organization’s in-house lawyer walked into his office and shut the door, waving the paperwork in his hand.

“He said, ‘Have you lost your blankety blank mind?’ I said, ‘No, why?’ He said, ‘Do you not keep up with the news?’” Kelley said in Tuesday’s hearing, referring to publicity around the welfare scandal. “I said, ‘I have.’ And he said, ‘Why would you take this money?’ and I said, ‘Our people need it.’”

Three Rivers boasts a 27-county wide training and job placement program, administered through contracts with local community colleges and the state unemployment office, for low-income Mississippians struggling to find work or who are stuck in low-wage positions, under 200% of the poverty line.

According to a budget Mississippi Today retrieved through a public records request, the bulk of Three Rivers’ program funding in the federal fiscal year ending last month went to the Mississippi Department of Employment Services, Itawamba Community College, Northeast Mississippi Community College, Northwest Mississippi Community College and East Mississippi Community College. According to ledgers Mississippi Today retrieved, Three Rivers lists these payments as sub-expenses and does not provide additional documentation of how its partners spend these funds. 

It budgeted another $100,000 for supportive services, but little of that had been spent by the end of August, and $218,000 for administration, mostly salaries.

Three Rivers reports serving between 600 and 700 people a year, but the participant data it is required to submit to MDHS includes numerical codes instead of written descriptions for the services it provided, according to the submitted spreadsheets retrieved by Mississippi Today. Additional reports are not made available to the public. MDHS and Three Rivers did not respond to requests for additional information about the data. 

Currently, Kelley said his organization is serving 83 TANF-eligible clients and four of them are in truck driving school with the opportunity to increase their income to $80,000.

“This program started with Mr. Anderson. Y’all need to recognize, he’s done away with the volleyball courts,” Kelley said.

Beyond the roughly $4.5 million in direct cash assistance payments and $26 million spending on subgrants annually, Mississippi allocates $29 million in TANF to the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services and transfers $25 million to supplement the Child Care Payment Program that provides vouchers to working parents.

Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, acknowledged that TANF is supporting some good programs in Mississippi, but that more of it should be used on direct cash assistance — the more efficient option.

“The TANF money is the only money in the budget that we can put into the hands of poor people. The state budget is $31 billion dollars. And this is the only money that can directly help poor people,” Blount said. “There’s a massive bureaucracy, and RFPs, and ten-step process, and fiscal management, and all that bureaucratic crap, where you could just send people checks, and they can spend it, and pay rent, and buy food with it, and that, to me, is more efficient.”

U.S. Congress created TANF in 1996 to replace the former Aid to Families with Dependent Children entitlement program known as welfare. TANF was primarily considered a work program intended to provide a small stopgap while parents — 99% of whom are single mothers in Mississippi — seek new or better employment. Yet, the majority, 80%, of families on the program are child-only cases, meaning they do not have a work-eligible parent in the home. This includes caregivers with disabilities or homes where a grandparent is taking care of the children.

An average of just 307 Mississippi adults were on the program each month in 2023.

Because the household income limit to qualify for TANF is so low — less than $10,000 a year for a family of four — it is very difficult for a parent who has a job to enter or remain in the program. This helps explain why just 1.4% of adult recipients are employed.

Only about 5% of families experiencing poverty in Mississippi receive cash assistance compared to almost 40% of those families in 1996 at the start of the program.

One of the biggest barriers to parents seeking the assistance is that they must provide information about their child’s noncustodial parent, so that the state can pursue them for child support, in order to qualify. Any child support it collects in excess of $100 each month is seized to reimburse the state for the cash assistance it provided the family. 

The state imposes a “family cap,” meaning that if a parent is receiving TANF assistance and then births another child, that child would not qualify to receive assistance — a policy that only five other states still have on the books.

Mississippi also requires TANF applicants to complete a substance use disorder questionnaire and, if suspected of drug use, a urine test — a policy opponents say is based on racist stereotypes about the poor. The state spent $50,000 TANF funds on this test in 2022, according to state expenditures available online, though out of thousands of applicants in roughly the last year, Anderson said only 59 were drug tested, and of those, just 6 tested positive.

All of this is compared to the workforce programs offered with the same federal funds by the subgrantees, which serve people who make up to about $50,000 for a family of three and do not impose child support requirements or drug testing.

“I’ll say again, it’s not Bob Anderson’s drug test requirement, it’s in the statute,” Anderson said. “I can’t take it out of the statute. I have to comply with what’s in the statute.”

The former professional wrestler Brett DiBiase, who pleaded guilty within the welfare scandal in 2020 for receiving $48,000 in TANF funds through a contract he could not perform because he was in rehab, which was also paid for with TANF funds, has not been sentenced. 

Despite the frustrating red tape and low approval rate, Mississippians in need continue to seek assistance. In 2015, before the alleged scandal occurred, the department received 13,517 TANF applications. In 2023, it received 16,376 applications.

When Congress adopted TANF, it turned one of the nation’s primary safety net programs into a block grant and allowed states to spend the money on other goals, such as reducing out-of-wedlock births and promoting two-parent families. But while it created strict requirements for poor parents attempting to receive the assistance, it provided little accountability for organizations receiving the funds for programming.

States began using the funds to plug budget holes in other areas of government, like the nearly $30 million Mississippi currently allocates to the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services, which conducts investigations into abuse or neglect. 

Subgrantees receiving the largest amount of TANF funds in 2024, according to the state’s expenditure database, were the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services ($15 million), MS Alliance of Boys & Girls Clubs ($6.5 million), Canopy Children’s Solutions ($4.5 million), Save the Children ($2.4 million), Three Rivers Planning and Development District ($1.8 million), the Mississippi Department of Employment Security ($1.4 million), Institutions of Higher Learning ($1.3 million), and South Delta Planning and Development District ($1 million).

But nonprofit or government subgrantees providing TANF-related services are not the only vendors who received the funds. Jones Walker, the law firm bringing the civil litigation against Favre and others, received nearly $1 million in TANF funds in 2024, and the Office of the State Auditor, which conducts an annual audit of MDHS spending on behalf of the federal government, received $162,000. The state also recorded some payments under the TANF Work Program to private contractors and vendors such as Guidesoft Inc. ($160,000), Horne LLP ($124,000), Staffers ($57,000), Cronus Consulting ($20,000), Dell Marketing ($13,000), Office Management Systems ($11,000) and various hotels.

In response to emailed questions about these expenses, the Mississippi Department of Human Services provided only the following explanation: “Each of these expenditures are in compliance with the TANF administrative policy and statute. MDHS adheres to federal guidance to the percentage of the annual state grant that is utilized for administering the TANF program and the guidelines for which expenditures qualify as administrative costs.”

During the scandal, TANF subgrant recipients did not receive proper auditing and officials accused Davis, the former director, of forcing employees to look the other way when they suspected a problem.

MDHS says it now does conducts subgrantee monitoring and when it flags an issue with a subgrantee’s expenditures, such as unbudgeted purchases or missing documentation, it sends a finding letter to the subgrantee, and if the subgrantee cannot account for the spending, the agency requires repayment. 

From late 2021-2023, the welfare agency questioned nearly $660,000 in expenditures from 13 subgrantees, most of which were cleared, though four grantees were ordered to return $95,000. The largest error MDHS found was $65,000 in spending by the Mississippi Department of Employment Security, which the MDHS said failed to provide proper documentation for payroll expenses.

From 2020-2021, the agency questioned $4.5 million in expenditures and demanded $1 million returned.

The ongoing civil suit, which attempts to claw back a whopping $80 million in misspending, including from nonprofits that are now defunct, has so far resulted in settlements of $1.7 million. The state has yet to recoup the $7 million lost to the volleyball and pharmaceutical projects.

While MDHS has decided generally how it’s going to divvy up most of its annual TANF grant in future years, it has not answered questions from Mississippi Today about how it plans to use roughly $150 million in accumulated TANF funds.

The agency has instituted better controls and continues to sue the alleged fraudsters. But some advocates suspect that the TANF program — no longer operating as a criminal enterprise — remains a scandal of another kind.

“If we wanted to reduce poverty in a serious way, we wouldn’t be ending any federal fiscal year with tens of millions of federal assistance dollars unspent,” said Matt Williams, longtime TANF researcher with Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative. “... So why are the leaders in our state so silent on the obvious big issue, the obvious elephant in the room, which is widespread persistent poverty and what to do with the TANF program?”

The post If you count unspent millions, high denial rate and mysterious outcomes, the TANF scandal persists appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch filed another brief in support of the argument that states with strict abortion bans should be able to deny emergency medical care to pregnant women if that care involves an abortion. 

The filing in the Idaho case is called an amicus curiae brief, which allows interested parties not directly involved in a court case to submit legal documents voicing their opinion. 

The case began when the Biden administration sued Idaho for barring abortions when a pregnant woman’s health is at risk. 

Fitch added Mississippi to the amicus brief in 2022, immediately after the Dobbs decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Nineteen other states now stand with Mississippi, according to the newest court filing.

Fitch’s office declined to comment for this story. 

At the heart of the case, explained Mary Ziegler, one of the country’s preeminent experts on abortion law and a professor at UC Davis School of Law, is a discussion of health versus life – which she says is less of a philosophical distinction and more of a political strategy. 

“There are plenty of things that go wrong in pregnancy that can really affect your health that aren’t going to necessarily imminently kill you. But if you’re coming from a movement perspective, you see all these health justifications basically as loopholes that people are exploiting,” she said. “So, some states responded to that anxiety like Texas by having a health exception but having it be very, very, very narrow, and other states like Mississippi responded by just not having a health exception at all.”

In fact, national health policy organization KFF does not consider Texas’ health exception – to prevent “substantial impairment of major bodily function” – to be an exception at all. Mississippi is one of six ban states which does not have an exception for the health of the mother. 

Arkansas, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas are the other five, according to KFF. All six have exceptions to protect the life of the mother.

The federal law at odds with these state bans is called EMTALA, or the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which requires medical providers to stabilize everyone entering the emergency room before discharging or transferring them. The Biden administration argued that treatment should include abortion and should apply to mothers in ban states – if the mother’s pregnancy poses a risk to her health. 

These 20 states, including Mississippi, that have joined the “friend of the court” brief have “a profound interest in preserving the federalist structure, their power to regulate for the welfare of their citizens, and state laws adopted by citizens’ elected representatives to protect unborn children from intentional destruction,” according to the brief. 

While the argument of the amicus brief relies heavily on the principle of state rights, it also presents several anti-abortion defenses, including that doctors should not be allowed to prioritize the health of women over unborn children. 

“That EMTALA imposes obligations on hospitals to pregnant women does not allow hospitals to ignore the health of unborn children,” the brief reads. “Hospitals cannot ‘pick and choose’ between their dual obligations. They must stabilize both women and unborn children.”

But allowing states to treat life and health differently, Ziegler said, doesn’t create a distinction as much as it causes confusion. 

“If you’re going to lose an organ or be permanently disabled – does that fall under life exception or not? And some states say ‘well, yeah, our life exception doesn’t require you to be imminently dying, it just requires that there be a threat to your life, and certain organ damage could qualify.’ But it’s also sort of unclear.” 

After Mississippi’s abortion ban took hold in July 2022, the state’s number of abortions plummeted to nearly zero – despite the fact that Mississippi’s ban has two exceptions: to protect the life of the mother, and cases where the pregnancy was caused by rape and reported to law enforcement. 

Cases like Ashley, the 13-year-old Delta girl TIME magazine wrote about who was raped and forced to carry her baby to term, show that the exceptions can be theoretical.

Only four abortions were performed in Mississippi in 2023, according to data from the Mississippi State Department of Health.

If the Supreme Court votes in favor of the states, Ziegler says it probably wouldn’t change much for a state like Mississippi. If, however, the Supreme Court votes in favor of the Biden administration, it could change the landscape – not of abortion generally, but in those instances where a woman goes to the emergency room for pregnancy complications and doctors are deciding if they can legally treat her. 

“If the Supreme Court ultimately said that EMTALA does cover a universe of physical emergencies that are not imminently life-threatening, and here are some of those examples, it would be very hard for Mississippi prosecutors to go after anyone who performed procedures in those circumstances,” Ziegler said.

A similar case is playing out in Texas.

The Idaho case is currently awaiting an oral arguments hearing in December, after which the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will issue an opinion. If appealed, it will return to the Supreme Court.

The post Attorney General Fitch sides with Idaho in abortion lawsuit appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi’s 165th state fair just came to an end. The past week saw Mississippians of all ages flock to the heart of Jackson to enjoy freshly squeezed lemonade, every kind of fried food imaginable, gentle animals, thrilling games, and rides (for the particularly brave). The Mississippi Today team didn’t miss out.

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On Thursday evening and Friday morning, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency held listening sessions in the capital city to hear Jacksonians’ thoughts on the work being done with the city’s drinking water system.

While many recognized the progress in the system’s reliability, residents continued to lament JXN Water’s increased water bills, which went into effect earlier this year despite a key component of the billing change — a discount for SNAP recipients — being held up in court. Most of the complaints centered around the new $40 availability charge, as well as issues getting help through JXN Water’s call center in Pearl.

But before those meetings kicked off, U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate, whose 2022 order put JXN Water and its leader Ted Henifin in charge of the water rehabilitation, criticized federal attorneys over the EPA’s decision to hold the public meetings.

During a Thursday afternoon status conference, where Henifin detailed the faster-than-expected progress in fixing Jackson’s sewer system, Wingate questioned DOJ attorney Karl Fingerhood, who represents the EPA in the lawsuit over Jackson’s water system, for roughly an hour about the meetings.

The judge wondered why the EPA would invite feedback from the public in a venue outside the court, and even asked Fingerhood if the listening sessions would somehow undermine the court proceedings. Wingate repeatedly referred to a hearing he held in 2023 where he invited feedback from Jackson residents about Henifin and JXN Water’s work thus far.

While that meeting was held more than a year ago and Wingate hasn’t announced plans for one since, the judge wondered why the EPA didn’t consult him about their plans. Fingerhood explained that the meetings weren’t meant to be formal proceedings, but that the EPA had made a commitment to hear Jacksonians’ feedback and that it had been a while since the agency had last engaged with residents.

After last year’s hearing in Wingate’s courtroom, where residents and advocates made a range of requests including more communication from JXN Water, the judge filed a response brushing off most of the feedback he heard, even calling some criticisms of Henifin “racist.”

Both Wingate and Henifin also pointed to a letter that Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba sent the EPA in March criticizing JXN Water, wondering if the EPA was holding the meetings in response to the mayor’s concerns. Fingerhood denied any connection.

Wingate also used the moment as a chance to call out Lumumba, who the judge has scolded in prior status conferences, saying: “The mayor it seems to me is not a friend of this endeavor to straighten out this mess.”

Sewer and water system progress

At the start of Thursday’s status conference, Henifin informed the court that JXN Water has already repaired close to 300 sewer line failures around the city since it took over the wastewater system last year. Those include 215 that the court order listed in one of the priority projects. Henifin initially expected that project would take two to three years to finish. He added that JXN Water was able to make the repairs without any federal funds. Most of the lines needing repairs, Henifin said, were collapsed underground pipes, and were causing raw sewage to leak out onto city streets and even on residents’ property.

Henifin added that JXN Water inherited 2,200 service requests dealing with sewer issues around the city, and they’ve since reduced the backlog to under 200.

He said one of the city’s three wastewater treatment plants, the Savanna Street plant, still needs a lot of investment — about $36 million — for capitol improvements, but he added that JXN Water has been able to reduce the number of prohibited bypasses of wastewater into the Pearl River.

On the drinking water side, Henifin explained that by fixing leaks JXN Water has been able to reduce the amount of water it needs to put into the system by 25%, adding though that there is still a 50% loss of what water does get treated and sent out. The hope, he said, is to keep decreasing the amount of water needed to go out — to below 30 million gallons a day, versus the current output of 40 MGD — so that the city can finally close the age-old J.H. Fewell plant and save money on operations. To do that, JXN Water is working with four different contractors to find suspected underground leaks that never show up above the surface, thus making them harder to find.

In terms of billing, Henifin said JXN Water will in “the next few weeks” start shutting off connections to single-family homes that are falling behind, starting with the largest balances. Wingate added, “I don’t have very much mercy for those people” not paying their bills.

Public’s feedback

About 50 people showed up to each of the two meetings the EPA held at the Mississippi e-Center on Thursday and Friday. Some, like Jessica Carter, complained about a lack of communication from JXN Water when it shuts water off to make repairs.

“Just three weeks ago, I woke up and the water was off,” said Carter, who lives in northeast Jackson. “No notice, no letters, no nothing. I kept calling, kept calling, asking what’s going on … We went about 36 hours without running water this time. I have a 4-year-old, so I’m trying to figure out what do I have to do? Do we need to get a hotel room?

“I kept calling the hotline, they didn’t have the answers either… then once water came on, I was like, will be there be a reduction in the water charges for the 36 hours that the water was turned off?”

Part of the feedback the EPA asked for was over the long-term future of the system. While some said that the water system shouldn’t return to the city’s control, others noted that the city never had the resources that JXN Water is accessing.

“Before that Jackson didn’t have that money to do that work,” Natt Offiah, who grew up down the street from the meeting but now lives downtown, said about the $600 million Congress appropriated for Jackson after the federal takeover. “Now we got that money to do the work, everyone’s acting like Jackson didn’t care, but we didn’t have those resources to begin with.”

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The University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage launched a new longform podcast about Mississippians in World War II.

The 10-episode first season of the “Voices of Our People” podcast covers World War II from the Pearl Harbor attack to Armistice Day. The podcast consists of oral histories from Mississippians who experienced the war on the homefront and overseas, as well as storytelling from historians at USM’s Dale Center for the Study of War and Society. Mississippi musician and media personality Bill Ellison serves as the host.

“By combining the insights of our state’s leading scholars with the memories of those who lived it, the ‘Voices of Our People’ series attempts to contextualize our shared experiences with the goal of gaining a more grounded view of history,” said Ross Walton, who leads digital production and preservation at the oral history center and hosts its other podcast called “Mississippi Moments.”

“Each season of the series will examine a different historic event that shaped who we are as Mississippians and Americans,” Walton said.

The 20th anniversary of the USM center’s “Mississippi Moments” podcast inspired Walton to create a new podcast using the oral history center’s extensive collection of oral histories from World War II.

“Often unfiltered and raw, these interviews capture the deep, visceral reactions to such an uneasy age,” said Dr. Kevin Greene, historian and director of the oral history center. “They give voice to the voiceless in a way only qualitative interviewing can.”

Listen to Voices of Our People at this link.

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Mississippi Division of Medicaid Executive Director Drew Snyder is resigning after nearly seven years serving in the position. He will serve until the end of the month.

Gov. Tate Reeves appointed Cindy Bradshaw, the division’s deputy executive director for eligibility, to replace Snyder.

The Magnolia Tribune first reported the news.

Snyder declined to say where he would go next. He would only confirm it was a job in the private sector.

Snyder has led the division since Dec. 2017, when he was appointed by then-governor Phil Bryant. He previously served as Bryant’s policy director and counsel. 

The Division of Medicaid provides health insurance to over 700,000 low-income Mississippians, including children, pregnant women and disabled adults. 

Bradshaw served as Mississippi’s State Insurance Administrator before joining the Division of Medicaid. 

“Drew Snyder has done a great job as executive director of Division of Medicaid, and I wish him all the best in his future endeavors,” said House Medicaid Chair Missy McGee, R-Hattiesburg.

The Division of Medicaid and Gov. Tate Reeves’ office did not respond to Mississippi Today’s request for comment by press time. 

“Mississippi Medicaid is in the best fiscal shape in its history,” said Snyder at the Joint Legislative Budget Committee Hearing Sep. 26, less than two weeks before announcing his resignation. 

He said today, the agency’s budget represents 9.2% of the state’s total state support appropriation, down from 16% in fiscal year 2016, two years before he was appointed. 

Synder acknowledged that the state’s appropriation would increase in coming years due to reduced public health emergency federal spending and dwindling surplus funds.

Snyder took the helm at the division during a time of conflict between the division and the governor’s office. Prior Medicaid director David Dzielak was asked to resign just weeks before the 2018 legislative session after he requested an additional $47.3 million to close the gap in the agency’s budget and failed to voice agreement with Bryant’s plan for the Mississippi Department of Human Services to take over insurance eligibility determinations.

Snyder joined Mississippi Medicaid as controversy bloomed over the decision to award the division’s lucrative managed care contracts to three for-profit companies over nonprofit Mississippi True, which is managed by Mississippi hospital leaders. Though legislators made efforts to allow Mississippi True to re-bid for the contract, Magnolia Health, United Healthcare and Molina Healthcare ultimately kept the contract. 

He also oversaw the agency through the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw enrollment numbers soar to over 900,000 Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollees in May 2023 and drop to 705,000 by July 2024. During the pandemic, states were not allowed to remove beneficiaries from their rolls. In April 2023, the division was again required to review beneficiaries’ eligibility, beginning the “unwinding” process.

Snyder oversaw the rollout of extended postpartum coverage for Mississippi mothers and the beginnings of a new law allowing pregnant women to access prenatal care that went into effect in July. 

The program is currently on hold as the division works with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which requested to review additional information from the state.

Before joining Bryant’s team, Synder served as an assistant secretary of state for policy and research under Delbert Hosemann.

The director of the division serves at the pleasure of the governor and is required to meet one of three criteria: be a physician with health administration experience, hold a degree in medical administration or have three years’ experience developing policy for Medicaid programs.

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So much to discuss and dissect this week: Vandy toppling Bama, Ole Miss righting the ship and preparing for LSU, a banner Sanderson Farms Championship that now has new life, and how injuries killed the Atlanta Braves and are ruining a promising Saints season. All that and more…

Stream all episodes here.

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