P&P August 2015

my turn

By Joseph W. Bodmer

“The Time Has Come,” the Walrus Said …

I always wondered what retirement would feel like, and now I know. Exhilarating, intimidating, and exhausting are three words that come readily to mind. Exhilarating, to be sure. I never quite understood the freedom and opportu- nity that being retired after 35 years of government service would offer (eight in the U.S. Navy). I now know the concept behind the age-old saying, “the world is my oyster.” It truly is. I finally have the opportunity to promote, unfettered by the restraints of annual budget restrictions or shifting public policy prerogatives, the concept that creativity and innovation in the field of health and human services is not limited to just the private sector. I have never believed that government is too slow and cumbersome to be agile in the development and delivery of modern, 21st century-service delivery models. Today’s government can and must produce service models that are at once both universal in their approach, and steadfast in their mission to provide cost effective, efficient, integrity-based solutions to those most in need in our nation. Intimidating, to be sure. For the first time since I was a newly minted high-school graduate in the summer of 1976, I am taking two months off from the day-to-day job of making govern- ment work better today than it did yesterday. Sixty days to contemplate my retirement and to look forward to the next phase in my career; one that saw me enter government civil service as a wide-eyed 32-year old. My career has spanned major legislative initia- tives in the field of human services, such as the Family Support Act of 1988, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act of 1996—something better known as

In February 2012 I was asked by then Assistant Secretary George Sheldon to assume responsibility for the ACF Interoperability Initiative. Naïve as to the amount of work I had signed on to produce, it didn’t really take long for me to understand the extent of disarray regarding states’ service integration. States began pulling the systems that supported their health and human service programs apart in order to meet a set of arbitrary and ini- tially unrealistic deadlines under the Affordable Care Act. Over roughly the next year after the act passed, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in conjunction with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), produced two stunning pieces of policy: they announced the provi- sion of 90 percent enhanced federal funding for state Medicaid agencies to build new or enhanced eligibility and enrollment systems; and, most impor- tant for our human service programs, they published guidance allowing for

welfare reform—and of course, the Affordable Care Act of 2010. It ended with the chance to build not only a fully automated child support system for all tribes nationwide (called the Model Tribal System or MTS 1 ) but also to lead the administration’s efforts to bring a new focus to integrated service delivery in human services through the Administration for Children and Families’ Interoperability Initiative. Exhausting, to be sure. This could refer to the last three years of my government career in which I simulta- neously headed up the Office of Child Support Enforcement’s Division of State and Tribal Systems as its director, and the MTS Project as its director, but also as the director for the aforementioned ACF Interoperability Initiative. 2 Yet this was not the part of my career that I think exhausted me most. Rather, I find myself looking out across the landscape of health and human services in states and localities and realizing that there is still a daunting amount of work still waiting to be accomplished.

Image by Vintage Retro Antique

Policy&Practice   August 2015 24