Cuyahoga County JFS slashed call wait times by 75% - federal changes threaten to undo it all

By Kaitlin Durbin / August 7, 2025

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Cuyahoga County’s Job and Family Services was able to slash average call wait times to less than 20 minutes this year, but officials fear that President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is about to undo their big, beautiful progress and increase hold times again.

Federal changes to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, will create a paperwork nightmare for staff, overwhelming them and the system and putting vulnerable residents at greater risk of losing benefits, Kevin Gowan, director of Job and Family Services warned in an interview with cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.

Under existing rules, staff are already processing about 12,000 new or renewed Medicaid applications and 15,000 to 20,000 SNAP applications each month, Gowan said. However, the new rule changes would require 19,000 more SNAP screenings to verify work requirements for certain able-bodied parents and seniors up to age 64, and about 8,000 more Medicaid renewals each month.

And that’s just the baseline, Gowan said. He predicts that the extra touchpoints are going to lead people to miss their deadlines, get kicked off the system and have to reapply, which doubles the work on his staff.

“It’s more work for the agency to reinstate or process new applications than if they had simply maintained eligibility,” Gowan said. “It’s going to be tough.”

Upending progress

Gowan fears the repercussions will be reminiscent of 2022, when Ohio implemented six-month check-ins for SNAP recipients, creating backlogs as workloads increased and clients unfamiliar with the new rules were being dropped from benefits and having to reenroll. It overwhelmed the system then, resulting in a third of calls going unanswered and driving up wait times to an average 69 minutes.

One woman around that time told cleveland.com she waited nearly five hours on the phone.

But over the years, state processing tweaks and efficiencies, like the automatic renewals, have improved conditions immensely. Wait times dropped to just 16 minutes in June – a 75% reduction, Gowan said. The department also now answers about 80% of calls, with SNAP queues seeing 82-90% answer rates.

“The eligibility specialists are knocking it out of the park, and it’s actually getting better,” David Merriman, director of Health and Human Services, praised. “But I think that progress is at risk, and it’s not at risk for (Gowan) or his team, it’s at risk for those seniors and working poor families.”

The increased workload also comes as federal SNAP funding is decreasing, which could leave Cuyahoga County on the hook for another $7 million a year at a time when county finances are already stretched. If the state doesn’t take over the burden, the county may have to consider reducing staffing or cutting other services, which Merriman said would further increase call wait times and access to benefits.

That could leave thousands of children, seniors and disabled residents without food or healthcare, he said, adding that he doesn’t see the benefit. Maybe the changes force an estimated 3,200 of Cuyahoga County’s able-bodied parents back to work, he said, but it will also gum up the system for hundreds of thousands of others and could cost them their benefits.

“We’re trying to help seniors eat. There’s nothing political about that,” Merriman said. “People that don’t eat probably aren’t going be the best at going to work, going to school, going about their daily business...and I think the red herring of just saying this is about waste, fraud and abuse or (able-bodied recipients) disregards the fact that when you disrupt the very complex system and you throw a bunch of additional administrative burden into the middle of it, it impacts everybody.”

What’s the county doing to prepare?

However, the law is the law, and Merriman said the county has to follow it. While the office waits to understand the full impact of the changes, staff are also working to mitigate it as much as possible.

The county is keeping up with hiring call takers and currently has about 80 people in training who will be coming on board just as some of the changes are expected to take effect. Officials are also looking for other ways to streamline or automate paperwork and urging residents to pay attention to their deadlines to make the transition easier.

Gowan advised residents to wait until they receive notices about their cases before they start calling the office, and to follow menu prompts carefully when they do. If they already have an appointment scheduled, then say yes when prompted, he urged, otherwise they will be routed through customer service and sent to the back of the queue.

“It’s designed to get people to the right place,” he said of the system.

Other mitigation efforts, though, will depend on JFS’ budget, and Merriman doesn’t yet know what the full expenses will be or what the county can afford. The county’s budgeting process begins this fall, but the county is still waiting to hear from the state whether it will pick up the added $7 million tab just to keep running the benefits programs.

In the meantime, Merriman said it might be up to the community to come together and decide how to care for its own. Other support systems are being disrupted too, he recognized, including food banks, housing programs and hospitals, “so, how as a community do we come together to prepare ourselves for the new law?” he asked.

He’s putting the community on notice now: “Expect change.”