Global Company Prepares to Take on Statewide Public Assistance Contract

Maximus will handle employment and training case management for Montanans receiving food and cash assistance

By Mara Silvers for Montana Free Press

A global private company is beginning to release details about how it plans to handle its new $15 million state contract to deliver employment assistance and training for some Montanans who receive public food, cash and refugee resettlement assistance. 

The state health department under the administration of Gov. Greg Gianforte decided last year to seek a single statewide contractor to provide services to eligible recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, and Refugee Support Services. The state announced in late January that it planned to award the contract to Maximus Federal Services, a sprawling government contractor with U.S. headquarters in Virginia. The agreement is slated to continue until September 2025, with the opportunity to extend.

The move marks the state’s transition away from the roughly 12 local providers that were delivering employment and training services around Montana. Under the new model, Maximus plans to have five physical offices, in Missoula, Great Falls, Helena, Bozeman and Billings, and 16 additional part-time locations across the state. Services will be provided through a mix of in-person meetings and digital platforms.

Speaking Tuesday to state lawmakers on an interim health and human services committee, state health department Director Charlie Brereton said the decision to issue a statewide contract was intended to create consistency, expand access and increase efficiency in employment and training programs linked to public assistance. 

“Many of our clients were receiving different services or varying degrees of services largely as a result of where they lived,” Brereton said, noting that residents of some counties have no access to employment assistance or training. 

The director later expanded on the state’s intention for the new contract model. 

“Ultimately our goal is to outline a path to employment and self-sufficiency for these individuals, and most importantly to help them get there, and to wrap around the clients while they’re doing business with the department,” Brereton said. “And we are of course happy to support our clients, and really want to see them move to what I would call healthy independence over time.”

Maximus Vice President Rachel Zietlow, seated next to Brereton, told lawmakers the company is excited to work with the Legislature and the state “over the next several years” and is committed to increasing access to services across Montana.

“Every tool that we bring to bear will be available to everyone in Montana who is a part of this program. That’s very important to us and aligns very well with what the department asked for,” Zietlow said. 

The health department’s decision to go with a statewide contractor and to award operations to a for-profit entity not based in Montana has been met with opposition and dismay from some current community-based contractors. While Zietlow said Maximus has sought to enter into subcontracting agreements with some of those organizations, at least one, Career Futures in Butte, has declined the company’s offer based on differences in its approach to case management and an inability to make ends meet through a subcontract agreement alone. Career Futures has been a contractor for TANF recipient assistance and has been subcontracted through Easterseals-Goodwill Northern Rocky Mountain to offer employment and training services to SNAP recipients. 

“It is not financially feasible to sub-contract and it is not within our Mission Statement to ‘work with clients’ in the manner Maximus intends to,” wrote Sarah De Money, executive director of Career Futures, in a March 5 email to Maximus shared with Montana Free Press. “It is with a sad heart that we have to close and dissolve the organization.” 

In a later interview with MTFP, De Money said Maximus had communicated its intention to have each case manager in Montana handle a 35-person caseload, between two and three times the number of clients Career Futures workers handle for different contracts. 

“Each person that walks in our office is in crisis of some kind,” De Money said. A person might be trying to leave an abusive relationship, enter college, or find a new job to support their family, she said. A case manager, in turn, might handle such situations with seven referrals and subsequent phone calls to different community resources and providers. Those local connections, she continued, have been built over almost 40 years of contracting with the state for employment and training assistance. 

“It’s always intensive case management. We are very, very in tune with what’s going on in our community and who to call,” De Money said.

Jennifer Sipes, the executive director of Career Transitions in Bozeman, said her organization expressed interest in subcontracting with Maximus, but learned on Monday that the company had opted to partner with a different local organization. 

She said it’s unclear how the loss of state contracts for SNAP and TANF assistance will affect her organization in the long term, but that the budget reduction has already had an impact. After finding out last year that the health department would be condensing contracts, Sipes said, she decided not to renew her organization’s roughly $8,500 monthly lease on its office space in Belgrade. Her remaining space in Bozeman, she said, is not sufficient for Career Transitions to offer Certified Nurses Assistant training courses, one of its other professional advancement opportunities. 

“We have a few other things that we do that bring in some funding. It just doesn’t cover the cost of all of our overhead and all of our salaries,” Sipes said. “There’s just going to be some hard decisions that need to be made … There’s definitely a risk of not being able to perform our services if we can’t cover the costs of our programs.” 

In an emailed statement Tuesday, Easterseals-Goodwill indicated it will not continue providing employment assistance and training programs as a Maximus subcontractor. The organization was one of five applicants, along with Maximus, for the new statewide contract.

“Easterseals-Goodwill was not awarded the Employment and Training Services (E&T) contract and we are not a subcontractor to the new provider,” said the group’s director of community relations, Chelle Fried. “We want to ensure a seamless transition in services for the Montanans who benefit from this important program.”

De Money and Sipes said their organizations’ contracts continue until the end of June, and they expect to hear more about plans to begin transitioning clients in the coming days and weeks. In its presentation Tuesday, the health department said Maximus will begin accepting new clients on April 1.