(1) Existing law establishes various public social services programs, including, among others, the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) program, CalFresh, and the Medi-Cal program. Existing law defines “public social services” to mean activities and functions of state and local government administered or supervised by the State Department of Social Services or the State Department of Health Care Services and involved in providing aid or services, or both, to those people of the state who, because of their economic circumstances or social condition, are in need of and may benefit from the aid or services.

This bill would require the State Department of Social Services to convene a workgroup comprised of, among others, the County Welfare Directors Association of California, to develop recommendations to allow data from Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) applications to be released to county welfare departments to authorize students to apply to receive public social services based on data collected pursuant to information from their FAFSA application. The bill would require those recommendations to be submitted to the Legislature by December 31, 2024. The bill would, upon the submission of those recommendations, require the department and the workgroup to begin to pursue administrative and statutory changes to make it possible for data from the FAFSA application, or any other student aid application administered by the Student Aid Commission, to be prepopulated into applications for students to receive public social services.

(2) Existing law requires the Office of Systems Integration within the California Health and Human Services Agency to implement a statewide automated welfare system, known as the California Statewide Automated Welfare System (CalSAWS), for various public assistance programs, including the CalWORKs program, CalFresh, and the Medi-Cal program. Under existing law, among other duties, the state is consolidating existing consortia systems into the single CalSAWS.

Existing federal law provides for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known in California as CalFresh, under which supplemental nutrition assistance benefits allocated to the state by the federal government are distributed to eligible individuals by each county. Existing law requires the department to convene a workgroup to identify the steps necessary to establish a CalFresh application submission process that accommodates the large influx of CalFresh applications during the beginning of a school term, as specified, and to submit a report, on or before April 1, 2023, to the Legislature on the necessary steps identified by the workgroup and any estimates of costs associated with implementing those steps.

This bill would require the department to ensure that CalSAWS allows all county office eligibility workers, regardless of county, to view, transfer, and process all CalFresh applications via CalSAWS to allow students to be able to apply for benefits in their home county before moving, or, in the county of their school.