South Dakota is feeling the squeeze from all directions as federal funds are significantly cut across government. Now, South Dakota’s lawmakers need to manage the crunch.
The cuts coming from D.C., namely in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, are comprehensive and have already reached South Dakota. Now comes the time for legislative leadership to act.
Bureau of Finance and Management chief budget analyst Brandy Miesner laid out the reality of the situation at this week's interim legislative appropriations committee meeting.
“This report listed all of the various federal grants state agencies received notice that the federal government was cancelling,” Miesner said.
Named in that report were items like the health disparity grant, which seeks to ease negative health outcomes for different population groups. However, Rapid City Republican Sen. Taffy Howard couldn’t get a clear answer as to where South Dakotans can find precise impacts.
“How can the general public access all the grants that came out under the Health Disparities Act or the American Rescue (Plan Act) – ARPA,” Howard asked.
“That’s a great question, and honestly it is one of the shortcomings of our existing accounting system," Miesner responds. "Earlier today, we talked about the project performance management — that will centralize a lot of that grant information. Unfortunately, it’s just not possible in our system we have today.”
That means impacted organizations could be completely in the dark regarding funding status until that system is changed.
Major cuts also came to programs like Medicaid and SNAP, or low-income food assistance. Medicaid changes include work requirements of 80 hours a month, and reassessment of expanded Medicaid recipients.
“The other changes to the eligibility include doing redeterminations of the expansion population every six months instead of once a year," Miesner said. "Relooking at those people to make sure they’re still meeting the income guidelines and they’re still eligible to receive those services.”
Meanwhile, lawmakers are setting a goal of nearly a billion dollars’ worth of property tax cuts. Property taxes are primarily used to fund the South Dakota public school system and local governments.