GUEST COLUMN.
HUMAN SERVICES AS PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE
By Tracy Evans, author of American Welfare and formerly president and CEO of the American Public Human Services Association
Federal cuts to food assistance and health coverage place ever accelerating strain on families, states, and local communities and increase the risk that everyday instability in households will turn into a deeper crisis. Economic volatility, technological disruption, climate stress, and public distrust are no longer separate problems arriving one at a time.
They are colliding in the lives of families and communities all at once.
For state and local leaders, the question is not whether these pressures are real, but whether the public systems people rely on are being designed for the world we are already entering.
Human services can no longer be treated as residual or reactive. They are part of the infrastructure communities need to absorb shocks, adapt to change, and hold together under strain. And preparedness, in this sense, is not just about more planning. It is about shifting the assumptions underneath our systems and designing for resilience, trust, and shared well-being.
But this is where state and local leaders have more agency than we sometimes acknowledge. Human services are among the few places where government still meets people in the practical realities of daily life. Every clear process, every respectful encounter, every accurate benefit payment, and every transparent decision becomes a small proof point that public institutions can function with fairness and care. We saw this during the pandemic, when expanded Child Tax Credit payments gave many families direct experience with government as a source of stability rather than suspicion.
The list of fields in which the need for effective and efficient social services is a long one.
Start with economic life. We still cling to the story that work alone is the surest route to security. But for millions of people, that has not been true for a long time. Costs keep rising. Work is more fragmented and less predictable. Entire sectors are being reshaped by automation and artificial intelligence. At the same time, federal decisions are narrowing public benefits just as more households struggle to make ends meet.
State and local leaders see the consequences first. They see what happens when a labor-market shock becomes a housing crisis, when lost work hours lead to food insecurity, or when a family’s instability is misread as individual failure rather than the predictable result of systems that do not adapt to real life. The task is not simply to process claims faster or patch holes after the fact. It is to build stronger stabilizers into daily life, so support can expand as instability rises, rather than forcing families to repeatedly prove their distress.
AI adds another layer. It is increasing pressure on workers and families as jobs shift, even as it promises new efficiencies within government. That makes it tempting to treat AI as a separate technology issue. It is not. It is a public-values issue. AI can reduce paperwork, improve navigation, and free human services workers to focus on the relationships that actually help people move forward. But it can also encode old biases, widen the distance between people and institutions, and make public decisions feel more opaque. The question is whether government will govern these tools in ways that make access, fairness, and trust more real.
Distrust makes all of this more difficult. Disinformation thrives where people feel alienated, unseen, or left behind. In that environment, government is easily caricatured as either incompetent or threatening, and public systems that serve struggling communities remain easy targets.
Climate disruption raises the stakes further. Human services are often first responders in social recovery and among the last systems standing for families afterward. That means climate adaptation can no longer sit on the sidelines as a specialized emergency function. It belongs in everyday planning for housing, benefits, care networks, and community resilience. Tools such as Disaster SNAP and emergency Medicaid waivers show what this can look like when flexibility is built in before a crisis hits.
What all of this requires is not panic but a cultural shift. If we continue to treat hardship as mostly a personal failure, government as inherently suspect, and instability as simply the way things are, we will keep designing brittle systems and calling the results inevitable.
But we are not stuck. We can meet the converging forces we face by treating human services not just as a set of programs but as the foundational infrastructure communities need to thrive in this new era of disruption.
The opportunity before us is to make design choices that reflect the world we are entering. That is the deeper meaning of public readiness. I explore that larger argument in American Welfare. But the work itself is already underway in communities across the country. The question is whether we will continue organizing public systems around yesterday’s assumptions or write the next chapter on foundations wide enough for all of us.
The contents of this Guest Column are those of the author, and not necessarily Barrett and Greene, Inc
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