Legislative Committee Update, May 2025

April 30, 2025

Written by James Stolz

It’s been a hectic, busy, unprecedented legislative session. Your society has been very active in advocating for the concerns of licensed clinical social workers on many levels. As legislative chair, I have been active with the Mental Health Legislative Network and the Coalition of Licensed Social Workers and both groups have been advocating and advancing bills that promote the work that you do and protect the clients we serve. Here are the latest updates.

The Governor’s budget calls for huge cuts for the next biennium. Our legislature needs to present a budget by May 19^th to avoid a special session, so things will move quickly. With a few exceptions, bills must be passed through a committee in order to still be considered viable. To manage this task, committees passed out a larger Health and Human Service Finance “omnibus policy bill,” (SF 2669) a bill that is composed of many individual bills that they considered earlier in the session. Generally, the committee chairs determine the final bills for inclusion in the omnibus bill. Because the House is tied, there must be agreement between the DFL and GOP co-chairs. In five committees (education, energy, environment and natural resources, health, and higher education), they could not reach agreement by the April 10 deadline, so they passed a rough outline that they will amend later. This is unusual. As of April, 28^th it has passed in committee and is headed for a floor vote.

We are hopeful that the bill to increase MA rates and remove the 20 percent reduction from the standard rate for master’s level providers has a shot to pass, but the opposition is concerned that it requires a tax increase to fund it since there is no money available given the projected cuts. We should be consistently encouraging legislators to stay engaged in finding a solution to address this very serious gap.

There is a bill (SF 2647) that will expand the scope of mental health professionals, which includes LICSWs with certain training, in residential substance treatment services. We signed a letter of support for this bill. It will increase employment opportunities for social workers in 245G licensed facilities in some of the roles only LADCs have been able to do. That has been moved to Health and Human Services Omnibus bill (SF 2443). NASW-MN has a great summary of all of the Omnibus bills here.

In 2023, the Legislature set aside dedicated funding for School Support Personnel, including school social workers, to increase school resources so they can address the increasingly complex needs of students. HF56 repeals the statute defining and funding school support personnel aid to create “safe school aid,” increasing the money available for existing safe school revenue. While safe school revenue can be used to fund school social workers and preventative efforts, its primary purpose is to fund the cost of policing in schools. By merging funds meant for supporting students’ social-emotional well-being with School Resource Officers (SROs), cybersecurity, and other crime prevention measures, we are concerned that school districts with limited budgets may deprioritize mental health services, leading to increased disciplinary actions and juvenile justice involvement. House Chair Youakim engaged school social workers and other stakeholders to reach an agreement on possible adjustments to School Support Personnel funding. It creates needed flexibility in the funding while still maintaining the integrity of the original purpose of supporting the complex needs of students.

On the national front, we were alerted by our parent group, CSWA, of an issue related to members’ information being used to promote a group called “7 Cups”. Many of you reported having your information taken from the internet and promoted as if you were a 7 Cups clinician. CSWA provided direction on how to respond to them. CSWA will be writing a letter to the 7 Cups Legal Department to demand that the ways our professional information is being used without our permission, as well as confused with unlicensed people, be stopped. We have contacted our AG office about how we should handle this on our end.

We will be supporting our national organization in confronting this activity, but you can also reach out to Parker Maertz at the AG office, who is aware of the situation and has offered to reach out to 7 Cups directly on behalf of anyone to have their name removed. Parker.maertz@ag.state.mn.us

I know everyone saw the myriad of emails about the changes to Telehealth that were going to happen on March 31^st. That has been pushed out to September 30^th. While there was a lot of back and forth, the substantive issue is the 6-month face-to-face requirement within the first 6 months. There is no a work around for that one, like there is for the 12-month requirement. We need to continue to encourage legislators at the national level to address this before the Sept 30^th deadline.

We will continue to keep you updated on the progress of the Social Work Interstate Compact. In February, the Compact Commission voted on its Executive Board and appointed CSWA as an ex-officio, non-voting member of the Commission. CSWA Director of Policy and Practice, Laura Groshong, LICSW, will serve as CSWA’s representative in that role. The Director of NASW-MN, Karen Goodenough, also sits on that committee. The current target date for the Compact being open and available is the spring of 2026 at the earliest. We should know more about the cost of an Interstate Compact license within 3 to 4 months.

I’ll end with a call to action from our legislative consultant, Jenny Arneson LGSW, with the Coalition of Minnesota Social Workers:

Clinical social workers – your advocacy is needed.

Why? Because it’s deadline time at the Capitol – the time of session when some bills move forward and others do not. Legislators are deciding among competing priorities. We need as many social workers as possible contacting key legislators and emphasizing the areas that are still in contention this session including:

Increasing MA reimbursement rates for behavioral health and substance abuse.

Expanding the scope of LICSWs related to substance abuse disorder services.

Several key pieces in the Children’s Boarding Solutions bill, brought forward by the Mental Health Legislative Network (MHLN) and featured during our Advocacy Week.