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President Donald Trump in his first 100 days signed more than 140 executive orders directing changes to policies and procedures touching all parts of American life, including many that impacted state agencies administering federal aid programs and the people who depend on them.
Staff at Oregon’s Department of Human Services, the largest state agency tasked with administering federal food, disability, refugee, child and family support programs, among others, were “all kind of scattered,” said the agency’s then deputy director, now director, Liesl Wendt.
That period in early 2025 would be a practice test for the litany of challenges that unfolded as the year progressed, but Wendt — in a recent interview with Oregon Capital Chronicle — said she, the agency and its staff have come out stronger, if not a bit battered.
In July when she was appointed to take over the agency following the announced retirement of its outgoing director Fariborz Pakseresht, she was immediately tasked with responding to the tax and spending cut megalaw passed by Congressional Republicans, which slashed funding and added new work requirements to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP. By the fall, when she was fully in charge as Pakseresht made his official exit, funding for all programs was drying up as the longest government shutdown in U.S. history was underway.
The agency worked fast to fund SNAP benefits for Oregonians in November after a judge ruled the federal government needed to release emergency funds, but before the Trump administration could ask for a pause and appeal, effectively re-freezing funding.
And she crafted a request to the Oregon Legislature for more than $110 million for the human services agency, a significant ask going into a short legislative session and at a time when the state was strapped for cash and staring down potential budget cuts. By the end of the session in March of this year, she got the money, allowing the human services department to hire 400 staff to help handle issues such as new benefit eligibility reporting requirements.
“I think even the staff after the first 100 days were like: ‘We did it,’” she said of her first few months steering the ship. “I’m like, ‘we can do hard things, everybody.’”
‘There’s a change’
At the Department of Human Services East Branch in Portland, Wendt greets employees on a first-name basis.
At one entrance, people seeking assistance for public benefits enter to talk with staff who have pantries stocked with food remaining from last year’s government shutdown. Cubicles line the backrooms where agency staff describe the confusion that has been ushered in by the new federal requirements.
In a conference room later that day, she speaks more vaguely of how the agency needs to improve. She mentions a “hefty” list of expectations from Kotek, making sure child welfare staff have cars with four-wheel drive in case they are moving through the snow, and working more closely with labor leadership to ensure employee ideas are valued. She describes lobbying state legislators and creating a two-pager with SNAP participation rates in each of their districts.
About one in six Oregonians relies on the program, and under the new work requirements imposed in the Republican tax and spending law, they’ll have to prove they are meeting heightened work requirements or receive an exemption to continue receiving the benefits.
Securing funding from the Legislature earlier this year means she’s been able to avoid large-scale cuts to existing services and staff, even as new federal benefit requirements have ratcheted up administrative costs for states. Still, thousands of Oregonians have already been pushed out of SNAP following the new requirements.
Wendt said the biggest long-term struggle at the agency will be staying “focused on the core work,” which includes providing benefits and child welfare services.
She also said it will take time to change the culture of the agency, which Pakseresht had led for the previous eight years despite criticism over mounting issues within the state’s child welfare system.
Under Pakseresht’s tenure, the agency was sued in a class-action lawsuit over the treatment of kids placed in foster care, found to have given millions in state dollars to an unlicensed child welfare provider who put kids in hotels and short-term rentals and, by February, confronting growing calls from union caregivers to be fired over the state’s handling of state-run homes for individuals with disabilities.
Wendt is hoping to move the agency away from the controversy of its past.
“We process a lot and talk a lot. And we need to get better at taking action. That’ll be the hardest culture change,” she said. “This is an agency that has been very risk averse for all the reasons. Through different eras, it’s had a lot of change-over in leadership, so I think the natural tendency is to kind of hunker down.”
Wendt declined to speak on the record about criticism of her predecessor, saying she herself has “gotten a lot of criticism over the last year.”
“I have really thick skin right now,” she said.
