North Stars in a Moment of Constraint
Cassandra Madison
Executive Director,
Center for Civic Futures
Tyonka Perkins Rimawi
Managing Director of Programs, The Families and Workers Fund
Tim Shaw
Director, Benefits Transformation Initiative and Senior Policy Advisor
Contents
The past year has placed increasing pressure on already strained Health and Human Services delivery systems across the country. Federal policy changes to SNAP and Medicaid have increased both administrative burden and financial liability for states still dealing with pandemic-era workforce shortages and budget constraints. The time pressures around implementation have forced states to make difficult (and expensive) decisions as they try to quickly bring aging technology systems into compliance. The impact of these operational and technical constraints is already being felt. Staff are under pressure, beneficiaries are confused, and benefits caseloads are on the decline in many states.
During challenging moments like these, it can feel impossible for government leaders to focus on anything other than the crisis at hand. But the choices states make today about policy, operational processes, vendor contracts, and system design will shape how residents experience public benefits for decades. Without a clearly articulated vision for what efficient and effective service delivery looks like and the tools to measure against it, the long-term impact of these decisions on beneficiaries remains hidden. For example, a state could:
- Add a manual review step that improves control over individual cases but increases processing backlogs, resulting in benefit delivery delays.
- Make a change to the redeterminations process that improves processing speed, but causes eligible residents to lose coverage for procedural reasons and return to the system weeks later.
- Sign a contract for a temporary vendor solution to help clear a backlog while inadvertently introducing new handoffs or dependencies elsewhere in the system that actually increase error rates.
While these choices aren’t inherently right or wrong, they can lead to unintended consequences that leaders must understand while managing large, complex systems under significant constraint.
North Stars as an Operating Anchor
Through a multi-agency, federal initiative focused on improving “life experiences” that began under the first Trump Administration and continued under the Biden Administration, eight federal agencies articulated a shared set of North Stars that define what good service should look like for residents facing financial hardships. Since their publication, states working with the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program have modified and validated them as an important set of goals for state benefits agencies. An individual who qualifies for public benefits should be able to:
- Know what they are eligible for
- Apply in 20 minutes
- Enroll in 24 hours
- Share their information once
- Receive the correct amount of benefits or services within a week
- Stay enrolled for as long as they are eligible
- Have consistent, high-quality service experiences
These North Stars are intentionally aspirational and describe the service delivery system states are trying to build over time. In times of stability, they can help states design and prioritize their most ambitious ideas for transforming the staff and beneficiary experience. During periods of disruption, North Stars can function as guardrails, helping leaders evaluate trade-offs and understand where short-term fixes may unintentionally weaken service delivery systems and make benefits harder to access for the people who need them.
Effectively using these North Stars in benefit delivery also matters for the financial security of beneficiaries. Each year, Americans forego up to $140 billion in benefits they are eligible for, often due to unnecessary administrative burdens in the application or renewal process. A state agency that effectively improves customer experience doesn’t just improve beneficiary experience; it puts more money in the hands of families and state economies.
For a government leader, North Star thinking means going beyond compliance to ask teams questions like:
- What will this implementation choice mean for the people using the system?
- Does this decision move us closer to or farther from our North Stars?
- Which North Star could be put at risk by this approach?
- Are we improving one part of the system while unintentionally creating problems somewhere else?
While these questions do not make the underlying constraints disappear, they can broaden the lens through which critical decisions are made and help staff think about the system as a whole, rather than individual actions in isolation.
This brief is the first in a series centered on putting the North Stars into practice, focusing first on how state agencies can measure agency performance against the North Stars and build measurement into practice at the leadership level.
Why Measurement Matters
While the North Stars can help state agencies align on shared vision, it is the ability to measure progress against them that has the power to unlock real transformation. During moments of crisis, leaders are forced to make decisions based on partial information. Having a consistent set of metrics in place can provide a more complete picture of opportunity and risk, surfacing trade-offs that may have otherwise been invisible. In a moment of pressure, it can be hard to know whether a policy or implementation choice actually improved conditions or merely shifted the burden elsewhere in the system. The data can also provide early warning signs where decisions have had unintended consequences.
The goal is not to measure everything, but to develop a core set of metrics that enhance situational awareness, flag operational risks, and help agency leaders understand whether they are moving in the right direction. A small number of well-chosen indicators can help leaders:
- Identify emerging issues before they become a larger operational problem.
- Evaluate whether a policy change is improving or degrading the beneficiary experience.
- Highlight where policy decisions are creating new work for staff and the impact it’s having on speed, quality, and accuracy.
- Ask more targeted questions of vendors and implementation teams.
- Make course corrections before it turns into a public crisis.
While there are a core set of best practice metrics that may emerge across states, specific indicators could vary significantly depending on the goals, circumstances, and data availability within a state. These could include measures such as application completion time, volume of documentation requests, time to eligibility determination, churn, ex parte renewal success, call center wait times, or disparities in outcomes across vulnerable populations.
Start with the Data You Have
When it comes to data, it’s easy to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Despite decades of modernization efforts, many state data systems remain fragmented and built on legacy infrastructure, which can lead to significant data access and quality issues. This can lead state teams to delay measurement because the clearest indicators are some of the least accessible. But waiting for a perfect data environment can leave leaders without visibility when they need it most.
In this environment, using the data you have to develop proxy measures is more important than waiting for a new data system or tool to come online. These proxies can be critical indicators of directionality, allowing leaders to make more informed decisions right away.
For example, a state that cannot calculate the exact amount of time residents spend completing an application may be able to monitor where applicants abandon the online process or how many applications require caseworker support. A state that cannot calculate a documentation-burden rate may be able to identify which verification documents staff request most often. Sharp spikes or declines in these rates following the implementation of a new policy or process can flag risks or opportunities for states at critical moments.
The most important thing for states is to establish a baseline, be explicit about what the data does and does not tell you, and track the same signals consistently enough to understand direction over time.
Leaders gather to discuss current challenges to the U.S. public benefits system at the 2026 Forum. © Aspen Institute: Photo by Brian Carey
Measurement As A Leadership Practice
Measurement is most effective when it is built as a regular practice of looking at the system, asking questions, and adjusting based on the results. This can happen at multiple levels within an organization, from a weekly senior leadership meeting or a governor’s office briefing, to an implementation review or contract negotiation with a vendor as a way to drive productive conversation and reflection. Key big picture questions include:
- Where are we today?
- What has changed and why?
- Who is experiencing the impact of the changes we’ve made and was that consequence intended or unintended?
- If it was unintended, what can the agency adjust?
This kind of discussion is how states move data review from being a box that gets checked to being a core part of how an agency operates and makes decisions. It can also provide a common language across policy, operations, technology, and leadership teams that may otherwise be looking at the same implementation challenge from very different vantage points.
Building the Capacity to Learn Together
The North Star statements highlighted in this series were built by and for states. The desire to develop better metrics and the challenges in doing so exist across many states. States shouldn’t have to face these challenges alone. The work ahead is not only about identifying better measures, but also strengthening the infrastructure states need to learn from one another, setting shared benchmarks, building their internal capacity to use measurement, and creating safe, de-risked spaces where states can test new approaches before scaling them. To support states in implementing North Stars, the rest of this series will offer practical approaches for choosing and using these measures.
The pieces that follow will include:
- A practical measurement guide organized around each North Star, including potential measures, proxies, warning signs, and questions leaders can ask their teams
- Guidance for establishing baselines and working with imperfect data
- Lessons and examples from states applying these principles in practice
- Guidance for communicating operational choices and risks to governors, legislatures, and oversight bodies
- Resources and partners that can support states as they build this capacity
These resources will evolve and grow and change over time, as we gather feedback and the state landscape evolves. The hope is that this series will help leaders articulate a vision in a way that allows them to measure progress and examine the human impact of their operational and policy choices.
Bridging the Information Gap: How Organizations Can Assess and Use Benefits Screeners
From Band-Aids to Stepping Stones: How We Can Rebuild Young Adults’ Trust in Public Benefit Systems
OBBBA’s Impact on Young Adults and 5 Strategies to Support Them
Leading with Empathy: Strengthening Benefits Delivery with Mike Wilkening
A Persistent Challenge: How Financial Shocks Continue to Undermine Family Financial Security
Beyond Income: Worker Financial Security and the Role of Benefits Inside and Outside of the Workplace
