A federal judge ruled Thursday to give thousands of New Yorkers who depend on the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program for home care or for work more time to register with its new management company to ensure people do not lose their care.

The preliminary injunction the state Health Department agreed to gives disabled or elderly people who use the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program until May 15 to register with company Public Partnerships LLC. Workers must be registered with the new management company by June 6, and must continue to be paid by their previous management company until then.

“The parties in this litigation have come to a thoughtful agreement that supports the state’s ongoing CDPAP transition and ensures these reforms will proceed in full," Gov. Kathy Hochul's spokesperson Sam Spokony said in a statement. "The agreement has no impact on hundreds of thousands of consumers and workers who have already completed registration with PPL. It provides a limited window for additional consumers and workers to complete their registration with PPL."

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement of interest against the Health Department after the agreement late Wednesday — warning the federal government is keeping a close eye on the state throughout the transition to make sure New York holds up its end of the deal.

"The United States has a significant interest in ensuring fair treatment and continued, uninterrupted and critical care for the thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers in the CDPAP program affected by this transition," according to the filing by the DOJ. "The United States will monitor this litigation to ensure that this interest is served by the CDPAP program."

Earlier this week, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted on X the federal government will review the state's controversial home care transition over the next 90 days.

Spokony said the removal of more than 600 smaller companies that have handled the program's payroll will reduce taxpayer waste regardless of federal oversight.

"New York state's much-needed CDPAP reforms will protect services for people who need them and put an end to runaway bureaucratic spending in this taxpayer-funded program,"  he said. “...The Department of Health will continue working with all stakeholders to ensure that CDPAP consumers and workers receive the care and support they need, and the Department of Justice's statement does not take away from that."

Hochul proposed the change in last year's budget — approved by the Legislature — to transition the program from 600 management companies to just one, arguing it would improve oversight and reduce millions of dollars of fraud and abuse.

State Budget Director Blake Washington maintains the change will save the state $500 million per year, but told reporters Wednesday it's unclear how much over 50,000 people who moved to a more expensive private home care program will cut into the savings.

"It remains to be seen," Washington said. "...To the extent that there's any unnecessary expenditures and fraud or anything of that nature, we want to make sure that gets rooted out."

Assemblyman John McDonald, a practicing pharmacist, said constituents told him fiscal intermediaries continued to text CDPAP users until the days before the original deadline of April 1 misleading patients that they didn't need to register with PPL.

"It's very clear as much as there were some great organizations that were there for the right reasons, there are many individuals there that were just there for the money and they were holding on for dear life," the assemblyman said. "It's a little bit longer than what we anticipated, but at the end of the day, patients are getting their care, which is what a lot of people were saying wasn't going to happen."

McDonald said the state should have forced fiscal intermediaries to provide patient and worker information before adopting the change in last year's budget.

"I think it was wise to continue to have a deadline because if there wasn't a deadline, nobody would have moved," McDonald said. "...But as a health care professional, I never thought in my wildest dreams you'd have to shame or threaten a provider to make sure a patient got the care they needed."

State Sen. John Liu, who has pushed to extend the transition timeline, said the order is a good decision to prevent tens of thousands of people from losing care.

The state senator, a Queens Democrat, expects the Legislature will need to make other fundamental program changes in the future. He said his office continues to get many complaints from CDPAP users and workers having issues logging their hours, or getting a call back from the company.

"We'll get through this," Liu told Spectrum News 1. "Hopefully everybody is signed up properly, nobody loses the care that they need and we'll see what fixes need to be made."

While the process is ongoing, the state officially transitioned its CDPAP payroll to PPL on April 1. The company issued its first payments to workers Thursday.

About 189,000 CDPAP consumers have finished registration with PPL as of Thursday — leaving over 30,000 incomplete registrations, according to the Health Department. 

About 206,000 CDPAP workers have access to PPL's Time4Care app to log their hours of about 243,000 personal care assistants enrolled in the program to date, per the department.