Wisconsin would lose about $314 million in food assistance from the federal government under the massive budget bill passed by the U.S. House last week, according to an analysis of the proposed cuts by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
The legislation, which President Donald Trump refers to as the “big, beautiful bill,” would require states to start matching federal funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. It would also impose new work requirements on families with young children and older people, and it would require regular paperwork to prove exemptions from such requirements for some groups, such as families with special needs children.
Speaking to reporters Thursday, Wisconsin Medicaid Director Bill Hanna said those changes amount to new red tape that could cause 90,000 Wisconsinites to lose some or all assistance.
He said that would put new pressure on nonprofits like food pantries and have ripple effects at the retailers where people spend what’s commonly known as food stamps.
The proposal would push many costs onto the state, where lawmakers and the governor are in the process of deciding the next two-year budget.
“There’s going to be more demand to put state money into a program that has been 100 percent federally funded for really its entire existence, which will strain the state’s ability to put its state dollars towards other things like education, our health care system and other important aspects of what we do with our state dollars,” Hanna said.
Those state costs are calculated based on a given state’s error rates, which tend to occur when a person’s income or residence changes unexpectedly. Hanna said that Wisconsin has a low error rate but is lumped into a bracket with states with much higher error rates, and charged accordingly.
“These errors are not fraud,” DHS wrote in a statement. “For the first time ever, Congress is proposing an extreme, zero tolerance policy for payment errors harming states like Wisconsin that consistently keep error rates low.”
States would also be responsible for covering new administrative costs and for providing job training to people newly obligated to fulfill work requirements.
All six of Wisconsin’s Republican congressmen voted for the bill. Both of Wisconsin’s Democratic House members voted against it.
Over the weekend, U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Prairie du Chien, argued that anyone “legally receiving SNAP benefits should not see a single reduction in their SNAP.”
Hanna argued that’s because the federal government is “changing the definition of ‘legally receiving SNAP.’”
“They are adding additional red tape to folks to meet that by expanding those work requirements,” he said. “There certainly will be people who get caught up in the new red tape that they have to meet in order to achieve the benefits.”
Currently, about 700,000 Wisconsin residents — or an eighth of the state — receive SNAP.
This story was originally published by WPR.