(The Center Square) – The Wisconsin Department of Health Services estimates cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program could cost all Wisconsin residents $314 million each year.
The cuts to SNAP funding, included in the budget bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday, are now on their way to the U.S. Senate for consideration.
The DHS report says SNAP cuts would shift the cost to the state of Wisconsin and counties, eliminate healthy eating education programs, limit geographic waivers of work requirements for certain counties and territories and expand work requirements.
Overall, DHS estimates 700,000 Wisconsin residents currently benefit from SNAP, and the cuts could cause 90,000 people to lose benefits entirely.
“Wisconsin runs one of the best SNAP programs in the country,” Wisconsin Medicaid Director Bill Hanna said in a statement. “The cost of these cuts is over a quarter billion dollars each year that Wisconsin couldn’t use for our health care, our roads, our schools or our economy.”
However, SNAP is “100% funded by the Federal government, resulting in minimal incentive for states to control costs, enhance efficiencies, and improve outcomes for recipients,” the House Committee on Agriculture said in a statement.
The committee concluded that complete reliance on federal funding has allowed states to discourage work and expand benefits for those the program was not intended to serve, causing costs to balloon.
“States are going to have to accept the fact that if they are not administering this program efficiently, they’re going to have to pay a portion of the program that is equitable, and it makes sense and it is scaled,” U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wisconsin, previously said at a Agriculture Committee markup.
To correct misusage of SNAP, the proposed cuts will cost more for states that improperly issue SNAP benefits, while states with a lower percentage of payment error will pay less.
“If [the states] improve, they’re going to pay less and that’s going to encourage a responsible bureaucracy so every single dollar that is allocated to these programs goes to the hungry child, to the senior, to those most in need,” Van Orden said.
Because of Wisconsin’s 4.41% payment error – one of the lowest in the country – the state would only have to cover 5% of SNAP costs, according to the Committee on Agriculture’s fact sheet.
However, the DHS report argues Wisconsin taxpayers would have to cover 15% of SNAP costs, contrary to the Agriculture Committee’s 5% estimate.
The DHS criticizes the cuts as punishing Wisconsin taxpayers despite the state’s record low payment error.
“Wisconsin’s payment errors are not fraud,” the DHS report said. “They are errors like unexpected changes to a person’s income or accidental errors that occur when determining if someone qualifies for the program. For the first time ever, Congress is proposing an extreme, zero tolerance policy for payment errors that harms states like Wisconsin who consistently keep error rates low.”
