On this Sunday, March 29 — Palm Sunday on the Christian calendar — the Rev. Rachel Kirk will be among a procession of Christians gathering at the state Capitol building in Madison to assert their spiritual resistance to the actions of the administration of President Donald Trump.

Kirk, associate pastor for Community and Faith Formation at Middleton Community United Church of Christ, is one of the organizers for the Palm Sunday Path in Madison, an initiative promoted by the Wisconsin Council of Churches that will have variations across the state. 

It will take place the day after Saturday’s No Kings rallies across the country protesting Trump, and Kirk says the two events share similar objectives: “to challenge unjust power structures and the deterioration of democracy.” But she expects the Palm Sunday Path to offer a different experience — “a celebratory, but also a serious thing, more prayer than protest,” she says.

“The story of Palm Sunday is of Jesus processing into Jerusalem in what would become the final week of his life, and it’s a story told in all four of our gospels,” says Kirk. Some religious scholars have suggested that the Palm Sunday procession in the Bible purposefully echoed another parade: a triumphal march through the city by the Roman leaders whose army occupied the land of Israel.

In that light, for Christians such as Kirk, Jesus’ ride on a donkey has a pointed, anti-imperial meaning.

“Palm Sunday is his journey into that center of power to assert a different kind of power — one that doesn’t dominate and doesn’t exclude,” Kirk says. “We are trying to echo that original message of Palm Sunday — that it is Jesus’ legacy of confronting power that oppresses and excludes and is violent, and we’re trying to assert what we believe is the message of Christ, which is love and inclusion and belonging and peace.”

‘I cannot turn aside…’

The first year of Trump’s second administration has generated  recurring protests of increasing size, channeling public opposition to the administration’s sweeping attacks on immigrants, the reversal of policies that promote diversity and inclusion, the promotion of discrimination against LGBTQ and transgender people and cuts to health care and social supports for poor people. 

Among those resisting the Trump administration’s policies, faith groups and faith leaders have taken an increasingly high profile — across the country and in Wisconsin.

“My baptismal promises include following the works and words of Jesus and to resist evil. The ordination promises by which I became a minister echo that,” says the Rev. Kerri Parker, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, an ecumenical organization representing churches from more than 20 distinct Christian traditions.

“It means I cannot turn aside when I see evil being perpetrated, when I see vulnerable people being actively victimized by power, by what I would at this point call Capital E Empire,” adds Parker. “I have a duty to engage the tools of my faith, what platform I have, the skills I have been given, to say this is not right.”

At the height of the occupation in Minneapolis this winter by federal immigration agents, hundreds of faith leaders gathered in the city  to join the community’s resistance to the federal incursion. Among them was the Rev. Zayna Thomley, the lead pastor at the Middleton Community UCC church.

She attended a mass gathering of clergy in a large Minneapolis church and joined a protest in the lobby of the Target corporate headquarters the next day criticizing the store chain’s cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. 

“It felt really powerful to know that everybody who was in the room and who was on the street had the understanding to be a part of a bigger vision of what it means to be part of community, what it means to be held by God and what it means to show up for justice,” she says. “It was a deeply holy experience.

Religion and social justice

Religious groups have long taken part in social justice movements. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister who invoked his faith in his commitment to nonviolence as essential to the struggle for civil rights for Black Americans.

In Milwaukee, the interfaith organization MICAH — Milwaukee Inner-city Congregations Allied for Hope — has operated for nearly four decades, working to address the issues of justice in “a city afflicted with radicalized and concentrated poverty,” in the words of the organization’s website.

MICAH’s president, Rev. Richard Shaw, says he has seen more faith leaders and organizations getting involved in pushing back on federal policies in the current administration, as they are “looking at the families being broken up, looking at innocent people being arrested and put in detention without due process.”

He welcomes newcomers to the work. “I do believe that there’s power in numbers,” says Shaw, pastor of St. Matthew C.M.E. Church in Milwaukee. “If we truly follow the Jesus of scripture, to not get involved is to deny the earthly ministry of Christ.”

Christian groups are part of a broader coalition of faith groups standing up to the Trump administration. In January the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee, which represents 22 faith organizations — Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu and more — issued a statement in defense of immigrants and of peaceful protest after the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis by a federal agent. 

“We consider the exploitation of human beings, the separation of families, and the use of violence and intimidation, to offend the human dignity not only of the oppressed but the oppressor,” the Interfaith Conference statement declared. “The rights of all people, including neighbors, immigrants and asylum-seekers, to humanitarian treatment is explicit in our national foundation, and our international treaty obligations.”

“There is a deep respect for human dignity in all of our religious traditions, and what has been happening on our streets is something that is observable to all people of faith who care about human rights and respect dignity,” says Ahmed J. Quereshi, the Interfaith Conference executive director.

At a vigil in Minneapolis for Renee Good after she was killed, Imam Mowlid Ali told Good’s neighbors, “Today is the day that we send a message to everyone in this nation. That we are united. We reject any dehumanization of any person in this city, in this state, or anywhere in our nation.”

“We Jews know from history what happens when people are kidnapped, deported, detained, and given no human dignity or rights,” Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum said at a flash mob protest at a Minneapolis Target store. “We know what God demands of us. God demands that we be with the worker, with the vulnerable, with the immigrant … We are all created in God’s image, without exception.”

The morning after inauguration

Religious individuals, groups and leaders were among those who stood up to the policies and practices of the first Trump administration. Their role in response to Trump’s second term has been even more prominent.

“It arguably began the first day of Trump’s second term,” said Jack Jenkins, a Washington, D.C.-based reporter for Religion News Service, during an online round table discussion RNS conducted March 24.

At a prayer service the morning after Trump was inaugurated, Bishop Mariann Budde spoke directly to the president from the pulpit, urging him to “have mercy” on frightened gay, lesbian and transgender children as well as on “the vast majority” of immigrants, regardless of documentation, who are not criminals.

“That sermon that was given to him at the Washington National Cathedral by Bishop Mariann Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, made clear very quickly that there was going to be religious pushback to several parts of his agenda,” Jenkins said.

Trump was elected in 2024 with the support of more than 80% of white evangelical Protestant Christians, 60% of white Catholics and 57% of white non-evangelical Protestants, according to data compiled by the Public Religion Research Institute. And Trump has garnered favor among Christian groups that oppose abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

But Christians cover a much broader spectrum of ideologies and perspectives on social issues.

“The loudest voice of Christianity in the United States is what we’re starting to really understand as white Christian nationalism,” says the Rev. Julie Burkey, senior pastor at Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ on the west side of Madison.

Burkey sees a religious revival emerging among Christian traditions that emphasize “the beloved community that we’re working towards, which includes all people,” regardless of gender, sexual orientation or other dividing categories.

When the immigrant advocacy group Voces de la Frontera and U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) decided to hold a news conference in late January to announce their intentions for a peaceful but firm resistance to a possible federal immigration enforcement surge in Wisconsin, they chose the Orchard Ridge church for the event.

Burkey says engagement with social justice has been a core part of her ministry and faith since her seminary years in New York City.

“So it doesn’t feel new to me necessarily,” Burkey says — but, she adds, people may be noticing it more now.

“I just think it’s so important that we’re speaking up for human dignity and for just very basic things that are tenets of our religious faith, like loving one another,” Burkey says. “That golden rule of treating each other like we would like to be treated is a very deeply agreed upon value in the world and all faith traditions, and it’s being violated right now.”

Protests, lawsuits, immigrant support, nonviolence training

The faith-based resistance to the Trump administration has taken many forms.

During the Minneapolis gathering, nearly 100 faith leaders were arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport on Jan. 23 after going there to protest the ICE detention of workers and commuters as well as the involvement of airlines in transporting people taken into ICE custody.

After Trump reversed a 30-year policy that put schools and houses of worship largely off-limits for immigration raids, the Greater Milwaukee Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and other church groups in a lawsuit to block the change.

A federal court ruling in February that granted the groups a preliminary injunction against the administration’s change is currently under appeal.

The Milwaukee synod joined the suit because church officials could see the impact of the administration’s aggressive stance towards immigrants on their congregations, says Bishop Paul Erickson.

“People were not coming to church because they’re afraid of ICE. People were not going to the food pantry at the church because they’re afraid of ICE,” Erickson says. “We felt a strong belief that the behavior of our federal government was interfering with the free expression of religion.”

At Christ Presbyterian Church in Madison, church members were among people in the community who years ago identified the need for an immigration legal aid service and helped raise the funds for it to operate, says the Rev. Will Massey, an associate pastor at the church. The church went on to host the service, the Community Immigration Law Center.

That relationship has gone back more than a decade. In the last year, however,  CILC has been ramping up its operations significantly in response to the Trump administration’s policies to remove immigrants. 

“Right now one of the church’s highest priorities is providing for the work of the law center — making sure that we are acting and we are managing our building in ways that allow their work to continue,” Massey says.

The Rev. Jennifer Nordstrom, senior minister at the First Unitarian Society in Milwaukee, helped lead a training in non-violent civil resistance for faith leaders in January.

“We have a long tradition as people of faith of being the moral voice in society against unjust laws and being willing to take a moral stand, a non-violent moral stand, against injustice in the world — even when it’s our government promoting that injustice, which is what we’re seeing today,” Nordstrom says.

“I see faith leaders who have always been siding with love, faith leaders who have always understood God and the Holy as a loving God that believes that all human beings are made in the image of God,” Nordstrom observes. “And in this moment, because the assault on human dignity is so pointed and aggressive, those folks are bringing that Imago Dei — the image of God, the holiness and sacredness of every human being — theology out into the community and even out into the streets.”

‘Loving our neighbor’

Other forms of support are less visible, but participants say, no less important. Some of it grows out of a longer history of assistance to refugees and immigrants in less fraught times.

“There’s been work that has happened quietly in an everyday manner that people have been proud of and comfortable participating in,” says Parker of the Wisconsin Council of Churches. “The everyday work of resettling refugees, feeding hungry people, helping folks learn the language of the place where they’re living now.”

In the current political climate, “folks who have been doing this quietly are being more direct and public about the need,” Parker adds. “And folks who may not have been engaged in it before are diving in.”

Much of that work now has also become much more discreet, to protect families and individuals who those involved fear could be targeted indiscriminately  by immigration authorities.

“I see so much organizing happening locally,” says the Rev. Kendra Grams, a Presbyterian pastor in Hudson. “It just doesn’t get as much visibility for various reasons. But it is happening and from my perspective that’s been wonderful to see.”

Erickson says friends, colleagues and family members in the Twin Cities, where he previously lived and worked for 13 years, have told him that protests and other public actions are only a fraction of the work people are undertaking to help the most vulnerable people in the community. 

“It’s the networking of providing mutual aid and food and money and support,” Erickson says. “Helping people get rides to the doctor’s office because they’re afraid to go out by themselves, and showing up in restaurants and committing to eat in the same restaurant every day and spend two hours there just in case ICE shows up in an immigrant-owned restaurant or a restaurant that employs significant numbers of migrants.”

Those are not “a centralized, coordinated, highly orchestrated effort,” Erickson says. “It’s simply baked into the fabric of how do I love my neighbor?”

That underlying tenet is found in “any religion that I’m aware of, whether it be Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish,” he says.  “And so I think that’s really what we’re trying to lean into and recognize, that the actions of the federal government are getting in the way of us loving our neighbor. And we’re not going to sit back quietly and let that continue.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

Wisconsin and 20 other states filed a lawsuit Monday that seeks to prevent the U.S. Department of Agriculture from imposing “anti-discrimination” conditions on all the money the department disburses to the states. 

USDA provides billions of dollars in funding to the states every year to administer programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — which in Wisconsin helps nearly 700,000 residents afford groceries. 

Under a new policy issued late last year, USDA states it will not provide any financial disbursements unless the states agree to conditions involving “gender ideology,” “fair athletic opportunities” for women and girls and immigration. 

The lawsuit argues the conditions are overly broad and vague, that sub-agencies within USDA are interpreting the rules differently, potentially conflict with existing state laws and amount to unconstitutional roadblocks between the states and the money that Congress has already appropriated to be sent to the states. 

“With billions at stake for life sustaining food and critical funding for their residents, the States may be forced to accept funding conditions that they fundamentally do not understand, that are designed to coerce the States and their instrumentalities to adopt USDA’s policies, and which are ultimately unlawful,” the lawsuit states. 

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, along with the attorneys general of California, Illinois and Massachusetts led the development of the suit which is being joined by Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. 

Aside from the nutrition assistance programs, USDA also funds programs that aid and support Wisconsin farmers, prevent forest fires and protect local ecosystems. UW-Madison received $68 million from USDA during the 2024-25 fiscal year for agricultural research and other programs. On Monday, USDA announced more than $2 million in spending to support timber operations in Monroe and Shawano counties.  

“USDA funding helps keep kids and families fed and healthy,” Kaul said in a statement. “Attempting to use this critical funding to further unrelated policy goals of the Trump administration is wrong and unlawful.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

State officials across the country are looking to crack down on fraud and mistakes in the nation’s largest food assistance program, spurred by looming federal rules that will force states with high error rates to pay more.

But the Republican proposals mostly focus on more frequently verifying the eligibility of individual households that participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), rather than on broader administrative shortcomings that allow most of the waste and fraud to occur.

Policies such as verifying recipients’ eligibility each month — which can involve cross-checking multiple databases or collecting extra documentation — might increase state agencies’ workloads without lowering error rates. This is especially likely if states don’t boost funding to handle the extra paperwork, investigate fraud or resolve recipient and agency errors.

Eliza Kinsey, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine who focuses on hunger, said staffing shortages, outdated technology and changes to eligibility rules that require oversight are making it harder for state agencies to avoid overpaying or underpaying recipients — the errors that will cost states money under the new federal rules.

“The fact that we’re seeing error rates that are higher really makes sense, given the context of what’s going on in SNAP right now,” Kinsey said.

SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, is a federal-state program that provides recipients with a debit card that can be used to purchase food at grocery stores and other retailers. SNAP errors and fraud often get conflated, but they’re largely separate issues: Errors are unintentional mistakes by SNAP agencies or recipients, while fraud is intentional theft.

SNAP errors occur when the state overpays or underpays SNAP recipients. They’re caused either by unintentional recipient mistakes — forgetting to report a change in how many people live in the household, for example — or by an agency processing error, such as incorrectly calculating a household’s expenses.

States have encountered instances of individual recipient fraud, though they can go uninvestigated when resources are scarce. Large sums, in the millions, have been stolen by sophisticated crime rings that electronically “skim” money from the debit cards that SNAP recipients use to purchase food.

State SNAP error rates include recipient fraud, recipient errors, and state agency errors.

Alabama earned local and national media attention last year when initial U.S. Department of Agriculture data from early 2025 showed it leading the nation in stolen SNAP benefit claims, ahead of much more populous California and New York.

“There’s a lot of talk about SNAP fraud, and a lot of it is misrepresented,” Nancy Buckner, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Human Resources, which administers Alabama’s SNAP program, told state lawmakers at a January budget hearing. “The biggest SNAP fraud in this country are those people that are doing it electronically.”

In recent years, her department noticed SNAP purchases being made in states nowhere near Alabama, she said, including New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Maine.

“It was obvious to us we don’t have that many Alabama clients shopping in those other states,” she said. This month, Alabama became the second state, behind California, to issue SNAP debit cards to recipients with the kind of microchips that are standard on commercial debit cards. Chipped cards are harder to steal from than those with magnetic strips only.

In the middle of it all, states are staring down massive cuts in federal funding. President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act puts states on the hook for more administrative costs and forces states to pay a higher share of benefits, in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars, if they have higher error rates.

“The federal government is telling states, you have to pay more in administrative costs, and you have to bring your error rates down simultaneously,” said Kinsey. “It feels like those two changes are in opposition with each other.”

Error prone

Last month, Alabama state lawmakers grilled Buckner, demanding to know her plan for lowering the state’s error rate.

Under Trump’s new law, Alabama’s SNAP administrative costs will rise by $39 million. Meanwhile, the state’s error rate, which Buckner expects to be about 9%, is below the national average, but high enough to allow the feds to force the state to cover 10% of its SNAP benefits starting in fiscal 2028.

All told, Alabama could be on the hook for an additional $200 million or more per year by 2028.

“Is there anything that can be done to prevent running into that $200 million wall?” Alabama state Sen. Greg Albritton, a Republican, asked Buckner during a budget hearing in January. “Right now I think that the train’s got the light on, heading straight for us.”

Buckner said she hoped for some extra wiggle room from the feds, but provided few details on how the department could lower Alabama’s error rate enough to avoid financial penalties.

Currently, the federal government pays for SNAP benefits and splits administration costs 50/50 with states. But starting in October, under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, all states will be on the hook for 75% of their own administrative costs. And the new law allows the feds to penalize states for their SNAP errors, requiring them to pay from 5%-15% of their SNAP benefit costs if their error rates are over 6%.

The only states under the 6% threshold, per the most recent data available from USDA, which oversees the program, were Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Republicans say these new rules will reduce the federal government’s investment in SNAP while giving states some “skin in the game” when it comes to being responsible with federal money.

“One of the problems is the federal programs don’t mandate the prevention, detection and prosecution of fraud,” said Dawn Royal, with the United Council on Welfare Fraud, a national membership group focused on fraud in public assistance programs. “And so states are unwilling to spend state money in order to protect federal money.”

In Alabama, the USDA replaced nearly $16 million in stolen benefits from fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2025, according to federal data.

The Alabama Senate is currently considering a bill that would require state agencies to conduct monthly checks of other state databases to make sure SNAP enrollees remain eligible.

Buckner told state lawmakers that increasing eligibility checks for SNAP benefits would “shoot that error rate up, way up.” The state’s Legislative Fiscal Office estimated the additional work for both Medicaid and SNAP under the pending bill could cost $16.7 million per year.

“Monthly reporting is not the answer to that, at all,” she said.

But other states are looking at similar measures.

Lawmakers in states including Idaho, Kansas and Wyoming have introduced bills to require their state SNAP administrators to check eligibility of SNAP recipients more frequently. Missouri, Oklahoma and Utah bills would require verification of citizenship or legal immigration status before approving applicants for SNAP benefits. A Wisconsin bill would require the state’s Democratic governor to bow to a White House demand to turn over state data on SNAP recipients.

And in Arizona, GOP lawmakers wanted to go even further than the new federal requirements. Last week Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a package of Republican bills that would have required the state agency administering SNAP to get its error rate below 3% by 2030 or face financial penalties, and cut an additional 10% from its budget if the state failed to take corrective action.

States target fraud

SNAP fraud has made state and national headlines in recent years, but there’s not a broad consensus on the scale of the problem nor how to address it.

Some SNAP fraud is perpetrated by recipients who lie in order to get SNAP benefits for which they’re not eligible. But there’s also organized electronic SNAP theft, which involves thieves taking control of EBT accounts through electronic methods such as card skimming or cloning, bot attacks and phishing scams. Skimming is a form of theft where devices are illegally installed inside sales terminals at a store and capture card data. That data is then used to make unauthorized purchases or steal from the victim’s account.

In December, a longtime USDA employee was sentenced to two years in prison for her role in what the U.S. Department of Justice called a “sprawling fraud and bribery scheme” that generated more than $66 million in unauthorized SNAP transactions. The same month, two Romanian nationals were indicted for their role in allegedly stealing more than $160,000 in benefits in Oregon and elsewhere. In 2025, California reported more than $100 million in stolen funds from California SNAP recipients’ EBT cards.

States reported replacing more than $360 million in stolen benefits from fiscal 2023-2025, according to federal data. Experts and state officials differ on whether recipients or organized crime rings are the biggest threats to SNAP. But since the federal government stopped reimbursing stolen SNAP benefits at the end of 2024, more states are looking at ways to address fraud.

States including Arkansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Virginia are joining Alabama and California in rolling out chip cards to make it harder for skimmers to steal SNAP benefits.

“SNAP fraud is rampant,” said Royal, of the United Council on Welfare Fraud. “If anybody tells you that there’s not SNAP fraud out there, they’re trying to pull the wool over your eyes. It exists in all 50 states. It is definitely a plague on the taxpayers.”

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

Advocates are urging state lawmakers to help Wisconsin absorb new administrative costs as a result of federal changes to the nation’s primary food assistance program.

Changes made to Supplemental Nutrition Aid Program (SNAP) benefits in the mega bill signed by President Donald Trump last year will add $69.2 million to the cost of Wisconsin’s FoodShare program in the current two-year budget, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. The agency administers the FoodShare program.

The federal mega bill, which Trump signed on July 4, cut taxes along with spending on some federal programs, including SNAP.

A letter from 165 participating groups asks legislators “to take immediate action to provide funding for these changes. Additional delays in providing this funding will put Wisconsin taxpayers at risk of paying for increased costs and will negatively impact communities, businesses, and SNAP recipients across Wisconsin.”

The coalition of social service, food industry and advocacy organizations held a press conference Wednesday to call for the added state support.

“At an average of $6 per person per day, SNAP supports nearly 700,000 Wisconsinites, and also supports local economies with each dollar in SNAP benefits, generating between $1.50 and $1.80 in economic activity,” said Jackie Anderson, executive director of Feeding Wisconsin.

The press conference coincided with a lobbying day for the Wisconsin Cheesemakers Association, one of the coalition members

“FoodShare brings more than a billion dollars of spending power into our state every year, and a large share of that is returned to Wisconsin producers, and in particular, dairy producers, that flows not only through grocery stores, but back through cheese plants and into dairy farms like the one my family owns,” said Andy Hatch, the owner of Uplands Cheese in Dodgeville and the cheesemakers’ association’s policy chair.

“This is a bipartisan issue” — one that the association’s members, Republicans and Democrats alike, “have all agreed on,” Hatch added. “Our core mission is to feed people and to support our communities, rural and urban, and is why we’ve come together with people across the state to ask our lawmakers to fund the requested $69 million and make sure that there is not a disruption to FoodShare.”

The request includes funding to add administrative staff to avoid errors in the state’s operation of the program. Among the changes to SNAP is a penalty that would require states to pick up some of the benefit costs if their errors exceed 6%. State officials have said that could cost Wisconsin up to $205 million.

The $69 million that the state has estimated it will require to implement those changes was not included in the 2025-27 state budget. Gov. Tony Evers’s office said he had told lawmakers about the need last August, and Evers highlighted the coalition’s call in a statement Thursday.

“Because of President Trump’s so-called ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ Wisconsin taxpayers will already be on the hook for over a quarter of a billion dollars in new costs in future budgets,” Evers said.

“And if we don’t get the resources we’ve been asking for in order to keep our FoodShare error rate low, Wisconsinites could have to pay hundreds of millions even more in penalty fees each year,” he added. “That just cannot happen—it will cripple future state budgets. This funding is critical, and the Legislature must get this done.” 

The request includes $16.1 million to add staff in order to ensure that FoodShare is administered accurately. The new federal law requires states with SNAP error rates exceeding 6% to cover from 5% to 15% of the benefit costs starting in October 2027.

Wisconsin’s error rate in 2024 was 4.47%, the state health department said in a news release in August. The error rate flags instances when recipients get too much or too little SNAP aid or the state makes other mistakes in the program.

“However, rates naturally fluctuate, and even more so when the federal government changes program policies and standards with virtually no notice and is inconsistent with its definition of an error,” the health department release stated.

If the error rate rises and requires Wisconsin to start paying some of the benefit costs, that could cost the state up to $205 million a year, according to the Wisconsin DHS.

To hold down the state’s “historically low error rate while implementing the other provisions” in the federal law and to maintain quality control in administering FoodShare, the state and Wisconsin counties combined will need to add 56 employees, according to the health department.

The new federal law also increases the state’s share of administrative costs for SNAP from 50% to 75%, starting Oct. 1, 2026. That will cost the state an additional $32.4 million.

In addition, the law expanded work requirements for people who receive SNAP, which the Wisconsin DHS estimates would affect about 43,700 Wisconsin FoodShare recipients.

The new requirements affect anyone ages 18 to 64 without a child under 14 at home, including parents with children ages 14 to 17, who were previously exempt from work requirements. Previously work requirements applied to adults age 54 or younger without any children under 18 at home.

The state has estimated it would need an additional $20.7 million to increase participation in the FoodShare employment and training program for recipients who have work requirements and aren’t working already.

Reno Wright, public policy and advocacy director at the Hunger Task Force in Milwaukee, said more than 40% of FoodShare recipients are children, with about one in four Wisconsin children living in a household that uses FoodShare sometime during the year.

“Research shows that SNAP reduces child poverty by nearly 30% and is linked to long-term health and educational outcomes, but those outcomes depend on a system that functions efficiently,” Wright said. The funding sought for the program “ensures that the department has the staffing and the infrastructure needed to prevent delays and disruptions as new federal requirements take effect.”

There is not a stand-alone bill in the Legislature currently for the additional funding, but advocates hope an amendment could be added to another piece of  legislation that would fund SNAP.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

A bill in the Assembly seeks to order the Evers administration to follow a White House demand and turn over data on all Wisconsin food aid recipients since 2020 — despite a lawsuit that has put the federal demand on hold.

AB 1027 would give the administration six months to compile and share with the U.S. Department of Agriculture “all data” that USDA demanded in a letter to the states this past summer on applicants and recipients of benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Aid Program (SNAP).

SNAP funds the state’s FoodShare program.  The letter threatened to cut off SNAP benefits to states that didn’t comply with USDA’s data demand.

Wisconsin is one of 21 states along with the District of Columbia that have sued to block the demand, and a federal judge in California granted the request for a temporary restraining order in their favor. The case remains in litigation.

On Wednesday, the nine Assembly health committee Republicans who were present voted to advance the bill after holding a public hearing with just two witnesses. All five Democrats voted against the measure.

In the hearing, Rep. Nate Gustafson (R-Omro), the bill’s author, said it doesn’t change who is eligible for FoodShare.

“It is focused solely on compliance with the existing federal requirements, so that funding continues without disruption, and Wisconsin citizens can keep receiving the benefits that they have been promised,” Gustafson said.

Rep. Lisa Subeck (D-Madison) asked Gustafson exactly what information was being demanded from the state.

“I’m trying to figure out the motivation for wanting this data, and without a clear picture of what this includes, it certainly concerns me,” Subeck said. “Given what’s happening in the federal government right now, this raises a number of red flags.”

Gustafson said he had not spoken with the Department of Health Services, which administers the FoodShare program, but that in his view, “what this bill is trying to say is, why, we don’t have anything to hide, so let’s just comply.”

Subeck rejected the claim that the bill would help uncover fraud in the FoodShare program.

“I believe that we should absolutely root out any fraud that is in any of our programs,” she said. “I do not believe this bill does anything to address fraud.”

The only other hearing testimony was from Mike Semmann, president and CEO of the Wisconsin Grocers Association, which opposed the legislation. Wisconsin grocers have many customers who use FoodShare in order to meet their needs, Semmann told the committee.

“Many times Wisconsin’s retailers are on the front line, and they’re going to be the ones who are going to be asked the questions about the program and about the concept of what’s going on with their information,” Semmann said. “And we just think that due to everything that is going on with both the potential pending litigation, but other additional questions, that right now to pass a piece of legislation at this time is just a little bit premature.”

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE