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.

Trump bill would cost Wisconsin $314 million in federal food aid is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Lutheran groups in Wisconsin are defending their records of service after coming under attack on social media by Elon Musk, the tech mogul tapped by President Donald Trump to root out waste and inefficiency in the federal government.

Over the weekend, former national security advisor Michael Flynn posted on X, the social media platform Musk owns, accusing Lutheran organizations who receive federal grants of committing “money laundering.”

Musk responded that his team at the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, is “rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.”

Federal grants totaling billions of dollars each year go to nonprofits to provide a range of community services that states don’t provide themselves, such as housing or food assistance.

Flynn’s post included screenshots of some Lutheran groups that receive federal funds. But it’s unclear how Flynn identified which Lutheran groups to name in his post, or how Musk determined those payments to be illegal.

The two Wisconsin groups included by name in Flynn’s post are Wisconsin Lutheran Child and Family Services (WLCFS), a Christian mental health care provider in Germantown, and the Gundersen Lutheran Medical Foundation in La Crosse, a nonprofit health clinic that no longer has any affiliation with the Lutheran Church.

A spokesperson for Christian Family Services, which oversees WLCFS, said the group understands its government funding to still be in place.

“We have been following the news with interest because we know that any funding we receive – whether from public or private sources – is a privilege and could end at any time,” the spokesperson said.

In a statement, Gundersen’s parent group, Emplify Health, said the group works with officials of all parties.

“Any public funding we receive is through existing public programs, approved through the legislative process, and is used to improve access to healthcare for our patients,” the statement reads.

‘I think he got this one wrong’

Other Wisconsin-based Lutheran service groups that received federal aid in recent years were not included in Flynn’s post. That includes Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan.

“I actually responded to Musk,” said Héctor Colón, that group’s president.

Colón said he’s interested in Musk’s career trajectory, and said curbing wasteful government spending would support communities that need government resources.

“But I told him, I think he’s got this one wrong,” he added.

Colón said his organization has operated for 143 years and serves about 30,000 people per year, providing youth development, mental health and substance use services, housing coordination and other services.

The group has also helped resettle about 11,000 refugees over the last 50 years — another government project that is largely outsourced to nonprofit groups. That work has also been targeted under the Trump administration, and funding for Colón’s group’s refugee work has been suspended since last month, under a stop work order issued to all American resettlement groups.

“Not only is it the humanitarian thing to do for these individuals, but there’s economic benefits as well,” Colón said. “Right now, there’s a huge shortage of workers. And these individuals come here, they end up loving America, and clearly are on a path to citizenship and buying homes and having jobs and contributing to the broader economy.”

Since his brief stint in Trump’s first administration, Flynn has become a figurehead for the QAnon conspiracy movement. In other social media posts, he criticized money that goes to Catholic charity groups.

Flynn is tied to Christian nationalist groups that often see mainline Protestant groups as anti-Christian, according to Julie Ingersoll, an expert in American religion and politics at the University of North Florida. But many faith-based groups take on governmental priorities or projects, she added.

“Part of our whole system — in which we give tax advantages and all to religious organizations — part of the justification for that is the charitable work that they do,” she said. “(The government) can’t insist that that a group that wants to get funding for some charitable work be a secular group. That’s been considered by the courts to be discrimination against religious viewpoints.”

Indeed, the bulk of governmental refugee resettlement work is done by faith-based groups, primarily those with Protestant, Catholic and Jewish origins. Since 1980, that work has been standardized under the Refugee Act. Refugees have been granted legal status to be in the United States. Community-based groups do the work of getting them set up with housing and jobs, train them about how to set up utilities and bank accounts, and get their kids into school.

“They’re doing work that the federal government isn’t doing and can’t do, and they see it as part of their Christian mission to do good in the world,” said Ingersoll.

This story was originally published by WPR.

Elon Musk calls for cutting funds to Lutheran groups, including in Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Dueling ads in Wisconsin’s high-stakes Supreme Court election focus on a backlog of criminal cases that took place during one candidate’s stint as the state’s top lawyer.

Sexual assault kits — often referred to as rape kits — are collections of DNA and other evidence taken from an assault survivor that can help identify or prosecute an assailant. But in some cases, the evidence is collected and then goes unprocessed, creating what some advocates have described as a national backlog of hundreds of thousands.

In Wisconsin, that backlog was about 6,000 when Brad Schimel, the Republican-backed candidate for Supreme Court, took office as Wisconsin’s attorney general in 2015. He served until 2019, and in a recent campaign ad he claimed that his office cleared 4,000 sexual assault kits during that time.

This week, his Democratic-backed opponent, Susan Crawford, released a competing ad that focused on the early years of Schimel’s time as attorney general.

“He let 6,000 rape kits sit untested for two years,” the ad states.

Crawford’s ad refers to a statistic from midway through Schimel’s tenure. As of early 2017, his office said the state had cleared just nine of those 6,000 backlogged tests, according to reporting by the Green Bay Press-Gazette at the time.

That came after the U.S. Department of Justice and the New York County district attorney’s office sent $4 million in grant funds to Wisconsin to assist with the process. A Schimel spokesperson at the time said the DOJ was following proper protocols for respecting survivors and adhering to requirements of the grant money.

A year and a half later, much of the backlog had been cleared. Schimel announced in September 2018 that all but five of the eligible tests had been cleared, using about $7 million total in grant funding.

That announcement came ahead of his reelection campaign against Democrat Josh Kaul, who criticized Schimel’s handling of the backlog and ultimately bested him that November. Schimel said at the time that there was no political motivation behind the announcement.

“We didn’t delay anything. We didn’t set anything aside. This was done as quickly as possible,” Schimel said in 2018, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

All told, Schimel said at the time that his office had cleared about 4,154 kits, in which survivors consented to the testing. Some of those incidents dated back to the 1980s.

Now, sexual assault kit testing is once again a subject of political debate — this time in a battle for a seat on Wisconsin’s high court, which has no say in how the state manages its DNA testing.

But being able to hold up a record in addressing crime — or suggesting that one’s opponent is soft or slow to respond to crime — is standard messaging in these races, said Damon Cann, a political scientist at Utah State University who has written extensively about judicial elections.

“Rape kits are crime-related, and crime tends to be the No. 1 issue for voters in judicial elections,” Cann said. But, he added, “the big money and the most influential cases that the courts decide that have the most policy consequences are almost never criminal cases.”

Schimel and Crawford are both running to replace outgoing liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley in an election that will determine whether the high court maintains its 4-3 liberal majority or flips to a conservative majority.

This story was originally published by WPR.

Dueling Wisconsin Supreme Court ads focus on rape kit backlog is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.