Reading Time: < 1 minute

In April, 2,004 residents of Menominee County in northeast Wisconsin received benefits from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

That’s about 46% of the county’s 4,300 residents.

SNAP, formerly known as food stamps and called FoodShare in Wisconsin, provides food assistance for low-income people.

Other reports show similar rates.

As of March 2024, 51% of residents in the Menominee tribal nation received SNAP, according to the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum. 

The latest U.S. Census data, for 2022, showed the rate for Menominee County was 49%.

American Indians constitute nearly 80% of the county’s population.

Menominee County’s rate was cited June 14 by U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., at the Wisconsin Democratic Party convention. He commented on President Donald Trump’s tax cut bill pending in Congress. It would remove an estimated 3.2 million people from SNAP, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

SNAP cost $100 billion in 2024, 1.5% of the federal budget.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• Wisconsin Department of Health Services: State Food Stamp/Foodshare Benefits and Participation Data
• U.S. Department of Agriculture: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
• Wisconsin Department of Health Services: FoodShare: Your Income Could Make You Eligible
• Wisconsin Policy Forum: FoodShare Use Remains High Post Pandemic
• U.S. Census Bureau: Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates — Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
• U.S. Census Bureau: Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates — Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Menominee County
• Wisconsin Democratic Party: WisDems 2025 Convention – Day 1
• Congressional Budget Office: Letter
• U.S. Department of Agriculture: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Participation and Costs
• The Journalist's Resource: As Congress considers cuts to SNAP, we address 8 questions about this US federal nutrition program

Do half the residents in one rural Wisconsin county receive food stamps? 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.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

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.

Changes a U.S. House bill makes to the federal program known as FoodShare in Wisconsin would increase costs for the state, the state Department of Health Services (DHS) reports. (Getty Images Creative)

Food and nutrition cuts in the reconciliation bill that passed the U.S. House early Thursday would cost Wisconsin taxpayers at least $314 million if they are signed into law, a state health official said Thursday.

A requirement for the state to pick up some of the costs of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, a provision penalizing the state for errors in distributing benefits, expanded work requirements for recipients and the elimination of a nutrition education program will all contribute to that cost, said Bill Hanna, Medicaid director at the Department of Health Services (DHS) in a briefing for reporters Thursday afternoon.

The SNAP program is known as FoodShare in Wisconsin and administered by DHS.

SNAP currently includes a work requirement for adults ages 18 to 54 without children to receive benefits. The legislation would raise the upper age to 65 and add the requirement to adults with children who are 7 or older.

Wisconsin has an employment and training program to help FoodShare recipients meet the existing work requirement. With the increase in people who would have to meet the requirement, “We estimate that would cost another $44 million a year,” Hanna said.

Currently the federal government funds 100% of the food benefits under SNAP. The new bill requires states to pick up a portion of the cost, which is tied to a state’s error rate, Hanna said. Errors include the payment of more benefits than a person qualifies for or the payment of fewer benefits than they qualify for.

“When errors are identified, we correct them, meaning if there was an overpayment to a member, that is recouped on future benefits, or if there’s an underpayment, we fix that and back pay those payments,” Hanna said.

Wisconsin’s error rate is low enough to require the state to submit only a 5% match for SNAP funds under the House Republican proposal, he said. But another change — which would allow zero tolerance even for errors that in the past have not counted against state programs — would boost the state’s required match to 15%.

DHS estimates based on the proposed new requirements the state would have to pay about $207 million a year in benefit costs, he said. If the state is able to reduce its error rate to qualify for the 5% match, it would still need to pay $69 million a year.

A higher state share of administrative costs in the bill would add $51 million to the state’s costs for SNAP, Hanna said.

The state would also lose the $12 million it receives for SNAP-Ed, a program that provides education to SNAP participants on healthier food choices.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE

U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden tours Gilbertson's Dairy in Dunn County. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

When he was campaigning for Congress in western Wisconsin, Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden talked about growing up “in abject rural poverty,” raised by a single mom who relied on food stamps. As a result, he has said, he would never go along with cuts to food assistance. 

“He sat down in my office when he first got elected and promised me he wouldn’t ever vote against SNAP because he grew up on it, supposedly,” Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan said in a phone interview as he was on his way home to Wisconsin from Washington this week.

But as Henry Redman reported, Van Orden voted for the Republican budget blueprint, which proposes more than $200 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in order to make room for tax cuts for the very wealthy.

Still, after that vote, Van Orden issued a public statement warning against reckless cuts to SNAP that place “disproportionate burdens on rural states, where food insecurity is often more widespread,” and saying it is unfair to build a budget “on the backs of some of our most vulnerable populations, including hungry children. Period.”

Van Orden sits on the House Agriculture Committee, which was tasked with drawing up a specific plan to cut $230 billion from food assistance to pay for tax cuts. Van Orden reportedly balked at a cost-sharing plan that shifted 25% of the cost of the program to states, saying it was unfair to Wisconsin.

But then, on Wednesday night, Van Orden voted yes as the committee passed an unprecedented cut in federal funding for SNAP on a 29-25 vote.

Van Orden took credit for the plan, which ties cuts to state error rates in determining eligibility and benefit amounts for food assistance. According to WisPolitics, he declared at a House Ag Committee markup that “states are going to have to accept the fact that if they are not administering this program efficiently, that they’re going to have to pay a portion of the program that is equitable, and it makes sense and it is scaled.” 

But states, including Wisconsin, don’t have money to make up the gap as the federal government, for the first time ever, withdraws hundreds of millions of dollars for nutrition assistance. Instead, they will reduce coverage, kick people off the program and hunger will increase. The ripple effects include a loss of about $30 billion for farmers who supply food for the program, Democrats on the Ag Committee report, and damage to the broader economy, since every $1 in SNAP benefits generates about $1.50 in economic activity. Grocery stores, food manufacturers rural communities will be hit particularly hard. 

Wisconsin will start out with a bill for 5% of the costs of the program in Fiscal Year 2028, according to a bill explanation from the Agriculture Committee. But as error rates vary, that number shifts sharply upward — to 15% when the error rate goes from the current 5% to 6%, to 20% if we exceed an 8% error rate, and so on.  

And there are other cuts in the bill, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) points out, including stricter eligibility limits, work requirements that cannot be waived in times of economic hardship and high unemployment, and reductions in benefits that come from eliminating deductions for utility costs. 

More than 900,000 children, adults, and seniors count on Wisconsin’s SNAP program, known as FoodShare, according to an analysis of state health department data by Kids Forward. The same analysis found that covering the costs of just 10% of SNAP benefits would cost Wisconsin $136 million. 

Alaska and Texas have higher error rates than Wisconsin, and so they — and their hungry kids — are stuck with the biggest cuts. Even if you accept that that is somehow just, the people who are going to pay for this bill in all the states, including ours, are, as Van Orden himself put it, “the most vulnerable populations, including hungry children. Period.”

“He says one thing and does another,” Pocan says of Van Orden’s flip-flopping on SNAP. “He’s gone totally Washington.”

That’s too bad for the people left behind in rural Wisconsin, who will take the brunt of these unnecessary cuts. 

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE