Natural gas pipeline projects completed in the United States in 2025 increased capacity by approximately 6.3 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d), according to our recently updated Natural Gas Pipeline Projects Tracker. A substantial portion, 85%, or 5.3 Bcf/d, of this new capacity is dedicated to delivering natural gas to the South Central region of the United States. This region includes the Gulf Coast, where much of the nation's growing natural gas demand, particularly from liquefied natural gas (LNG), is concentrated. The new capacity primarily connects both new and existing supply sources to consumers in the region.
(The Center Square) - A group of Wisconsin Democrats and labor leaders are pushing a minimum wage bill that would increase the state’s minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 immediately, progressively increase that to $20 by 2030 and then have…
(The Center Square) – There is a new fear among education reformers in Wisconsin following the lawsuit to change how the state pays for public schools.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden stands out among vulnerable House Republicans: He has not softened his rhetoric on President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics, despite public outcry over the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota.
The Wisconsin Republican, whose seat is one of Democrats’ targets in the 2026 midterms, supported an investigation into Alex Pretti’s killing, but said his “support for federal law enforcement” would remain “unwavering.”
Van Orden told NOTUS he is holding firm in his support for the Trump administration’s deportation efforts because of the crime committed by unauthorized immigrants.
He cited a video posted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week alongside the caption, “American citizens raped and murdered by those who have no right to be in our country.”
“That’s why I back ICE,” Van Orden said. “Watch that video, and then you would never ask me that question again.”
“If you can look at that thing and see all these people that have been brutally murdered and the families that have been destroyed because of these criminal, illegal aliens, and you’re willing to turn your back to it, that means you have an alternative purpose or an alternative objective,” Van Orden said.
Van Orden’s hard-line position in support of the president’s mass deportation agenda in one of this year’s most competitive races will test the Trump agenda in the very part of the country that helped secure the president a second term in the White House.
His district includes the farmland and exurbs of Minnesota’s Twin Cities, spanning Wisconsin’s border with Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. Van Orden won by a margin of 2.8 percentage points in 2024. Trump won the district by more than 7 percentage points. In a midterm cycle that favors Democrats, and at a time voters are losing trust in Republicans’ immigration agenda, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the race as a “toss up.”
“We’re not a border state. It’s not something that was on the agenda prior to Trump. And obviously, people like Derrick Van Orden have taken the most extreme possible positions on an issue that I’m not sure was top of mind for most Wisconsin voters,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative political commentator and Wisconsin resident.
Van Orden has shown his MAGA bona fides through issues like immigration and trade, where he has defended the president’s actions.
He followed the administration’s lead, expressing support for body cameras on immigration officers, a reform that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she would implement after Pretti was killed. Democrats want to standardize that policy in a DHS funding bill.
“It allows good cops to be good cops, and it holds police officers that may not be doing what they should do accountable publicly,” Van Orden said. “And that makes the force better, that makes the American population trust law enforcement more.”
He said he will await the results of a full investigation into Pretti’s death, but has laid the blame for the rise of political violence squarely with Democrats, as many in the administration and Trump’s circle have done.
“This is unfortunately true for many Democrats. They’re willing to put those American lives, throw them into the garbage can for political power, which means they have no business being in power,” Van Orden said.
There are issues where Van Orden has broken with the conservative mainstream. In January, he voted to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies to prevent coverage loss, though he is opposed to the program. He has advocated for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which he used as a child, though he voted for cuts to the program in the budget reconciliation bill.
Faced with a frustrated agricultural industry, Van Orden introduced a bill to create a path to temporary worker status for immigrant agricultural workers who self-deport and pay a fine. Wisconsin farms employ a large immigrant labor force.
“He has this interesting dichotomy of picking some of those softer issues that might appeal to independents and some others, versus his very strong pro-Trump issues where, obviously that’s going to settle well with the MAGA voters and the pro-Trump Republicans,” said independent political strategist Brandon Scholz, who formerly ran the Wisconsin Republican Party.
In contrast, other House Republicans facing heated reelection bids this year have moderated their positions on immigration enforcement, calling for a reassessment of the country’s immigration policy.
“Congress and the president need to embrace a new comprehensive national immigration policy that acknowledges Americans’ many legitimate concerns about how the government has conducted immigration policy,” Rep. Mike Lawler wrote for The New York Times.
Van Orden declined to comment on other Democratic demands for DHS reforms, which include a ban on masks and identification requirements for immigration agents, until the party funds the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service and the U.S. Coast Guard.
It is these nonimmigration agencies within DHS that Van Orden’s constituents are affected by during the partial government shutdown, which has left some without paychecks and blocked others from receiving their boating licenses to go out on the district’s many lakes, he said.
That message may work with his constituents, Scholz said. While Republican voters in Wisconsin may be concerned about immigration, the issue has not historically been top of mind for them.
“There are other issues for them that may be more critical to making a decision on what they’re going to do, i.e. economic issues,” Scholz said.
This story was produced andoriginally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.
Inside the mostly empty town hall in the town of Wausau on County Road Z last week, a handful of voters cast ballots in wooden booths for a school board race. The biggest question on the minds of local election officials wasn’t who would win — it was who would run elections next year.
After two clerks left within a year, longtime town supervisor Sharon Hunter stepped in because no one else would. Hunter’s term ends in April 2027. Nomination papers for a potential successor are due in January 2027, but local officials still don’t know who comes next.
“Sharon’s not going to do 29 years,” Deputy Clerk Amy Meyer said, referring to the long tenure of the clerk who resigned in late 2024, setting off the cascade of brief replacements.
Hunter, 72, laughed. “I’d be over 100 years old,” she said. “I don’t think you want me here with my walker.”
Hunter’s decision to step up in a town of 2,200 may seem insignificant. But Wisconsin’s election system — one of the most decentralized in the country — depends on people like her. The state requires each of its 1,850 municipalities to run its own elections. That means hundreds of local clerks are needed to keep the system running. By contrast, Texas, a state with nearly five times Wisconsin’s population, relies on county-level election offices and has about one-sixth as many local election officials.
That structure leaves Wisconsin unusually dependent on small-town clerks. Between 2020 and 2024, more than 700 municipal clerks here left their posts, the highest turnover by raw numbers in the nation. As rural communities age and fewer residents are willing or able to take on an increasingly complex job, replacing them has become harder — raising questions about how long the state’s hyper-local model can hold.
The system can absorb one vacancy. It strains under dozens. Elections get stitched together, paperwork piles up, and the quiet machinery of local government — licenses, payroll, meeting notices — shifts its weight onto whoever is left.
The town of Wausau municipal building is pictured Feb. 17, 2026. The town has had three clerks in the past year and struggled to keep the position filled until Sharon Hunter stepped in, giving up her vote as town supervisor. (Alexander Shur / Votebeat)
Meyer, 55, understands why people don’t want the job — she doesn’t want it either. Like her mother, she has worked elections in town for much of her adult life. She considered becoming clerk, but it wasn’t the right time. She doesn’t want residents coming to her house with ballots or questions, as they once did under the longtime clerk.
“There comes a point in the day where I want to turn my phone off,” Meyer said from the town hall, situated at the center of loosely stitched county roads dotted with ranch homes and small farms, some of them no longer in operation. “I don’t want to hear that your garbage didn’t get picked up, or your neighbor’s dog is barking,” she said. “I just don’t.”
In a small town, the clerk is often the first call for everything from election deadlines to everyday complaints — and the learning curve is steep.
“It’s going to take you practically the first year to learn everything,” Meyer said. “Now, we have somebody new in it, and we have spent half the term relearning.”
Older residents have long filled these roles, but clerks say the job has grown more demanding, with little added support. It is often thankless work for modest pay. In Wausau, the clerk earns about $27,000 a year with no benefits.
Even so, many residents remain committed to keeping elections at the town level. Hunter said preserving local control was her biggest reason for stepping in, though she has not decided whether to seek another term.
“But we do need to have someone coming after me,” she said. “Because I am old.”
In an aging town, succession is unclear
The rural town of Wausau sits just east of the city of Wausau, a community of about 40,000 that began as a logging town in the 1830s and now centers on manufacturing and a burgeoning ginseng farming industry. As the city has grown, the town has increasingly become a bedroom community, as its lower property taxes attract commuters. A handful of farms remain, but the town is less agricultural than it once was.
Its population is slowly growing — and steadily aging. That’s because retirees also make up a large and growing share of the town’s residents. Its median age has climbed by roughly a decade since 2000 and now hovers around 50 — a decade older than the statewide average. The town still must run elections, issue licenses and post meeting notices. What’s less certain is who will do it.
Here, as in many communities nationwide, the responsibility will likely fall to older residents. Nationally, nearly 70% of chief election officials are 50 or older, according to the Elections & Voting Information Center. In Wisconsin, that share climbs to almost 80%, with the oldest officials concentrated in the smallest jurisdictions.
One poll worker, knitting pink yarn during a lull between voters, said at 71 she was too old to take on the clerk’s job. She had encouraged a younger neighbor to consider it, she said, but the woman had just given birth.
Wausau’s shift reflects a broader reality in rural Wisconsin: The state built a system that depends on hundreds of small-town clerks and their deputies — a structure rooted in an era when farms were multigenerational, churches were full, and civic roles widely shared. That foundation is thinning. About a quarter of Wisconsin’s farms closed between 2002 and 2022, and churches are aging and shrinking. Volunteer fire departments and other local services report persistent staffing shortages.
There is no sweeping rural exodus. Rural counties are mostly growing, largely because retirees are staying or moving in. Wisconsin’s population is projected to age most rapidly in its rural communities, according to UW-Madison’s Applied Population Lab.
Voter check-in materials sit on a table during a school board election that affected only part of the town of Wausau. Turnout remained slow throughout the day. (Alexander Shur / Votebeat)
Originally from nearby Birnamwood, Hunter moved to the town of Wausau in the 1970s and has worked in public service ever since. For four decades, she wrote federal grants and helped low-income youth map out their futures through the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Her entry into town government came by accident. Upset over a town decision to pave the ends of some residents’ driveways, but not hers or her neighbors’, she ran for town treasurer. What began as frustration became a career: She spent 10 years as treasurer and two decades as a supervisor.
Her path shifted again after the former town clerk, Cindy Worden, retired after 30 years on the job. Supervisors appointed a replacement, but she left after two weeks because of a terminal cancer diagnosis. The next clerk resigned within months, overwhelmed by balancing the duties with a full-time job and raising a family.
As the town searched for a clerk, Hunter and fellow supervisor Steve Buntin, a retired auto mechanic, filled in. Supervisors listed the job on Facebook and the town website. Potential candidates declined. Some didn’t want the scrutiny of elections, and others resisted the administrative grind.
At one point, county officials offered to step in to run elections and charge about $1,000 per election. That was Hunter’s turning point, though stepping into the role meant giving up her vote on the town board — a sacrifice she did not take lightly.
“After you start, you kind of get hooked,” Hunter said. The residents might be “ornery most of the time,” but helping them navigate difficult choices is public service. “It’s in your blood.”
She can return to being a supervisor if someone else steps up as clerk, but, as Buntin put it, “nobody seems to be knocking down the door.”
Last April, the town asked voters to allow clerks to be appointed rather than elected, which would have permitted hiring someone from outside town limits. The referendum failed narrowly. A new state law has since made it easier for small municipalities to switch to appointments, but the town has yet to make the jump.
“You still have to have somebody come forward who wants to be a clerk,” Meyer said. “Just because the state law changed doesn’t make it all that easy.”
Clerks are hard to recruit, and harder to retain
Wausau sits in Marathon County, home to about 130,000 people. To run elections for that population, the county depends on roughly 60 municipal clerks — one in each city, village and town — layered beneath its elected county clerk. In most similarly sized counties elsewhere, such as St. Joseph County, Indiana, or Frederick County, Maryland, a single county office oversees elections for everyone.
There’s little appetite to abandon Wisconsin’s structure. Local clerks argue decentralization limits errors and keeps elections in familiar hands. But filling dozens of posts — and keeping them filled — is no easy task. Of the 13 new municipal clerks who have taken office in Marathon County since the April 2025 election, including Hunter, four resigned within months, County Clerk Kim Trueblood said. Since then, a fifth clerk — in the city of Wausau — has also stepped down.
Trueblood attributes part of the churn to recruitment practices that understate the job. Town and village chairs often approach potential clerks by describing the work as little more than taking meeting minutes.
“Then they get into a job, and it’s the elections, it’s all of the financial reporting, the liquor licenses, everything that they have to do — it’s just overwhelming,” she said. “And people who work a full-time job and have families, I don’t know how they do it.”
The pay rarely offsets the demands. In the town of Wausau, the clerk makes $27,628 per year plus a $1,000 mileage stipend, with no benefits. The job can require 10 to 20 hours a week — and far more around elections — covering everything from meeting notices and licenses to payroll and ballot administration.
Other municipalities in Marathon County pay far less. Kelley Blume, the clerk in the town of Marathon who’s also a deputy clerk for the county, earned just over $10,000 for her town role in 2025. During election seasons, she said, the hours stretch late into the night.
When she was first approached for the job about 10 years ago, she said town officials told her it would only be a couple of hours per week.
“It’s not a couple hours,” she said. “I feel bad for all of these new clerks that think it’s going to be easy.”
She is considering stepping down. The added responsibilities have grown heavier each year, she said, and she wants to spend more time with her children and grandchildren.
Waiting for the next name on the ballot
Hunter says she stepped in to preserve something she believes is worth protecting: the idea that elections should be run by people who know the roads and the names on the ballot, who know which farm sits beyond the bend and which houses were built last year. To her, local government isn’t an abstraction. It’s a neighbor answering the phone.
“I do feel local government is critical, and I would hate to see that be taken away from the residents,” Hunter said. “It’s important they have a voice, and it starts at their local government.”
She knows the structure is imperfect, but pride in local control runs deep here, even as the pool of residents willing to shoulder the work grows thinner. Ultimately, she said, the town may have to bend. Communities could share clerks or other services, even if that means loosening borders that have long felt fixed.
She’ll decide later this year whether to run again. If she doesn’t, she said, the town may take another vote on hiring clerks outside of town limits. In the meantime, she has no regrets about stepping up — even if nobody in town seems ready to follow her lead.
“It’s my civic duty,” she said.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Wisconsin Watch has a new partner in the fight for facts.
Ahead of another pivotal election year, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Wisconsin Watch are teaming up to produce more Fact Briefs, 150-word answers to yes/no questions based on claims made in the infosphere.
Wisconsin Watch has partnered with Gigafact since 2022 to produce more than 600 bite-sized fact checks. We’re part of a network of 18 nonprofit newsrooms across the country working to equip the public with accurate information to inform civic discussion.
The Journal Sentinel, part of the USA Today Network and the largest newsroom in Wisconsin, was an early adopter of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking nonprofit founded in 2007.
As Journal Sentinel Editor Greg Borowski writes in a column today at jsonline.com, the switch to Fact Briefs will appeal to readers seeking accurate information quickly and with a clearer true-or-false format, rather than PolitiFact’s six-tiered “score card” for assessing whether a claimant is telling the truth. Fact Briefs focus less on the claimant, and more on the claim itself.
“This partnership will increase the number of Wisconsin-focused items and allow us to present them more quickly and in ways we think readers most want to get them,” Borowski writes.
The facts matter, even more so in a world where politicians and media influencers seem to habitually get away with bending, breaking or simply disregarding the truth. Fighting for the facts isn’t about picking a political side or committing to a particular worldview, it’s about nurturing a shared reality that forms the basis of a free and civilized society.
That’s why the courts, teachers, scientists, the folks managing your investment accounts and even the refs checking the instant replay cameras take the facts so seriously. Why should our political discourse be any different?
We’re excited to grow our capacity to keep the public informed, but we continue to need the public’s support. Whether this new partnership will continue after the November election will depend on support from Wisconsin Watch donors. Click here to find out more about how you can support the fight for facts.
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A newborn baby is priceless, of course. But in Bayfield County, you can add $100 to that — thanks to a new program called Saving Early for Educational Dreams, or SEED. It’s a $100 educational savings account for all newborns in the county, plus an additional $100 for families who participate in the WIC program.
Republican lawmakers have been grilling Wisconsin's Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul about the use of environmental prosecutors whose positions were funded by an outside foundation.
A new poll shows former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes has more name recognition than any other candidate for governor, but he isn't Democratic voters' clear first choice.
A staff member at Madison East High School has been placed on leave while the school district investigates an allegation a student at the school was fed dog food.
The Winnebago County Board declined to take action on a resolution condemning federal immigration actions in Minneapolis, removing the item from its agenda Tuesday night without debate.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Growth Energy, the nation’s largest biofuel trade association, expressed renewed urgency after Congress missed another deadline to approve a permanent, legislative fix offering consumers year-round access to E15. After reaching an impasse in January, House leaders agreed to establish an E15 Rural Domestic Energy Council, tasked with striking a deal no later than February 15 and sending legislation to the House floor no later than February 25, 2026. Despite reports of progress, no legislation has been introduced.
“This is an urgent priority for rural America, and we’re grateful for the hard work by our champions on the council to keep this process moving forward,” said Growth Energy CEO Emily Skor. “But we need to get year-round E15 to the President’s desk in time to reignite the struggling farm economy and guarantee real savings at the pump this summer. We urge Speaker Johnson and his team to stand behind President Trump’s promise to quickly deliver year-round access to lower-cost, American-made E15.
“Stakeholders already have consensus legislation with clear support across the entire supply chain – including farmers, biofuel producers, retailers, and the vast majority of refiners. Now is the time to pull out all the stops to make certain the legislation has the momentum needed to speed through the House and Senate.”
HIGH POINT, N.C. – Thomas Built Buses (TBB), a leading manufacturer of school buses in North America and a division of Daimler Truck Specialty Vehicles, has selected Bryan County Schools in Georgia as the recipient of proceeds from its recent ‘If You Pass’ school bus safety awareness campaign. The contribution will support the district’s ongoing work to reduce illegal school bus passings and improve roadway safety for students.
Launched during National School Bus Safety Week, the ‘If You Pass’ campaign confronted the ongoing issue of illegal school bus passings, an offense that occurs an estimated 39.3 million times each school year according to National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services (NASDPTS). Rather than softening the message, the campaign opted for a direct, no-nonsense approach to school bus safety — If You Pass.
Through bold social messaging and a limited-edition merchandise collection, the campaign caught the attention of drivers, educators and families nationwide, helping push the issue into the public conversation. This reinforced the responsibility to stop and gave communities a way to actively participate in school bus safety advocacy.
Supporters purchased items from the merchandise collection, with all net proceeds dedicated to supporting school bus and driver safety education efforts. Supporters were also encouraged to nominate districts in their communities to receive campaign funds.
Of the districts nominated by supporters, Bryan County Schools received the most recognition and has been selected as the recipient of the campaign proceeds.
“Illegal passings are one of the most preventable dangers students face every day, and yet they keep happening,” said Mario DiFoggio, general manager of dealer channel sales and marketing for Thomas Built Buses. “The ‘If You Pass’ campaign was intentionally direct, because politeness doesn’t stop traffic — awareness does. For a short, three-week campaign, the response exceeded our expectations, and we know these funds will go a long way in supporting the important work Bryan County Schools is doing to protect students and keep this conversation going.”
Thomas Built Buses will continue to collaborate with school districts, transportation departments and industry partners to advance student safety and encourage responsible driver behavior nationwide.
About Thomas Built Buses:
Founded in 1916, Thomas Built Buses is a leading manufacturer of school buses in North America. Since the first Thomas Built bus rolled off the assembly line, the company has been committed to delivering the smartest and most innovative buses in North America. Learn more at thomasbuiltbuses.com or facebook.com/thomasbuiltbuses.
Thomas Built Buses, Inc., headquartered in High Point, North Carolina, is a subsidiary of Daimler Truck North America LLC, a leading provider of comprehensive products and technologies for the commercial transportation industry. The company designs, engineers, manufactures and markets medium- and heavy-duty trucks, school buses, vehicle chassis and their associated technologies and components under the Freightliner, Western Star, Thomas Built Buses, Freightliner Custom Chassis Corp and Detroit brands. Thomas Built Buses and Freightliner Custom Chassis Corp. together form Daimler Truck Specialty Vehicles. Daimler Truck North America is a subsidiary of Daimler Truck AG, one of the world’s leading commercial vehicle manufacturers.
A former school bus monitor in Grady County in southwest Georgia is facing a simple battery charge following allegations that she assaulted a student with autism while on duty, reported WALB News.
The alleged student assault occurred Feb. 12 at Eastside Elementary School in Cairo, Georgia.
The school’s resource officer along with another witness reviewed surveillance footage from the school bus. The officer reportedly stated that the video showed the bus monitor pinching the child and “striking him in the face with what appeared to be a bag.”
The child’s mother said she was notified to come to the school and discovered a bruise on her son when she arrived. She said her child, who is on the autism spectrum, was able to communicate what happened during the student assault on the school bus ride.
“I felt like I needed to speak out to protect my son,” the mother said via the article.
Grady County Schools confirmed that the school bus monitor involved is no longer employed by the district.
Authorities said the former school employee was charged with simple battery. The school resource officer indicated officials are working toward making an arrest as the investigation continues.
People shop for groceries at a Walmart store in Ohio. State officials across the country are looking to crack down on fraud and mistakes in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. (Photo by Marty Schladen/Ohio Capital Journal)
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 serves nearly 42 million people — more than 1 in 10 U.S. residents. More than half are children under 18 or adults 60 and older.
Each month, participating households receive an average of $187 in benefits per person to buy food.
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.
The federal government is telling states, you have to pay more in administrative costs, and you have to bring your error rates down simultaneously. It feels like those two changes are in opposition with each other.
– Eliza Kinsey, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine
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.”
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.”
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Parents and residents concerned by news of possible lead exposure in Milwaukee Public Schools buildings gather outside of North Division High School as a lead screening clinic is held inside in May 2025. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
A parents’ advocacy group is giving mixed reviews to the latest developments in addressing the ongoing issue of lead contamination in Milwaukee Public Schools.
On the plus side, Lead Safe Schools MKE supports a new lead testing initiative at MPS that officials announced this week.
“We applaud the efforts at testing children and increasing testing penetration,” Kristen Payne of Lead Safe Schools MKE told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email message. “This will help to ascertain the extent to which children in Milwaukee suffer from elevated blood lead levels.”
Payne said the organization wants to see testing and evaluation expanded from elementary schools to the rest of the school system.
Caroline Reinwald, the public information officer for the Milwaukee Health Department, said that the MPS work started with elementary schools because younger children are at higher risk for lead exposure, which can lead to developmental problems. MPS is planning to evaluate other schools, she said in an email message, with the health department overseeing and guiding the process.
AnMPS Lead Reports and Plan webpage outlines the district’s project for addressing potential lead exposure in the school system.
Payne said Lead Safe Schools MKE wants MPS to adopt a stronger standard for evaluating drinking water for the presence of lead than it currently uses — 15 parts per billion — noting that public health experts say that no level of lead in drinking water is safe for humans.
MPS media relations manager Stephen Davis said that the district tested drinking water from all fountains, faucets, dispensers and other fixtures in 2016, and that 94% of fountains “met EPA standards.” Fountains that did not were turned off and eventually replaced.
Davis said there are no lead service lines providing water to MPS school buildings. The district also has filtration systems on all water fountains.
Payne said that her group wants to see the district use a standard from the American Academy of Pediatrics of less than 1 ppb.
The organization also wants MPS to continue dust-wipe sampling in the buildings that the district has declared stabilized to ensure that they remain safe.
Reinwold said the health department “supports continued vigilance and will continue working with MPS to ensure stabilization work remains protective over time and that any new deterioration is addressed promptly.”
In addition, Lead Safe Schools MKE has sought more testing of soil on MPS school grounds, which Payne called “an overlooked pathway of potential exposure.”
Davis said the school district has evaluated areas where children may “come into contact with bare soil” including playgrounds, courtyards and unpaved outdoor spaces.
Payne said Lead Safe Schools MKE also has concerns about communication and transparency in the ongoing project to address lead exposure concerns in the school system.
“There are serious gaps in the data available to the public and no clear accountability processes in place to be sure information gets published,” she said.
Republican members of the Committee on Oversight of the Department of Justice speak at a press conference about their plans to "punish" the DOJ for hiring third-party attorneys to conduct environmental enforcement. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said that the nearly eight hours of hearings held by the newly established Committee on the Oversight of the Department of Justice this week amounted to “political theater.”
In a series of hearings Tuesday and Wednesday, the committee, chaired by Senate President Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk), dug into allegations that the DOJ violated state rules when it hired out of state lawyers on contract to enforce the state’s environmental regulations.
The attorneys were given fellowships to work as special assistant attorneys general through a New York University program tied to former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The testimony obtained by the committee included input from Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby and one of the state Republican Party’s most powerful allies, and a dairy farmer who was subject to an enforcement action by the state after he operated his factory farm without a permit for six years.
The Republican members of the committee said the fellowships presented “troubling” opportunities for a third-party organization to exert partisan influence over the work of the DOJ. Throughout the testimony, Republicans also complained about the specifics of state employment classifications, the timeliness of paperwork filing and previous contributions Bloomberg has made to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Kaul compared the committee’s work to former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s widely maligned review of the 2020 election.
“Increasingly, what we’re seeing are actions from the committee that I would describe as Gableman-esque,” Kaul said. “This is clearly an exercise in political theater, not a substantive exercise, and that’s really unfortunate, because the reality is that we do have serious issues to address on behalf of the people of Wisconsin, and we have progress to make.”
Kaul also questioned how an investigation into outside influence on state government could give the state’s most powerful lobbying organization a multi-hour platform to testify.
“The purported basis for this is to investigate outside influence, and the only outside influence that is going on here is the outside influence on our Legislature,” he said. “Just yesterday, the state’s most powerful lobbying organization got a platform to testify from this Legislature. We did not hear from a single person who was impacted by the harmful pollution, who was there to talk about those harms. So we have a one-sided presentation from the Legislature, and any concerns about outside influence are ones that relate to the actions of the Legislature, not the Department of Justice.”
Republicans on the committee complained that the fellows were paid through the university program while officially being classified by the state as volunteers and that Kaul seeking this outside funding for staff attorneys amounted to an end-run around the Legislature’s authority to decide the department’s budget.
“If you’re truly a leader of a department, you shouldn’t give up. You seem to believe in certain things, but you’ve given up on trying to help with your own state resources,” Sen. Cory Tomczyk (R-Mosinee) said, asking why Kaul didn’t ask the Legislature for additional money to fund environmental enforcement attorneys.
Kaul said he’s “confident the current majority will not fund additional environmental positions.”
Tomczyk also spent a significant chunk of his testimony asking about the timing of DOJ filing paperwork to officially hire the fellows, including when they took their oaths of office and got licensed to practice law in Wisconsin. He compared delays in the oaths being completed with the Tuesday testimony of dairy farmer Phil Mlsna — who missed a filing deadline with the DNR, causing the loss of his dairy farm’s permit.
Felzkowski, a former member of the Joint Finance Committee, has been among the Republicans most hostile to the state’s environmental rules and conservation programs. As a member of JFC, she anonymously held up the Pelican River Forest conservation project and has been heavily opposed to the extension of the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program.
Throughout her questioning of Kaul, she argued that funding environmental enforcement is inherently partisan.
“You want the citizens of the state of Wisconsin to believe this is a non-partisan organization without a personal agenda or their own private agenda,” Felzkowski said.
Kaul said enforcing the state’s environmental laws is a partisan issue only in that many Republicans don’t believe the government should address climate change.
“Well, what I would say is that the center is focused on environmental protection issues, and so a lot of it is a question of if you view protecting the environment, addressing climate change, working to protect safe and clean water, as partisan issues or not,” Kaul said.
Following the hearing’s conclusion, the Republican members of the committee held a press conference to say they’d assess the testimony and release a report. During the press conference, Tomczyk questioned if the DOJ should be “punished” over the fellowship issue.
“If we’re going to punish a farmer for not having his paperwork done, should the DOJ be punished for not having theirs?” he asked, adding that he has “some ideas” for what the punishment would look like.
The Democrats on the committee said that after two days of testimony, Republicans couldn’t point to any specific cases in which the fellows’ work on a case was unduly influenced.
“What was clear from the testimony over the last two days is there was not one, not one example of any legal matter or enforcement action that was worked on by these legal fellows that pointed to any special interest,” Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay), a former environmental attorney, said. “They were working on bread-and-butter environmental enforcement actions pertaining to water quality, CAFO regulation, wetland remediation and the like, everything was what we need as a state to protect our communities.”
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