Wisconsin lawmakers plan to take their first hard look at the state’s food stamp program in more than a decade.
The legislature’s Joint Legislative Audit Committee authorized an audit of the FoodShare program.
“The biggest thing I’d look at is that the federal requirements have changed, and the state is in a position where there’s close to a $300 million risk if we don’t look at and have in place the things we need to do to comply with the [Big Beautiful Bill],” Audit Committee co-chair Rep. Bob Wittke, R-Caledonia, said at Tuesday’s hearing.
President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill sets new requirements that punish states if error rates are too high. Any state with an over-payment or under-payment rate more than 6% will be fined by the federal government.
Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services, which runs FoodShare in the state, said Wisconsin’s error rate was 5.72% for fiscal year 2025.
“We collectively should be very proud of our state administration of FoodShare,” DHS Secretary Kirsten Johnson told lawmakers Tuesday.
But it’s not just errors. Lawmakers say Wisconsin last audited its FoodShare program in 2012.
“What I was seeing towards the end of my practice was the act of [a SNAP recipient] paying [a] drug addict, for instance, a dollar amount to go shop for them, or the drug addict going in and buying a bunch of meat and then selling it on the street. What are the mechanisms you use to stop that?” Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Gillet, said during the hearing.
Wimberger also pressed DHS managers for a plan to deal with FoodShare abuse.
“For the bad actor who is going to do those methods to basically get money by allowing other people to get food, what do you have that stops that sort of behavior?”
There are nearly 700,000 people in Wisconsin who are enrolled in FoodShare, though that number could drop.
The Big Beautiful Bill requires people who are not parents, elderly, or who have developmental disabilities to work 20 hours a week, go to school, or enroll in a job training program to continue receiving benefits.
