MADISON, Wis. — On Friday, Spectrum News reported on Wisconsin’s decline in SNAP enrollment just nine months after Republicans passed the Big Ugly Bill, which attacks SNAP benefits in the state. Since then, Republicans have been unable to lower unemployment rates or ease the affordability crisis. The decrease in SNAP enrollment indicates that working people already struggling to afford everyday living have less access to necessary resources to feed their families thanks to Wisconsin Republicans like Tom Tiffany, Bryan Steil, and Derrick Van Orden who rubber-stamped SNAP cuts.

Spectrum News: 15,500 fewer Wisconsinites receiving SNAP benefits than last July
By: Charlotte Scott | 4/17/26

Democrats had long warned that funding cuts and rule changes to SNAP, the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, would result in millions of Americans losing their benefits.

And now, new data shows that there’s been a massive participation drop following the signing of Republicans’ signature tax and policy law. 

“I would be surprised if it didn’t get worse,” said Joseph Llobrera, the senior director of food assistance research at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

Using data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, CBPP, a left-leaning policy organization, found the number of people on SNAP dropped by 6% — or 2.5 million people — from July, when the bill was signed, to December. In Wisconsin, participation fell by 2.3%, which equates to more than 15,500 people.

“It’s a small dip, but that’s 15,000 families who aren’t getting food assistance,” said William Parke-Sutherland, the government affairs director at Kids Forward, a policy center that advocates for children. “It’s probably not people who got a better paying job and aren’t eligible anymore.”

“Programs like food assistance and like Medicaid are countercyclical, and so as the economy gets worse, as unemployment rises, we would likely see enrollment in these programs grow, right? Because they’re safety net programs,” Parke-Sutherland added. “And so we’ve seen this dip in people getting access to food assistance during unemployment kind of holding steady. That also kind of adds to the, I guess, confusion.”

The law cut SNAP funding, expanded the number of people who must work to receive benefits, and ended eligibility for some lawful immigrants. It also pushed some of the cost of SNAP onto states based on the number of erroneous payments they make.

“Wisconsin has invested a little bit to protect benefits for as many people as possible. Wisconsin also has a really good mix of a very low error rate and a high program integrity rate,” Parke-Sutherland said. “I think Wisconsin is potentially in as good a place as it could be right now in responding to the federal government essentially kind of pulling the rug out from under families and states by going back on their promise for how much they were going to help pay to administer these programs, and then putting states in a really difficult position of maybe having to pay upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars if their error rate fluctuates beyond a certain amount.”

For now, Wisconsin is shielded from the penalty fees because its error rate is low. And to ensure that it stays this way, Gov. Tony Evers, D-Wis., signed a bill in March appropriating more than $72 million to FoodShare, which is what SNAP is called in Wisconsin. A chunk of the money will be used for employment and training programs, as well as quality control initiatives, to make sure that error rate remains below the threshold.

“States are scrambling right now to figure out ways to drive down that payment error rate, and we fear that that incentive to bring down payment error rates is causing states to put into place processes [and] procedures that [are] hindering access to the program,” Llobrera said.

[….] 

And at a House hearing Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took questions from Congresswoman Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee. She asked how the cut in SNAP funding interferes with his Make America Healthy Again initiative.

[…] 

Experts expect, as other parts of the law go into effect next year, that even more people could get kicked off SNAP. That’s why they say the changes should be delayed, so states have time to implement new standards and improve payment accuracy.

“They need the time to staff up, train their staff, upgrade their systems, update their systems, as well as being thoughtful about changes that they can make to their processes that bring down that error rate but don’t cut people off,” Llobrera said. 

Llobrera said it took three years for SNAP participation to come down by this much as the U.S. recovered from the Great Recession. 

“So the fact that we’ve lost that many people in a short amount of time indicates that it’s not economic conditions and the level of need that’s driving that change. It must be processes, procedures that states are putting into place,” Llobrera said. “And the very likely culprit is this intense pressure that’s on them to bring down their payment error rate in a way that may affect access to the program.”