Here & Now

Noon Wednesday with guest Dee Hall

Marisa Wojcik:

Welcome to “Noon Wednesday.” I’m Marissa Wojcik, a multimedia reporter with “Here and Now” and Wisconsin Public Television. Wisconsin has passed new work requirements for FoodShare recipients, and they might take effect next year. Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism has been reporting on how effective these previous work mandates have been, and Dee Hall has been reporting on this, and she’s here to tell us a little bit more about that. Dee, thanks for being here.

Dee Hall:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:

So, let’s start by talking about the difference between SNAP and FoodShare really quickly.

Dee Hall:

Well, SNAP is the federal name for the food assistance program that is funded by the federal government primarily, and FoodShare is what we call it here in Wisconsin. So, it’s a program in which people receive a certain amount of money per month to help them buy groceries.

Marisa Wojcik:

And then, what is FSET? What does it stand for and what does it mean?

Dee Hall:

So, that’s the FoodShare Employment and Training Program which is run by the state of Wisconsin. It is part of a requirement that FoodShare recipients who do not have dependents must do a certain amount of work, at this moment, 20 hours a week of either work or job training to continue to qualify for their food assistance.

Marisa Wojcik:

And what are the changes that we’re expecting to see?

Dee Hall:

So there was a special session late in the winter, early spring, in which the legislature passed some new requirements for the work requirement, and one of them is that the work hours would go from 20 hours a week, basically, to 30 hours a week. The other major change is that parents of children who are ages six and above would now be required to meet these work and training requirements. Previously, any parent with a dependent child was not required to meet those requirements.

Marisa Wojcik:

So, what happens if someone doesn’t meet those requirements?

Dee Hall:

So, they have three months of a grace period, let’s say, during a three year period in which they either, if they don’t fulfill the requirements, they can time out of the benefits. In other words, they would be taken off of the program.

Marisa Wojcik:

And would children be taken off of the program under these new requirements?

Dee Hall:

Well, according to the Department of Health Services, no. What would happen is the parent, him or herself, might become disqualified for food assistance, but the children would retain their benefits.

Marisa Wojcik:

So, expanding these employment and training programs is going to have a bigger price tag for the state, is that right?

Dee Hall:

Right now it costs about $50 million a year, and this would add about $50 million a year, so it would essentially double the cost of the program to wrap all of these parents with children who are ages six and above into the program.

Marisa Wojcik:

And that is tax money?

Dee Hall:

Yes, yeah, it’s federal and state money get applied to the program. I’m not sure of the exact mix. It depends on the type of activity that the state or the feds are involved in. But it is, it’s definitely a government program.

Marisa Wojcik:

Was that difficult for some Conservative lawmakers to convince people, okay, we want to spend more money on this program?

Dee Hall:

Well, it didn’t come up really much in the debate over this program. I think there’s a consensus among, so this was a special session that was entirely focused on changes to the welfare system, and all of them were aimed toward more self-sufficiency by people who receive these benefits. So this was much in line with the other bills that were passed, which are, you know, essentially adding to the requirements to continue receiving benefits, moving toward self-sufficiency.

Marisa Wojcik:

So, based on how the employment and training program has been going since it’s been around, do we know how many people have gotten jobs and how many people it hasn’t worked out for?

Dee Hall:

So, what happened was, this is actually, the work requirement for FoodShare goes back actually to the mid 90s, during another period of time in which there was a lot of welfare reform. And during that time, these work requirements were put in place, but then most states actually opted out of them, including Wisconsin, for many years. Then, beginning in 2015, the governor asked to reinstate the work requirement for FoodShare recipients in Wisconsin, and so the numbers that we have are from 2015 to now, so between 2015, when it was reinstated, and now, about 27000 people have gotten jobs through FSET, through the FoodShare employment and training program, but about 91000 recipients have timed out. In other words, they have failed to, you know, secure employment, or training, or fulfill the requirements under this program. And that’s not exactly 91000 people. It could be fewer people than that because some of these folks may have gotten their benefits back, for example, by requalifying under various exceptions that are there. So anyway, the question is, does it really work, and the answer’s going to vary depending on your perspective. I know that we’re spending a lot of money to bring, for example, 13000 jobs for Foxconn, right? This is 27000 jobs, so that’s a good thing. And it’s a smaller investment, $50 million a year, than what we’re paying for Foxconn. On the other hand, you know, Democrats who opposed these changes uniformly in the legislature say that, really, there’s a lot more that we should be doing rather than just requiring people to work. We should try to make it so that they get paid more, so that there’s more assistance for childcare, and transportation, and other things that could really help them get on their own two feet.

Marisa Wojcik:

Because, and you talk about wages, the average FoodShare recipient, if they’re working, you know, and making about $13 an hour, 35 hours a week, they still qualify for FoodShare benefits.

Dee Hall:

Right, so that’s according to the state’s own figures. Their typical person, when they’ve looked at how much does that person make, that person makes just over $13 an hour, which sounds like an okay wage, but about 35 hours a week, again, that’s the average person in the FoodShare Employment and Training Program, that average person, that single adult, would still qualify for FoodShare. And so, that’s another question that Democrats are raising. If the whole goal is to get people off of public assistance, if your typical recipient, or typical participant in this program is not getting off public assistance, then what is the purpose of the program? The answer I’ll give you, from the people who support it, is that it’s sort of this notion like, if you find a starfish on the beach, do you throw it back into the ocean, right? Just because you can’t save every starfish, if you could save a bunch of them, that would be a good thing, and so getting 27000 people into the workforce is, you know, by the supporters considered to be a good thing, even if it isn’t at a wage that would lift them up beyond the FoodShare eligibility level.

Marisa Wojcik:

But if they just surpass that level, they’re still making a low amount of money, and they no longer are getting FoodShare benefits, so are they, people who just exceed the limit to receive FoodShare benefits, is that an affordable way to live if they no longer get those benefits?

Dee Hall:

Well, I mean, that’s one thing that would be, right now, we haven’t, the State of Wisconsin has not really studied the program to answer some of those questions. I’d be very interested in the answer as well. The governor had vetoed a provision the legislature had passed in the past budget. He vetoed it to require that the program be evaluated, and the reason that the governor gave was he wanted the program to expand before they actually evaluate it. And of course, critics might say that maybe you should study it first, then expand it. But there are barriers to them actually studying it at this moment, in terms of the way that they collect the data. It is unclear that they’re collecting the correct data in the correct way for them to actually do a full assessment of the program at this point.

Marisa Wojcik:

You quoted one woman in your piece, saying that working 80 hours a month for $600 of FoodShare benefits is slave labor. Do we have any other evidence besides, or just anecdotes that tell us that this is or isn’t working? Do some people say that it is working for them?

Dee Hall:

Well sure, yeah. So, I took a tour along with one of the top people in the USDA. He came to Madison to look at a program called Just Bakery, and that trains about 60 people a year to become commercial bakers. And, you know, there was a man there who had been out of the workforce for a long time because he’d been in prison, and he said that this has really given him a shot at a normal kind of life, that it was very difficult having all the convictions that he had and all the breaks in his work history to learn an actual skill, and he had gotten a job. And so, there are those success stories. The Department of Health Services has a lot of those kind of success stories on their website. The challenge for reporters is that it is not a matter of public record who receives these benefits, so you can find out a little bit about them, their first name, and that’s about it. So even complaints about the program, either that people are cheating the program, or they’re not receiving the benefits that they’re supposed to receive. Generally speaking, the name of the recipient is blocked out, so yes, we sort of rely on these anecdotal stories, so you can see that this is clearly a beneficial program for some people, but clearly other people believe it is not a beneficial program, and you know, until we have a full evaluation of it, it’s hard to make it come down one way or the other on it.

Marisa Wojcik:

And on that same tour of Just Bakery, you spoke with someone from the federal SNAP program, and there’s potentially talk of kind of Wisconsin’s work requirement model being expanded out to something that the United States is looking at. Is that right?

Dee Hall:

So, in the House version of the Farm Bill, which is currently, well, the House passed its version of the Farm Bill, and it requires, it has some of the same requirements that Wisconsin has, and the main difference is that it would require, again, parents with children six and older to start working or training this 20 hours a week. And that bill, the Senate has a Farm Bill as well, and unfortunately, the Senate bill, fortunately or unfortunately, the Senate bill does not have that requirement, so the two houses need to get together and talk about whether this will go forward in the five year Farm Bill. At this moment, I don’t really know. But definitely House Republicans, on the federal level, are very interested in putting forward a program that’s similar to Wisconsin’s. In some ways, it actually goes past Wisconsin, ’cause their work requirement would go up to age 60, and our current requirement is for people 18 to 49.

Marisa Wojcik:

So, we don’t have a great way to evaluate how the program is working now. Is that something that we are going to see in the future?

Dee Hall:

I guess we’ll see. I mean, right now it’s not on the books. The governor said he wants to evaluate it when the program expands. The program is not scheduled to expand until October of 2019, so over a year from now, so my guess is, if that is the position that he maintains, then it probably won’t be studied until after that time.

Marisa Wojcik:

Okay. Dee, thanks so much for being here and telling us a little about this.

Dee Hall:

Sure, thanks for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:

If you want to see more from the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, visit WisconsinWatch.org and Dee’s reporting will be available starting Monday.

Marisa Wojcik:

Sunday.

Marisa Wojcik:

Sunday, okay, so look for that on Sunday. And for more from “Here and Now” and Wisconsin Public Television, visit wpt.org. And one quick note, we will be taking a break next week for the Fourth of July holiday, but we’ll be back on July 11th with Kevin Bernhardt, a professor of agribusiness, and we’re going to be talking about large-scale dairy farming in Wisconsin, so please tune in July 11th, and thank you for joining us on “Noon Wednesday.”