Here & Now

Shutdown Impacts Release of Food Stamps

Frederica Freyberg:

The more than 600,000 people in Wisconsin who depend on food stamps or FoodShare benefits as they are known here have been stretching those dollars after the month-long government shutdown. The average benefit is about $120 a month. If uncertainty over recent funding wasn’t enough, more changes are coming as to who’s eligible to collect FoodShare. David Lee is Executive Director of Feeding Wisconsin and joins us now from Milwaukee. Thanks for being here.

David Lee:

So good to be here.

Frederica Freyberg:

In the midst of the shutdown, the government gave roughly two months of benefits in January to last until March. Why does that represent a problem for people on FoodShare?

David Lee:

Sure, so when — typically when a family gets FoodShare benefits, they are — they use it throughout the course of the month, right? And so, in our state, our benefits get disbursed over the first two weeks of the month. So typically, if you’re on FoodShare, you get it between the 2nd and 15th. Now in January, due to the government shutdown, the USDA announced that states could disburse February benefits in the event of an extended government shutdown. So they disbursed February benefits in mid-January, which means that if we were to continue on this regular — this path of regular benefit disbursements, people wouldn’t have gotten their benefits, their March benefits, until potentially middle of March, right? So that’s what created this incredible gap of benefits, this benefit cliff, for folks to have to deal with in February.

Frederica Freyberg:

And yet they got the same amount of money they would get. They just kind of got it all at once. And what is that like, from your experience, for people living, you know, on the edge kind of and depending on this money?

David Lee:

Sure. You know, when people get their benefits, they typically use them, right? And I think the other thing that’s really interesting is that it’s really hard to contact folks with information about these — about the changes in the program. And so when people magically get a disbursement of benefits on a time that is not their usual schedule, they perceive potentially this is a mistake or a miss — yeah, some sort of mistake, right, like those Monopoly cards, “bank error in your favor.” This is not what happened in February. The state obviously did not make a mistake in disbursing benefits early. So what the state has decided to do, in addition to many other states across the nation, is that they’ve decided to change the benefit disbursement in March from the regular disbursement schedule to March 1. So to sort of close that gap between what a FoodShare recipient would normally get their benefit at.

Frederica Freyberg:

So they’ll be back on track but meanwhile, starting in October, there are new eligibility requirements going into effect. What are those?

David Lee:

Sure. So as you may remember, the last time I was here, we talked a little bit about the special session welfare reform bills that the legislature passed and the governor signed into law. What that would do is that it would increase the arbitrary time limits for families with children who are not complying with a work requirement. So it would increase the amount of work hours that they would have to participate in from 20 to 30 and it actually increase the — it would also extend the work requirement to families with children. Currently the work requirement only applies to single adults without children, commonly known as “a-bods” which means able-bodied adults without dependents.

Frederica Freyberg:

Have those kind of work requirements that are already in place resulted in people dropping off FoodShare?

David Lee:

Yeah. So the work requirement or the time limit for the a-bods that have already been in place in our state since 2015, as we talked about the last time, has resulted in about 84,000 people losing benefits and the sanction for not complying with the work requirement is pretty intense. It’s limiting people to nutrition assistance to three months of benefits every three years. So let me say that again. Limiting people from nutrition benefits to three months every three years.

Frederica Freyberg:

And so with the new ones going into effect in October, I suppose people believe that more people may drop off because of those eligibility requirements.

David Lee:

Potentially. I think when we were doing some of our client engagement over the last year, what we’ve learned is that there are a lot of folks in communities across the state who are working, just not working enough hours to comply with the extended work hours, right? So you might have somebody working at a convenience store 20, 25 hours, 28 hours a week, but they can’t get those last two hours to comply with the 30-hour — with this new 30-hour work requirement.

Frederica Freyberg:

Could Governor Evers repeal the work requirement?

David Lee:

We believe that he had the opportunity until the legislature passed the lame duck session bills in December. We are watching the lawsuits that are continuing through the court system and we hope that if the courts find that he still has the power to do so that he will.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. David Lee, thanks very much.

David Lee:

Thank you so much for having me.