Wisconsin Rolls Out Work Requirements for Food Stamps

Sherrie Tussler’s latest fight with the state of Wisconsin is about a fax machine. Tussler, the leader of a Milwaukee-based food distribution and advocacy center called Hunger Task Force, is upset that the Department of Health Services now requires that nutrition assistance applicants fax, rather than scan, their forms to the office. Fax machines only print out a proof that documents were sent—unlike scans, they don’t provide a detailed account of what was sent. “Fuck, faxes are as old as dinosaurs,” she says. “Moving back to using fax machines is taking people’s rights away.”

 

Under Tussler’s leadership, the Hunger Task Force has been a gadfly for years to the state, protesting benefit cuts and haranguing administrators to provide the best services to Milwaukee’s poor. Most recently, Tussler has been fighting a new law that took effect Wednesday which sets work requirements for certain recipients of federal nutrition assistance. Benefits for each able-bodied adult without dependents who doesn’t work 80 hours per month via employment or state work programs will be terminated after three months of non-compliance. In essence, if you’re single without children, and you’re unemployed or underemployed for more than three months, that’s it. It’s a program that Governor Scott Walker described as “making it easier to get a job,” but advocates, especially Tussler, are skeptical. There is only one certain outcome of this new requirement, Tussler says: More people in Wisconsin will go hungry.

When the state legislature passed the nutrition assistance work requirements in 2013, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau offered the sobering estimate that as much as half of the state’s eligible able-bodied adults without dependents would be rendered ineligible for benefits. The report said that “the short-term effects would likely be to reduce federally funded benefits that are currently available to a significant number of state residents with low income and who rely on these benefits to support a basic need.” In total, the report estimated that the requirements would force the state to forfeit about $72 million in federal dollars (because nutrition assistance is federally funded, and the administrative costs are split between the state and federal coffers). In exchange, the state would bar more than 31,000 people who live below or barely above the poverty line from receiving an average of $191 per month to buy food that the federal government had made available to them.

The report wasn’t the only alarm bell. The state has already seen how this might play out, having tested out work requirements in Walworth, Racine, and Kenosha counties since last July. All three are nestled south of Milwaukee and had an estimated 5,413 nutrition assistance beneficiaries eligible for work requirements in 2013. Five months after the work requirements were enacted—which means only the second month past the three-month grace period—more than 700 people had lost their food stamps, Department of Health Services representative Claire Yunker said. The state declined to provide data from more recent months, but it’s likely that the attrition rate continued apace, with more than 300 additional people kicked off each month. “It’s disorganized down there,” Tussler said. Unlike in Milwaukee, where the Hunger Task Force provides centralized assistance to the poor, residents in those counties only have access to a patchwork of charities. One food bank director I contacted hadn’t realized that work requirements had been affecting her visitors. Now that the requirements have been rolled out across the state, the results in these three counties will be magnified.