WASHINGTON — Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Prairie du Chien, didn’t hold back when asked if he supports a proposal to shift some of the cost of SNAP to the states.
“Absolutely not,” he told Spectrum News 1.
The federally-funded nutrition assistance program, formerly known as food stamps, helps low-income families pay for groceries. Van Orden sits on the House Agriculture Committee, which is trying to meet its target of $230 billion in agriculture spending reductions over the next decade, as part of the massive package of tax and spending cuts Republicans want to pass to enact the president’s agenda.
In a letter to the committee Chairman, Rep. GT Thompson, R-Pennsylvania, Van Orden called a proposal to put 25% of the SNAP costs onto state governments “reckless.”
“That means either the state of Wisconsin has to increase taxes to maintain benefits or they have to cut the benefits,” Van Orden told Spectrum News. “And I'm not doing either one of those. I'm just not going to do it.”
A spokesman for the committee responded, "Feedback from members is an important part of this process and we continue to evaluate all options that will incentivize states to be better stewards of federal tax dollars."
Van Orden said he doesn’t think there should be cost-sharing at all, but if there’s going to be, he said the only way it would be equitable would be to tie each state’s cost-sharing responsibility to its payment error rate, which is the percentage of benefits wrongly provided.
In 2023, Wisconsin’s error rate was 4.74%. So under Van Orden’s plan, the state would be responsible for 4.74% of the cost of SNAP. Van Orden said that would incentivize good program management.
Katie Bergh, the senior policy analyst for food assistance at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), said even the cost-shifting proposed by Van Orden would force states to find additional money or cut benefits.
“Unfortunately, that's fundamentally this same unfunded mandate that's so problematic, just with a slightly different structure," Bergh said. "The state of Wisconsin would still face new unanticipated costs and those same really tough choices: Do we raise taxes, cut spending elsewhere, or cut food assistance for low income families? And Wisconsin would still be hit with millions of dollars in new costs, despite having one of the lowest error rates of any state in the country."
By a CBPP analysis, if Congress where to require states pay 22.5% of SNAP benefit costs over the next decade, that "would impose $23.65 billion in new costs on state budgets in 2034 alone, the first year the proposal would be fully phased in." Wisonsin's slice of that would be $344 million in 2034, according to the analysis.
"Many states are facing short- or long-term budget shortfalls, and states just generally are not in a position to absorb these new costs," Bergh said. "So it's very likely that it could lead to some pretty staggering cuts to food assistance for low-income families."
Van Orden is facing a potentially competitive election next year, when Democrats are likely to campaign on the cuts to social safety net programs that are expected to occur in the final Republican spending plan. A number of Republicans in swing districts have voiced concerns about such cuts, complicating the GOP’s efforts to hit the spending targets they must meet to pay for the president’s tax cuts.
Van Orden is gung-ho on cutting costs by identifying fraud, waste and abuse, but he acknowledged that doing just that will not be enough for the agriculture committee to achieve $230 billion in cuts.
A Trump administration official told Spectrum News 1 the White House is supportive of cost-sharing. A final decision about whether to shift some SNAP costs to the states has not yet been made.
“While we don't know exactly which avenue Congress may be planning to make those cuts, at the end of the day, that's taking some really steep cuts to a program that helps more than 700,000 people in the state of Wisconsin put food on the table every month, the majority of whom are kids, seniors or people with disabilities,” Bergh said.
When asked if he’d vote against the proposal to have states share 25% of the cost of SNAP, Van Orden said he doesn’t negotiate in public.