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Feds Threaten Maine With Big Fines Over Food Stamps

Gov. Paul LePage (R-ME) CREDIT: AP PHOTO/ROBERT F. BUKATY
Gov. Paul LePage (R-ME) CREDIT: AP PHOTO/ROBERT F. BUKATY

Maine’s efficiency at processing food stamps applications has gotten so bad that the United States Department of Agriculture is warning Gov. Paul LePage’s (R) team to fix things fast or get hit with significant penalties.

Maine ranked 36th out of 53 administrative units in processing speed for food stamps back in 2014, but has now slipped all the way down to last. “[T]he Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has the lowest application processing timeliness (APT) rate in the country for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),” the USDA said in a letter.

“Maine’s poor timeliness performance negatively impacts SNAP clients across the State and must be addressed. This letter serves as advance notification that DHHS could soon be subject to suspension or disallowance of administrative funds” unless the state meets the USDA’s goals for faster service, the letter said.

Losing that administrative funding wouldn’t take food off Mainers’ tables. Benefits don’t get cut to punish poor administration. Instead, Maine would lose the matching funds that federal law allots for the cost of overseeing the program. The feds picked up $10.2 million of those costs in FY 2014 according to the USDA.

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Maine’s lethargic handling of food stamps applicants is arguably a feature, not a bug. Policies to restrict access to SNAP have been a defining trait of the LePage era. During his time in office, the governor has added drug tests to the application process, prematurely reinstated work requirements that his state’s job market can’t sustain, tried to enact a “junk food” ban to police poor people’s shopping carts, and revived a rule that kicks people off the rolls for saving money.

Politicians market these kinds of policies as a way to bring extra scrutiny to people who ask for taxpayer help. But they also create a lot of new administrative work for the people charged with the scrutinizing.

States that impose rules like these usually have higher error rates in their safety net payments after they start giving their staff this extra busywork. It stands to reason that those staffers can’t work through their core duties — examining new applications and benefit renewals — as quickly. Maine’s collapse in response speed to needy people’s applications for help is a natural byproduct of LePage’s broader push to drive down safety net enrollment.

LePage Senior Policy Advisor David Sorensen did not immediately respond to requests for comment. After publication, DHHS spokeswoman Samantha Edwards forwarded a statement from DHHS Commissioner Mary Mayhew saying the delays stem from the department’s transition to a new recordkeeping system. “I welcome all scrutiny of our performance in the management of these programs and specifically as it relates to this review of the more than 55,000 food stamp applications processed annually by the Department,” Mayhew said. “I am offended by the assertions by some Democrats that our actions are depriving benefits from those who qualify for them and need help.”

LePage Press Secretary Adrienne Bennett later told ThinkProgress that criticisms of the governor’s safety net reforms come from a place of ignorance. “Do you even understand the Governor’s background or how he grew up? You haven’t a clue as to how to bring someone who is in poverty back to a place of dignity, but the Governor (and me, for that matter) have been in extreme poverty and we understand the needs of people who are on assistance and have a willingness to become self-sufficient,” Bennett said in an email, apparently referring to LePage’s childhood experience of homelessness. “We are an administration fixing a broken welfare system, which tends to perpetuate the poverty cycle, while at the same time assist our most vulnerable toward a pathway of success.”

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The LePage administration’s dark accomplishment here is even more impressive than it seems at first glance. All those hard-hearted food policies have successfully driven SNAP enrollment way, way down. Maine shrunk its food stamps rolls faster than any other state over the course of 2014, Sorensen previously told ThinkProgress in October. Maine now has fewer than 197,000 individual food stamps recipients and under 103,000 total cases, down from 246,000 and 127,000 respectively when LePage took office in 2011. You’d think that giving your caseworkers 24,000 fewer files to process and 50,000 fewer stomachs to think about would let them deal with the remaining applicants faster, not slower — but the opposite has happened.

For every three households that re-apply for a renewal of their SNAP eligibility, two do not get a timely response from the state. One in three brand-new applicants also gets radio silence from her government when she seeks food aid. And at the same time that Maine’s leaders have boasted that they lead the country in food stamps reductions, they’ve slipped to the very bottom of the rankings for the most basic measure of a state’s ability to serve its neediest.

This piece has been updated to reflect additional comment from Paul LePage’s office and to correct the title of David Sorensen, who is a Senior Policy Advisor in the governor’s office rather than a spokesman for it.