This article originally appeared in Real Clear Politics June 20, 2026.

President Trump has put states on the hook for waste, fraud, and abuse in the nation’s food stamps, known officially as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Landmark legislation signed by the president last year requires the states to pay a share of the program’s costs if more than 6% of their food-stamp outlays are spent in error. States controlled by Democrats are, by and large, the worst offenders. For anyone who has followed the burgeoning and massive welfare fraud scandals in Minnesota and California, this trend is no surprise. And if my home state of Michigan is any indication, these deep blue states aren’t nearly as serious as they should be about rooting out fraud and protecting taxpayers.

That’s my conclusion after digging into food stamp fraud in Michigan. Under Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the state refuses to share food-stamp data with the Trump administration, so I sought information through public-records requests. I discovered that the state has tolerated the blatant abuse of this taxpayer-funded program by people who don’t even live in Michigan.

According to state and local records, over the past three years, Michigan has paid more than $4 million in food-stamp funding to people with out-of-state addresses. State law requires food-stamp recipients to live in the state, for obvious reasons. It’s one thing to let Michigan residents use their food-stamps across state lines – many people live near the borders with Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin. It’s another thing entirely to pay money to people who don’t even live in Michigan.

Michigan officials have known about this problem for years, yet they’ve allowed this theft of government services to grow worse over time. In 2024, the state sent $1.6 million to out-of-state addresses, rising to $1.9 million in 2025. Last year, Michigan sent this money to 3,177 out-of-state addresses. Based on data from the first three months of this year, that number should reach 3,700 by the end of 2026.

In other words, Michigan food-stamp fraud is going in the wrong direction – despite the new federal law that incentivizes the state to right-size the program. Nearly 10% of all food-stamp funding in Michigan is spent in error, and without a change in direction, state taxpayers will be forced to cover $300 million of the program’s funding over the next year and a half. An obvious way to lower the state’s error rate would be to stop sending food stamp money out of state.

But Michigan has made no meaningful moves in that direction. The state is spending $16 million to upgrade the debit cards that food-stamp recipients use, which means people outside the state will simply get better cards when they should get no cards. State officials also tout a new $30 million splurge to reduce erroneous spending, but through records requests, I’ve found that much of this money is going to state ad campaigns and private political consultants.

These efforts may reduce fraud at the margins, but what Michigan really needs is better monitoring and enforcement for out-of-state spending. On June 3, the Republicans who control the state House of Representatives passed a bill to that effect. The legislation would suspend a food-stamp account if it’s used out-of-state for more than 90 consecutive days. This is a basic anti-fraud measure, yet there’s no indication that the Democrat-controlled Senate has any intention of taking it up. Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, a Democrat from Grand Rapids, didn’t respond to a request for comment about the bill. Nor has Gov. Whitmer said anything about the bill or the broader issue.

The unfortunate conclusion is that Michigan isn’t serious about rooting out waste or fraud. The same is largely true for other blue states. California’s erroneous food-stamp spending is higher than Michigan’s; so is New York’s, at more than 14%, and Massachusetts as well. Tamping down such widespread abuse of taxpayer money will take enormous effort and years of work. That work should have begun long ago, and certainly after Trump put states on the financial hook with his reform last year. Alas, as Michigan shows, Democratic states are set to feed taxpayers to the food-stamp wolves.

Permission to reprint this blog post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy are properly cited.