Michigan healthcare freedom community forum
Michigan SNAP fraud has been quantified, analyzed, and had fixes proposed, as documented here in the Forum for over a year. Time for a new thread - the last one is pretty full.
Kudos to the watchdogs!
Michigan could be first Midwest state to upgrade SNAP cards
State begins mailing chipped Bridge cards after years of theft
Scott McClallen | August 14, 2026
Help is on the way for Michiganders who rely on taxpayer help to buy groceries via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The state is upgrading Bridge cards to help prevent theft of benefits.
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services has mailed about 1,000 households upgraded SNAP cards that have a chip that provides a higher level of security.
If Michigan can mail out the rest of the cards this year, it will become the first state in the Midwest to upgrade SNAP cards.
The department will mail cards to more than 699,000 households from Mid-August through September 2026, according to a document that Michigan Capitol Confidential obtained through a records request.
Timeline Progress 072326 (1) by mcclallen
That chip replaces a magnetic strip that’s easily clonable by criminals. Cloned cards can be spent at approved retailers nationwide. Criminals steal customer data by placing fake point-of-sale machines at high-traffic areas including gas stations, liquor stores and grocery stores. Private banks upgraded their cards in 2015.
Michigan recently cut its reported SNAP fraud nearly in half, from about $14 million in 2024 to $7.7 million in 2025.
The upgrade should save taxpayers millions of dollars, Rep. Jason Woolford, a Howell Republican who sponsored the bill, told CapCon in an email.
“This upgrade brings our benefits system into the modern era and will save taxpayers millions of dollars by cutting down on abuse and fraud that has gone unchecked for far too long,” Woolford wrote. “Chip‑enabled cards increase security and significantly reduce skimmer and cloning fraud. In fact, Visa identified an 85% reduction in fraud in 2019 after chip technology was introduced. We’re adding real security, real accountability, and real transparency to a system that has needed it for years.”
For over a decade, criminals have been stealing from Michigan’s poorest residents who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to buy groceries.
In 2023 and 2024, more than a hundred people in Oakland County reported that their SNAP benefits had been stolen and mostly spent in other states. One county law enforcement officer said in 2024 that the state’s Bridge card system had been hacked, CapCon reported in July.
Alabama, California, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Maryland, and New Jersey have upgraded to chipped SNAP cards, while Arkansas, Oregon, Virginia, and New York are in the process of upgrading, according to a dashboard from the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.
Michigan’s state health department has not responded to a request for comment about the card upgrade.
Watchdog CapCon takes another on MDHHS administration of SNAP.
State denied nearly 260,000 SNAP applications in Michigan last year
Four years of data show common reasons why Michigan rejects SNAP applications
Scott McClallen | July 27, 2026
Michigan rejects more than a quarter of a million applications for food-stamp benefits every year, according to records obtained by Michigan Capitol Confidential.
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services administers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that helps feed about 1.4 million people.
State residents apply for benefits that can be spent at about 10,000 SNAP retailers statewide. Those people must submit information about their income and other matters so the state can determine if they qualify for benefits, and if so, how much.
Michigan Capitol Confidential obtained records seeking how many applications the state has denied since 2022, along with the reasons it denied those requests.
Here’s how many SNAP applications were denied over more than four years.
2022: 259,978 applications denied
2023: 282,777 applications denied
2024: 290,252 applications denied
2025: 259,311 applications denied
2026 to date: 87,094 applications denied
The most commonly mentioned reason for denial in 2025 was a lack of eligible household members (132,115 cases). Another 82,547 applications were denied benefits because they failed to attend an intake interview within 30 days of applying. The state denied about 81,600 applications because the applicant failed to provide the required information.
”Non-cooperation of child support requirements” explains the rejection of more than 2,000 applications submitted in the years 2022 through 2025.
The state health department also closes accounts of people who had been receiving SNAP benefits. The department closed hundreds of thousands of accounts in each year of the four-year period:
2022: 940,768 accounts
2023: 926,625 accounts
2024: 898,509 accounts
2025: 695,842 accounts
2026 to date: 209,592 accounts
In 2025, the common reason for closing an account was that there were no eligible members in the household. The state pulled the plug on 184,000 accounts for this reason. About 84,946 people failed to return the DHS-1046, an eligibility form. Roughly 53,054 people failed to provide information within the required time. About 51,420 reported having greater than 130% of the federal poverty level.
Michigan is spending about $37 million to lower the error rate. About one out of every 10 times the state health department disburses benefits, it’s an incorrect amount, according to the data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture released in late June 2026.
The federal government, in a campaign to reduce SNAP fraud, is suing Michigan over the state’s failure to share data on SNAP recipients.
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