More People Are Getting On Welfare in Massachusetts

America is slowly becoming a nation of welfare fiends

Massachusetts' Department of Transitional Assistance recently reported that 672,483 new EBT cards have been added to the welfare rolls in slightly over a year. These figures have propelled activists to call for an investigation of the welfare agency.  This represents a 34.6% increase from July 2023 to September  

On October 8, 2024, the DTA announced that 218,000 of the new EBT cards come from the federally funded Summer Child Nutrition Program. According to DTA correspondence with the Boston Globe, 

The agency revealed that it “currently has about 1 million clients” and “the number of active EBT cards is not indicative of the number of individuals receiving benefits, nor whether the card has any money on it.”

State Senator Ryan Fattman is the Republican leader pushing for an audit of the DTA. He declared that “now is the time to look at waste.” He added that the investigation goes back to “what the Democrats did in the supplemental budget,” making a reference to the December 2023 budget fight over $3.1 billion to partially fund the migrant crisis.

Several holdouts, all Republican elected officials, backed a motion to pass the supplemental budget during a formal session but they ended up being defeated after Governor Maura Healey signed the emergency funding into law right before the Christmas holidays. 

Fattman believes that the increase in EBT cards makes his demand for an audit of the DTA even more crucial. He is calling on the state legislature to review out-of-state spending of welfare dollars after a media report on EBT expenditures from Hawaii to Alaska.

As welfare spending becomes normalized nationwide and mass migration is not contained, the welfare rolls will only expand. Until the welfare state is rolled back and immigration is restricted, additional budgetary scandals will continue to grow.