Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker unveiled a new budget on Thursday that requires food-stamp recipients to undergo drug tests that the Obama administration says are illegal — setting up a showdown with Washington that the Republican governor is "itching" to have,
the Huffington Post reports.
The drug-testing mandate fulfills a promise Walker made last year in his re-election campaign and — if he runs for president in 2016 — it presents him to Republican primary voters as a champion of entitlement reform,
the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.
But the draft budget proposal "provided few new details on how he would pursue a plan that could run afoul of federal rules governing those programs for the needy," the Journal Sentinel reports.
Last month,
a federal appeals judge upheld a 2013 ruling that Florida's mandatory drug-testing regime for welfare recipients was unconstitutional.
Elsewhere, Georgia has abandoned
a drug-testing measure signed into law last spring, backing away under pressure from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the federal food stamp program.
But states including Wisconsin, Montana and Maine are pressing ahead with welfare drug-testing proposals, the Huffington Post reports.
Walker, in a press release, pitched his version as one element of a statewide workforce overhaul that would address "some of the barriers keeping people from achieving true freedom and prosperity and the independence that comes with having a good job and doing it well."
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