BOSTON — Governor Maura Healey has spent the better part of a year insisting that anyone who questions Massachusetts' food stamp program is just carrying water for Donald Trump.

There's one small problem with that defense: the first people to flag the mess weren't Republicans. They were Democrats. Specifically, Joe Biden's Democrats.

The letter flagged three specific metrics that were failing federal standards: how fast applications get processed, how often payments go to the wrong people for the wrong amount, and how many procedural errors the state was making.

"I urge you to prioritize these concerns," the USDA wrote, "and take appropriate steps to make sure that your State meets basic Federal requirements."

Basic. Federal. Requirements.

This wasn't Fox News. This wasn't a Republican hit job. This was the Biden administration — Healey's own political team — telling her the numbers were bad and getting worse.

So what did she do? Based on the data, approximately nothing.

Under Charlie Baker in FY2022, the combined SNAP error rate was 11.77% — already over the 6% federal threshold. In Healey's first year it actually dipped slightly to 9.86%, which might have looked like progress if you squinted. But by FY2024, the combined payment error rate had exploded to 14.1%. That's not just above the federal limit. It's more than double.

Do the math on that. Massachusetts receives roughly $2.6 billion a year in federal SNAP funding — about $240 million every month flowing into the state. At a 14.1% error rate, that's roughly $364 million in erred payments in a single fiscal year — including $338 million in overpayments alone. By virtually any measure, Massachusetts is among the worst-performing states in the country.

Three hundred and sixty-four million dollars. Going to the wrong people, in the wrong amounts, through a system that — according to a whistleblower inside the Department of Transitional Assistance — was apparently designed that way on purpose.

The whistleblower, per the Herald's reporting, alleged that higher-ups at DTA directed staff to "avoid asking too many invasive questions" during eligibility screenings. The fraud, the whistleblower said, was "rampant."

Let that sit for a moment. A state employee is alleging that the people running the benefits system told front-line workers not to look too closely at who was getting the money.

And speaking of not looking too closely — Massachusetts EBT cards still don't have chips.

Every credit card in your wallet, every debit card at every bank in America, has moved to chip-enabled technology to prevent skimming and cloning. Massachusetts' EBT cards? One critic described them as "glorified hotel room keys for fraudsters." Upgrading the entire system would cost roughly $15.5 million — which sounds like a lot until you remember that the state budget has increased 50% since 2018 and Massachusetts just spent $940 million in FY2025 alone on the migrant emergency.

GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Shortsleeve filed public records requests about the chip-enabled card rollout. The state took more than eight months to respond.

Meanwhile, the state auditor's office has already found nearly $12 million in SNAP and MassHealth fraud. Federal authorities separately uncovered a $1 million pandemic benefit fraud scheme. Those are the cases that actually got caught — in a system where, again, the whistleblower says staff were told not to dig too deep.

Haywood Talcove, CEO of the government division at LexisNexis Risk Solutions — one of the country's top fraud detection firms — was blunt: "When Massachusetts officials say they don't have a problem, they clearly have a problem. Massachusetts is in the top five of the worst states in fraud detection and in payment error rate for SNAP."

Healey's response to all of this has been a masterclass in deflection.

DTA spokesperson Cecille Avila blamed COVID-era federal policy changes, saying the pandemic guidance was "intentional and appropriate." Healey herself called Trump's fraud allegations a "distraction" from his own failed policies.

But the Biden letter makes that defense collapse. You can't call it a partisan attack when the warning came from your own party's president. You can't blame Trump when the letter arrived two years before he said a word about it.

And here's where it gets truly remarkable: Healey is now refusing to hand over SNAP recipient data to the federal government at all, claiming the information could be used by ICE to target immigrants. Critics say this conveniently puts a wall between federal investigators and the fraud data they'd need to see.

This is the same governor, remember, who ran on accountability and transparency. The same state where 72% of voters approved a ballot measure to elect a state auditor specifically to root out government waste. Voters wanted oversight. What they got instead was a governor who won't even let Washington look at the books.

Massachusetts spent $940 million in FY2025 and $894 million in FY2024 on the migration emergency — nearly $1.8 billion in two years. The SNAP numbers suggest the state's benefits infrastructure is cracking under the weight. But instead of fixing the cracks, the governor's strategy appears to be: close the blinds and hope nobody notices.

Biden noticed. Trump noticed. The state auditor noticed. A whistleblower inside DTA noticed.

The only person who doesn't seem to have noticed is the one whose name is on the letterhead.