Whoa there, pardner! What does Commissioner Mary Mayhew hope to gain from drawing down on the federal government with regard to food stamps?

About a quarter of Maine’s population — families with children, the elderly, the working poor, the disabled — get federal benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Maine is paid by the federal government to administer the program, about $10 million a year.

For those who work for DHHS, that’s a chunk of your salaries, friends. The federal government pays for the SNAP program, too … about $380 million per year. Maine’s only skin in this game is how the program is administered. But since it is administered with federal funds, there is a limit to what Maine can do. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Mayhew and Gov. Paul LePage have been battling the feds over something pretty ridiculous. The state wants to put photos on EBT cards. But here’s the stupid part. The program has to be voluntary, and retailers can’t look at photos to match them to the holder.

That’s because anyone in the household, caregivers who aren’t even part of the household, administrators of group homes and nursing homes, and anyone designated by the cardholder can use the card to buy food by federal law.

And Mayhew knows this perfectly well. Or if she doesn’t, she’s in the wrong job.

In short, there is no way that putting pictures on cards can “deter fraud,” which is what Mayhew says they’re doing it for. In reality, it’s just another roadblock to getting state assistance for the neediest citizens.

Now Mayhew is saying that they may have to bow out of the administration of the food stamp program. That would put more than a few DHHS workers out of work.

And the federal government isn’t set up to administer the program, which means that all those people — the kids, the old people, the teens in group homes, the working poor, the disabled veterans, the mentally ill or developmentally challenged — would suddenly go hungry.

Yeah. Way to “reform” welfare, cowgirl.

What that would mean for Maine’s towns and cities is that we would start picking up the slack — we’d have to, there is really no ethical situation in which we could allow fellow citizens to starve — and that would put stress on the property tax system.

But of course Mayhew and LePage and the rest of the D-Double-H-S Corral have an idea about that, too — kill revenue sharing to the towns and forbid towns from providing general welfare assistance in many cases.

Our guess is that the towns would take their share of property tax income off the top and let the state sue them for the rest. At least, that’s what we would hope they’d do.

Before any of that happens, though, the feds would sue Maine, and given LePage’s abysmal track record in winning lawsuits either filed by Maine or by the feds, that would cost us all money, too. So far, LePage — with a win record of zero in the courts — has spent $53,000 in state funds to fight with the federal government on Medicaid alone.

Yay, cowboy. We can think of about 53,000 better things to spend that money on.

It’s time for LePage and Mayhew to back off the posturing and bulllying behavior — if they are capable of it — and let the wiser heads at DHHS do their job. They’re not going to win this battle with the feds, just as they’ve lost every other battle with the feds they’ve taken on.

The only thing they can do is frighten the townfolk and spend the townfolks’ hard-earned money on more lawyers, and more nonsense.