For more than half a century, food assistance to poor Americans has been funded entirely by the federal government. The sweeping Republican policy bill that is nearing conclusion would shift some of that cost onto states, with a twist: States with a track record of making more errors in administering benefits would pay a larger share of the program’s cost.
At least, that was the logic Monday. By making error-prone states pay more, Republicans said they wanted to nudge states to be better stewards of federal money — to have “skin in the game,” as congressional leaders put it.
But the version of the bill passed by the Senate on Tuesday does something notably different: It carves out exemptions for the states with the highest error rates, giving them more time to comply with the new rules and seemingly undermining Republicans’ original intent.
Why? The state with the nation’s highest error rate is Alaska, which overpaid about 23 percent of food stamp recipients last year. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who cast the pivotal vote to pass the bill in the Senate, pushed to soften the new requirement in her state. But because of the arcane rules governing the process Republicans are using to pass the bill, they couldn’t simply write an exception for Alaska into the law. Instead, they wrote one for states where the error rate “multiplied by 1.5 is equal to or above 20 percent.” (In other words, states with an error rate higher than 13.33 percent.)
The states that exceeded that threshold in 2024 data also included Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and the District of Columbia. In short: States with the lowest error rates will pay nothing. And states with higher error rates will generally pay more, unless they have the highest rates, in which case they will also pay nothing for an extra year or two.
“It’s just an absurd policy,” Chip Roy, a conservative House member from Texas, said Tuesday.
Meanwhile, because Hawaii “did good work in reducing the error rate by 15 percent, we are not exempt,” Senator Brian Schatz said on X.
Other critics warned that the change would encourage states to make more errors this year or next to buy themselves time before they have to pay the new state matching costs. (In 2024, Delaware and Rhode Island would have just missed the cutoff.)
The last-second exemption, which could still change yet again in the House, adds to what analysts say are perverse incentives for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program throughout the bill, and to misconceptions about its error rates.
“Bottom line is this isn’t a measure of fraud,” said Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, a professor at Northwestern who studies anti-poverty programs. “It’s more a measure of administrative burden and administrative capacity.”
States with higher rates, which are calculated by reviewing a sample of cases every year, aren’t necessarily sloppy about letting fraud through. They may be more burdened with complex cases — workers whose income changes with seasonal agriculture work, or families whose size changes with newborns or custody shifts. According to the Department of Agriculture, about 40 percent of state errors arise not from getting initial eligibility determinations wrong, but from failing to adjust food stamp allotments for subsequent life events.
Some populations like working families and immigrants simply make for harder SNAP cases for these reasons (retirees, on the other hand, don’t usually have more children or shifting jobs). And historically, states that have lowered their error rates have often done so by dropping more working and immigrant households from their SNAP rolls, said David Super, a law professor at Georgetown.
Other provisions of the Republican bill could compound these challenges for states, potentially increasing their errors. To find the money to pay their share of the SNAP benefits, states may divert funds they currently use to run the program, cutting funding for the staff or software needed to make sure recipients are eligible and payments are accurate. The bill also increases the share of the program’s administrative costs paid by states, further stretching the resources states would need to improve accuracy.
And the bill expands SNAP work requirements, meaning more people will need to regularly file paperwork documenting their hours worked or any work waivers.
“A lot of states are going to say: ‘We don’t have the capacity to take reports from people monthly about their working 20 hours. We’re just basically not going to make ourselves available for that,’” Professor Super said. “Those folks will all drop from the program.”
There is one kind of error, though, that is not counted in state error rates: when an eligible person tries to access food assistance and never receives it.
Emily Badger writes about cities and urban policy for The Times from Washington. She’s particularly interested in housing, transportation and inequality — and how they’re all connected.
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