Due to SNAP benefits not being issued during the government shutdown, almost 42 million Americans were affected. Following the shutdown, changes are coming to the SNAP benefit system. According to Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins states must provide SNAP recipient data. For instance, people who have died may remain in the program for a short time because the state has to verify the death and allow the household a chance to respond before stopping the benefits. If a household receives benefits by mistake for the deceased person, then they will have to pay back the money. This is in order to prevent fraud, as according to Rollins, her agency had found, “186,000 dead people receiving benefits, 500,000 Americans receiving benefits two times…”. However, the veracity of these statements are dubious at best due to no evidence being provided.
Regarding multiple payments, Rollins has not cited cases where people have received duplicated pay. However, a California state official has highlighted valid reasons for the possibility, including when a SNAP household is owed an additional payment due to an error.
Democratic states have refused to provide this data, as they verify SNAP eligibility themselves, and do not share sensitive data such as immigration status that the Trump administration is ordering.
Furthermore, Democratic officials question the motives of the administration for requesting the data. U.S Rep Jahana Hayes, a Democrat from Connecticut has said,
“Individuals who are just trying to buy food, those aren’t the ones who are gaming the system in the way that the administration is trying to portray.” In total, 22 states have blocked the order.
Food experts are worried about these changes as well, in particular the implication that many SNAP recipients are committing fraud instead of just getting the food they need. As Stacy Dean, executive director of George Washington University’s Global Food Institute and former USDA official during the Biden administration, said, “My worry is that she’s risking setting a public narrative that this is a program that has more fraud than it actually does, or that the people who need it and use it to meet their very basic food needs are somehow committing a crime by seeking food assistance”.
Combined with Trump’s tax and policy bill that changed work requirements to include homeless people and those between the ages of 55 to 64, millions of SNAP recipients are at risk of losing their benefits. In conclusion, claims of fraud and corruption in the SNAP benefit system must be evaluated objectively.