More Grief Over SNAP

by Tom Yamachika, President, Tax Foundation Hawaii

We recently wrote about additional confusion surrounding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP for short, that the U.S. Department of Agriculture administers with assistance from the States.  The program, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, serves as a critical resource for low-income individuals and families by giving them monthly benefits to purchase food.

What’s supposed to happen is that the States like us administer the program following federal guidelines.  The federal government then pays for most of the benefits and a share of the administrative costs.  However, under recent changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states can get billed for more of the program costs if they are found to make too many errors in program administration.  We wrote about that in July.

The recent federal shutdown brought lots more drama to the program.  When the federal government was shut down, USDA directed state agencies to stop distributing SNAP benefits in November, even though it had sizable reserves.  Those reserves, they said, were for use if hurricanes, fires, or other disasters were making people hungry — not if the federal government itself was making people hungry.  After going back and forth because of different court decisions, USDA told states to recall any benefits that were distributed.  Some state governors, including ours, vowed to keep the benefits going using state funds while the federal drama kept spiraling.

Now, with the federal shutdown over (at least for the time being), another bit of SNAP crisis is unfolding.  “Trump Administration Says It Will Punish Blue States Over SNAP Data,” one headline reads.  It turns out that USDA asked the States to turn over recipient data.  Lots of it.  It wants names, dates of birth, personal addresses used, and Social Security numbers of recipients as well as records to calculate the total dollar value of SNAP benefits received by participants over time, with the ability to filter benefits received by date ranges.  USDA said that it wanted the information to purge allegedly fraudulent recipients and threatened to cut off benefits to any States that didn’t pony up the information pronto. 

The law creating the SNAP program says that information provided by the recipients can be turned over to certain federal agencies to assist in enforcement of the program or its core requirements.  But USDA, according to court documents, wanted more information than it was legally entitled to, and it was going to make the information available to federal, state and local governments for any law enforcement purposes.  A coalition of more than twenty States including Hawaii, mostly blue states, sued and obtained a preliminary injunction against USDA on October 15th. 

Apparently, USDA didn’t want to take no for an answer.  It recently demanded, again, that the States fork over the data, and that if it didn’t do so it would stop paying any administrative costs to an insubordinate State.  Although less than the benefit costs, that would still be a huge amount.  According to federal data from 2023, the hit to Hawaii would be $31.5 million more than the state already pays. 

This kind of drama surrounding how we treat the most food-insecure members of our society reminds me of how some countries are fighting wars by starving the population that doesn’t agree with them.  Please tell me that we in the United States of America are not going down that path!