Don’t Trade SNAP Accountability for Farm Subsidies

Romina Boccia and Tyler Turman

As the Senate continues negotiations on the next Farm Bill, some members have floated delaying the cost-sharing requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), enacted last year as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). With many states facing potential penalties under the new requirements, the delay has gained traction as a way to secure bipartisan support for farm subsidies.

Congress should not use the Farm Bill to compromise on its commitment to combating waste, fraud, and abuse in SNAP. If reform is on the table, Congress should build on the progress it made last year, not undermine it.

Holding States Accountable for Payment Errors

SNAP has a well-documented integrity problem. Almost 1 out of every 9 dollars the federal government spent on the program, or $10.2 billion, was lost to improper payments in fiscal year (FY) 2025. Part of the problem is structural. SNAP is administered by the states, but funded almost entirely by federal taxpayers, with the federal government historically covering more than 90 percent of the program’s total costs. This gave states little incentive to tighten their eligibility processes to prevent improper payments, because the costs of financial mismanagement fell almost entirely on federal taxpayers.

The OBBBA took meaningful steps to address this incentive misalignment and improve program integrity by introducing matching fund requirements for states with high payment error rates. Starting in FY 2028, most states with error rates above 6 percent will be required to cover a portion of the SNAP benefits they distribute. Based on FY 2024 error rates, 42 states and the District of Columbia would face financial penalties under the new requirements (Figure 1).

Backpedaling Before the Ink Is Dry

Senate Democrats have made delaying this provision a central demand in Farm Bill talks. With most states facing potential penalties under the new requirements, some Republican senators have privately signaled a willingness to make that concession in exchange for Farm Bill votes.

This would be a mistake.

Congress’s “dessert first, spinach later” attitude of locking in new spending and tax cuts while pushing savings into the future was already on display in OBBBA. Although the cost-sharing requirements don’t kick in until 2028, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that they would save federal taxpayers more than $40 billion from FY 2028 to 2034, making them one of the largest SNAP offsets in the bill. Postponing their implementation would push those savings further into the future and cost federal taxpayers nearly $6 billion for every year the requirements are delayed.

More importantly, it would undermine Congress’s credibility on an issue that the Trump administration is actively waging a campaign against, and that federal taxpayers have made clear they expect Congress to take seriously. Compromising on this issue would signal to both taxpayers and the states that Congress’s commitment to addressing welfare fraud extends only as far as it is politically convenient.

If Congress does add SNAP reform to the Farm Bill, it should strengthen the cost-sharing provisions it already passed by eliminating policies that undermine them. A good place to start would be eliminating the Alaska Carveout, a last-minute provision shoehorned into OBBBA to get it through the Senate.

The carveout temporarily exempts states with error rates above 13.34 percent from cost-sharing. Although the provision was intended to give states with exceptionally high payment errors time to improve, as Representative Maxwell Frost (D‑FL) has noted, this carveout inadvertently “penalizes the states that make good faith efforts to improve integrity.” In effect, states with the highest payment errors are “getting rewarded for running a horrible program.” Worse yet, officials in states like New Mexico and Maryland have exploited this carveout by maneuvering to keep their error rates artificially elevated to qualify for the exemption.

A Better Way to Help States Lower Payment Errors

The concerns members of Congress have about the potential financial impact of OBBBA’s matching fund requirements for their state budgets are not unfounded. The solution to this problem is for Congress to help states reduce their payment errors, rather than giving them more time to avoid accountability for making them. Congress has no shortage of potential reforms to help states get there. These include:

• Modernizing SNAP’s Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cybersecurity standards. States replaced more than $320 million in stolen SNAP benefits between October 2022 and December 2024, and losses could reach more than $500 million by the end of FY 2026. The House-passed Farm Bill would help resolve this by requiring the Department of Agriculture to propose a rule enhancing EBT card security measures. The Enhanced Cybersecurity for SNAP Act (S. 3949), introduced by senators Wyden (D‑OR), Cassidy (R‑LA), and Fetterman (D‑PA), would help tackle skimming, one of the most common forms of EBT theft, by requiring chip-enabled cards to replace the easily cloned and stolen magnetic stripe cards many states currently use.
• Strengthening the Treasury’s Do Not Pay (DNP) system. DNP helps agencies catch potential payment errors before the money goes out the door by cross-checking applicant information against federal databases in real time. The tool helped agencies prevent, detect, or recover $11.7 billion in improper payments in FY 2025. But the tool is underequipped, underutilized, and agencies can ignore it when it flags potential errors. Congress should strengthen DNP’s data access and authority and make it more accessible to the state agencies administering programs like SNAP, as several bills advanced by the House Oversight Committee would do.
• Eliminating broad-based categorical eligibility. Forty-three states and DC have adopted BBCE, allowing them to bypass SNAP’s statutory income and asset limits. This policy has allowed an estimated 5.9 million otherwise ineligible people to receive SNAP benefits. The policy is also highly susceptible to improper payments, with one Government Accountability Office report finding that households enrolled through BBCE with incomes above federal limits had error rates almost three times higher than other households, largely because states used the policy to weaken their verification protocols. Representative Ben Cline (R‑VA)’s No Welfare for the Wealthy Act (H.R. 416) would eliminate BBCE by requiring all households on SNAP to meet the program’s federal income and asset requirements.

Helping states reduce their error rates and holding them accountable for failing to do so are not mutually exclusive. Congress can, and should, do both.

The Bottom Line

Every dollar lost to improper payments is a dollar taken from taxpayers and diverted from the beneficiaries SNAP is designed to serve. Congress made meaningful progress on program integrity with the OBBBA, and the Farm Bill should not become the vehicle for reversing those reforms to accommodate agricultural interests at taxpayers’ expense.

Source: https://www.cato.org/blog/dont-trade-snap-accountability-farm-subsidies