Red states brace for SNAP fallout

Politico

14-07-2025

Presented by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA)
With help from Grace Yarrow and Samuel Benson
QUICK FIX
— Republican state officials are assessing how to lower SNAP error rates — and whether they'll need to start paying for part of the program — after the passage of President Donald Trump's megabill.
— House Republicans will need help from Democrats to pass their 'farm bill 2.0.' And the minority is signaling openness to working with their GOP counterparts.
— USDA is aligning its fiscal 2025 spending levels for Forest Service programs with an executive order instead of congressional approval.
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Driving the day
SNAP FALLOUT: Republican state officials are still assessing how their budgets will be impacted by the GOP's recently passed megabill, which dramatically slashes federal funding for safety net programs and pushes food aid costs onto states for the first time.
Several officials told MA that they're mainly focused on decreasing their payment error rates, which measures over and under-payments of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits — the metric that will determine how much of the program states will need to pay for starting fiscal year 2028.
States that can get their SNAP error rates below 6 percent by the time the cost-share kicks in will be exempted from paying entirely.
Virginia's Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who leaves his term-limited office next year, said 'we are going to go to work and bring down the error rate with the localities' and that he's 'confident' that the state will 'transform the way that the SNAP benefit process is managed.' Virginia's error rate stood at 11.5 percent as of fiscal 2024.
More details: That sentiment was echoed by Alabama Commissioner of Agriculture and Industries Rick Pate and North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong, both Republicans.
If states can't get their error rates down, they'll need to make tough decisions about whether to redirect existing funds, raise taxes, cut benefits or find some alternative route in order to sustain SNAP. While the majority of the country's 27 Republican governors didn't respond to MA's requests for comment about the megabill, some spoke to the unease within the party over the new policies.
Louisiana Treasurer John Fleming, a Republican and former first-term Trump administration official, said that 'there could be a negative impact' on the state's SNAP recipients. He said money would need to be moved from other programs to pay for benefits if the state's error rate is too high, though he declined to get into specifics.
'We may have to trim back some [other programs] in order to afford the programs necessary to support the people of Louisiana who do need help and who are dependent,' said Fleming, whose state had the third-highest SNAP participation rates in the country in fiscal 2023. 'The state may have more responsibility to provide benefits, and we may have to make those kinds of adjustments.'
Alabama's Pate, who is also running for lieutenant governor, said he doesn't expect his state to try to backfill the federal cuts.
'We're probably not going to generate additional dollars to fund additional SNAP benefits that we can't afford,' he said, adding that 'everybody thinks budgets are going to start getting tighter' and that it will be 'all hands on board' to bring the state's 8.32 percent error rate under 6 percent.
Some Republican state officials argue that if states are being told to pay, they should also have more control over how the program is administered.
West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey's office said before the bill passed that he opposed the plan and would prefer to have the flexibility to run the program free from federal requirements.
And Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen told our Shia Kapos that if his state has to pay for SNAP, 'we're going to do it the Nebraska way, not the federal government's way.'
BLUE POV: Officials in Democratic strongholds, meanwhile, are conveying the stakes in dire terms. Democratic states have higher error rates and will have to pay a higher portion of SNAP costs if they don't get their error payment rates down in time, according to a new analysis by Grace and Paroma Soni.
'I don't think [the solution is] raising taxes,' said Laura Montoya, New Mexico's Democratic treasurer, home to the nation's highest SNAP participation rate. 'We have a rainy day fund. Right now, it's not just raining, it's pouring, and it's flooding, and we're going to have to figure it out. And I don't think figuring it out is screwing people more than what the federal government already did.'
In New York, roughly 300,000 people could lose access to food stamps because of the megabill, the New York Times reports.
Barbara Guinn, commissioner of the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, said state officials will have to make decisions about 'diverting resources from other priority areas,' lamenting the 'limited alternatives' for funding SNAP benefits.
On The Hill
FIRST IN MA: Thirty-two Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), are asking Senate Agriculture Committee leadership in a new letter not to include a Republican effort to prohibit state or local governments from imposing preharvest standards on agriculture products produced in other states in the next farm bill.
They argue that the Food Security and Farm Protection Act, introduced by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) in April, would threaten 'countless state laws,' including measures aimed at preventing invasive pests and protecting animal welfare standards, 'opening the floodgates to unnecessary litigation.'
The bill would effectively nullify California's Proposition 12, which sets standards for livestock confinement, and other similar state laws. (The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the California law this week, calling it in part responsible for high egg prices.)
FARM BILL LATEST: House Agriculture Chair G.T. Thompson's hopes for passing a skinny farm bill this fall could hinge on support from Democrats incensed by his maneuvering for the GOP reconciliation package.
While the Pennsylvania Republican's plans for additional farm spending will almost certainly face opposition from GOP fiscal hardliners, there are signs that lawmakers from the other side of the aisle may be willing to set aside their anger over the megabill's massive cuts to nutrition aid to work with him.
But they won't forget about the slight.
'The Republican budget cut nearly $200 billion from SNAP, which certainly upends the traditional farm bill process,' said House Agriculture ranking member Angie Craig (D-Minn.). 'I'll work with anyone to improve the lives of our farmers, but you can't decimate a title of the farm bill and think it won't negatively affect the bipartisan farm bill coalition and make future farm bills harder to pass.'
Read the full story from Samuel Benson out this morning here.
AROUND THE AGENCIES
AG APPROPS CURVEBALL: USDA is aligning its fiscal 2025 spending levels for Forest Service programs with an executive order rather than how Congress laid out the funds, the agency wrote in a letter to four Democratic senators last Thursday.
The White House is revising the money to 'accomplish the Administration's priorities,' Kristin Sleeper, USDA's deputy undersecretary for natural resources and environment, told lawmakers in a letter obtained by your host.
Sleeper's letter said the agency's process would put an 'emphasis' on supporting Trump's March executive order seeking to increase timber production and accelerate the approval of forestry projects.
'Realignment of Forest Service actions with a new Administration remains a Department goal,' Sleeper wrote to Democratic Sens. Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Amy Klobuchar(Minn.), Martin Heinrich (N.M.) and Patty Murray (Wash.). Murray is ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, of which Merkley and Heinrich are members. Klobuchar is the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee.
Row Crops
— The Trump administration has moved to make it more difficult for immigrants to obtain federal food assistance, even through food banks, our Marcia Brown writes.
— Federal immigration agents carried out immigration sweeps at two Southern California cannabis farms on Thursday, arresting about 200 suspected undocumented immigrants, per The Los Angeles Times — and Trump's border czar is pledging to give 'no amnesty' for undocumented farmworkers.
— Texas farmers and ranchers are cleaning up damaged crops and land after floods ravaged a large swath of the state. (The Associated Press)
— The West's most important river has shriveled over the past quarter century — and its leading climate scientist says things could get a lot worse. More from our Annie Snider here.
— Trump on Saturday threatened 30 percent tariffs on two major U.S. trading partners: the European Union and Mexico.
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