House Republicans’ search for waste and fraud to cut from federal spending put them on a crash course with food stamps, a massive program that racked up $10.5 billion in erroneous payments in 2023.
But it is proving a tough nut to crack. Democrats accuse them of trying to rip food off of Americans’ tables.
Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee are eyeing cuts to the program, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, as part of the effort to trim at least $230 billion from agricultural spending over the next decade.
The savings would help pay for tax cuts in President Trump’s agenda, which Republicans are trying to ram through Congress in party-line votes.
Food stamps have been a political lightning rod for decades. House Democrats were quick to blast the GOP before the committee unveiled its legislation.
“Let us be clear, it does not matter how my Republican colleagues try to spin this,” said Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee. “Cutting SNAP by $230 billion will result in children, seniors, veterans and disabled Americans going without food.”
Republicans are eyeing fixes that include limits to future benefit increases, adding work requirements and pushing more costs of the program to states.
SNAP accounted for about 68% of federal nutrition assistance spending, or about $112 billion total, in Fiscal 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The program served an average of 42.1 million people per month, with each participant reaping benefits of roughly $211 a month.
The program also doles out billions of dollars a year in improper payments, either payments that are the wrong amount or otherwise should not have been made.
In 2023, USDA estimated that 11.7% or about $10.5 billion of SNAP benefits it paid were improper or in error, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Rep. Dusty Johnson, South Dakota Republican, said Democrats are not being honest about the program’s problems.
“They will attack, attack, attack, regardless of what the policies are,” he said. “It used to be that you could have a reasonable conversation about welfare reform on a very bipartisan basis. The Dems are less interested in engaging on that level, and that’s too bad.”
House Democrats have launched a public relations blitz against cuts and policy tweaks to SNAP, similar to the left’s criticism of efforts to cut Medicaid spending.
Earlier this week, Rep. Brendan F. Boyle, Pennsylvania Democrat, filed a discharge petition for a bill that would prevent the GOP from reducing the enrollment or benefits for people using either program. The petition has 205 of the 218 necessary signatures to force a vote on the bill.
While no GOP lawmakers have signed Mr. Boyle’s petition, a trio of House Republicans on the agriculture panel — Reps. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, Zach Nunn of Iowa and Don Bacon of Nebraska — used a procedural move to show their opposition to reducing benefits for either program.
One proposal that has proven a sticking point for some Republicans on the panel is shifting more of the financial burden of SNAP onto the states.
Currently, the federal government pays the entire costs of food assistance benefits, and splits the cost of administering the program with states. The cost-sharing proposals being floated could be as low as 10% or as high as 25%.
“This is a program that the federal government is providing 100% and yet the states are administering it,” said Rep. Mark Harris, North Carolina Republican. “And you know, you just don’t have a whole lot of accountability going on there.”
While Republicans generally agree that some costs should be shared, disagreements begin to bubble up over just how much states should take on and how the cost burden should be distributed.
Mr. Van Orden would like to tie cost-sharing to a state’s error rate, or the rate at which states under- or overpay SNAP benefits. His proposal would effectively make a state’s cost-sharing liability go down the lower its error rate.
The error rates vary widely by state. Wisconsin, for example, has one of the lowest error rates at 5.15%, while Alaska has the highest at 60.37%.
“Those are real numbers,” Mr. Van Orden said. “Why should my Wisconsin dairy farmers pay for Alaska’s inability to run a bureaucracy? We shouldn’t.”
