(The Lion) — The U.S. Department of Agriculture will require every household receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to reapply due to rampant fraud and abuse, according to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.
The announcement follows months of internal audits finding what the agency described as “systemic vulnerabilities” in state eligibility systems.
“It really puts the country in jeopardy. People that need it have to get it. I’m all for it,” Trump told reporters. “But people who are able-bodied can do a job – they leave their job because they figure they can pick this up, it’s easier. That’s not the purpose of it.”
While the Congressional Research Service recently characterized SNAP fraud as rare, an independent analysis by The Lion shows fraud and abuse could reach as high as 25% of the program cost.
Rollins said 186,000 instances were identified in which benefits continued flowing to individuals listed as deceased, citing data from 29 GOP-led states cooperating with the USDA investigation.
She told Fox News SNAP is one of the “most corrupt, dysfunctional programs in American history.”
Rollins last month shared a chart with reporters showing SNAP costs increased nearly 30% under Joe Biden. When combined with the number of cases, it shows a 40% increase in SNAP usage, she told Fox.
In fact, SNAP spending rose more than that under Biden.
From $55.6 billion in 2019, SNAP surged to $74.1 billion in 2020, a 33% jump tied to COVID-19 era expansions.
But under Biden, the trend continued, even after the recovery was complete. According to USDA data, SNAP benefit spending in 2022 was nearly $128 billion when adjusted for inflation.
By 2024, the SNAP budget still totaled $99.8 billion, 30% over the 2020 expansion.
The rapid growth of SNAP during the pandemic followed the same pattern observed across other COVID-era programs, where reduced oversight led to widespread fraud and abuse.
“It’s sort of a combination of states have no incentive to dish these out efficiently and they have a lot of pressure from Congress to spend the money quickly,” Chris Edwards, chair in Fiscal Studies at the Cato Institute, told The Lion.
“So, that was sort of a double problem. Every aid program, from Medicaid to those school lunch programs, they’ve all suffered from this sort of fraud and waste problem where the states don’t have incentives to administer them efficiently.”
The renewed focus on oversight by the Trump administration comes amid a long-running increase in SNAP’s payment-error rate, of which about 90% are overpayments.
“There’s not a lot of incentive for states to measure” fraud, Rachel Sheffield, a research fellow in welfare and family policy at the Heritage Foundation, told The Lion.
Federal data show the error rate reached a historic low of just over 3% in 2013, but then rose sharply in 2014, the last year for which complete Obama-era data were released.
USDA did not publish national error rates in 2015 or 2016 because of what the agency described at the time as “methodological inconsistencies.” But when data releases resumed in 2017, the payment error rate stood at 6.3%, or roughly double the 2013 figure.
Today, the error rates stand at nearly 11%.
Sheffield told The Lion she estimated overpayments at around $9 billion annually, and trafficked benefits as costing $1.3 billion per annum, though she cautioned the amount of fraud may be much higher.
“I would assume that the numbers are higher, just because it’s hard to completely measure all of it. All of it doesn’t even get tracked,” she said.
This expansion of errors, she added, also coincided with the expansion of broad-based categorical eligibility (BBCE), a policy encouraged by the former Obama administration’s USDA beginning in 2013. It allows households to bypass SNAP’s asset limits.
“The problem with that is if you’re receiving a service from another program, then you can qualify” under BBCE without actually qualifying under the asset limits, according to Sheffield.
Indeed, even if states do as little as hand over a brochure for a program, that might qualify recipients for SNAP, she said.
While states supposedly require people to reverify eligibility every six months, BBCE allows states to widen income thresholds and reduce verification paperwork, increasing program access but also weakening antifraud protections.
Many of the largest states adopted or expanded BBCE during these years, covering a majority of national SNAP spending, according to a check of SNAP’s State Activity Report.
USDA is not ending BBCE yet, but new federal caps on payment error rates will pressure states to strengthen verification.
States that keep broad eligibility rules and fail to verify accurately will now be financially liable for a share of overpayments under the One Big Beautiful Bill 2025 farm legislation, the USDA says.
State legislators and inspectors general have warned repayment obligations could place a strain on state budgets. The financial exposure could be even more significant for states with broadened eligibility or relaxed oversight during the past decade.
State Sen. Li Arellano Jr., a Republican from Illinois, warned the state may face over $700 million in chargebacks from the federal government for fraud because of the state’s error rate.
The USDA also notes as much as 12% of SNAP benefits are stolen directly from beneficiaries through scams, such as ATM skimming or phishing, often by transnational criminal gangs. EBT theft largely stems from insecure state-designed card systems that left the program vulnerable to skimming and cloning for years, industry insiders said.
Remarkably, the federal government also previously reimbursed states for stolen benefits, so they had little incentive to protect against theft. Those reimbursements, which were green-lighted in January 2023, expired in January 2025, increasing pressure on states to provide more electronic safeguards.
Taken together, the known payment errors, stolen benefits and unmeasured fraud suggest as much as one-quarter of SNAP spending may be misallocated, fraudulent or abused.
Edwards noted in addition to payment errors and stolen benefits, eight other types of fraud occur inside the SNAP program.
He says when supplemental nutrition was created, the main problem was hunger. But today the government is simply subsidizing empty calories, creating obesity.
“I want the federal government to ask the states for larger contributions, to create these incentives, these anti-waste incentives, and allow the states to experiment delivering more nutritious benefits to low-income people,” Edwards added.
Previously, government aid programs were typically divided 50-50 between states and the federal government, he noted, ensuring better efficiencies because it was in the states’ best interest to be more efficient.
“The states are in a better fiscal situation than the federal government will be going forward,” Edwards said. “So, I hope that the [Trump] bill actually creates precedent that the states should pay more for aid programs.”
Sheffield added BBCE “fundamentally changed the nature of the SNAP program” with an emphasis on rapid adoption.
“We’re not addressing the underlying causes of poverty,” she said. “We’re just throwing money at the symptoms. And so, we’re not helping people. It’s not designed to promote upward mobility. … Here we are, 60 years later, and we have just more people [using benefits] and more spending.”
Photo credit: The White House
