GOP wants to cut waste. Critics say SNAP exemption could do opposite.

When passing their massive tax and immigration law, Republicans said they wanted to tackle instances of “waste, fraud and abuse” in federal programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

In a last-minute push to secure the vote of Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Senate Republicans included a provision some critics say could encourage some states to maintain – or increase – the number of errors they make in processing critical food assistance benefits.

SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, has been a federally funded program through the Agriculture Department since it was established, with states paying 25% of administrative costs. But under the legislation, which President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, some states will be required to pay for a portion of the SNAP benefits in addition to increased administrative costs beginning in 2028. The portion states are required to pay is calculated based on their SNAP error rate – a measure of each state’s accuracy in properly disbursing the benefit.

While Republicans intended to make states with error rates higher than 6 % pay for a percentage of their SNAP benefits starting in 2028, they created an exception to the bill in the final hours of Senate negotiations.

Under this exception, states with the highest error margins – rates of 13.34 % or higher – would delay the start of their cost sharing for SNAP benefits from 2028 to 2030. Republicans said the two-year delay is meant to give these states a chance to lower their error rate.

Under 2024 error rates, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and the District of Columbia would qualify for the two-year delay.

Pushing back the financial consequences of having high error rates could backfire, watchdogs warned, saying the delay could instead discourage those states from lowering their error numbers.

“It actually goes against their argument that they want to incentivize states to lower down their error rates,” said Gina Plata-Nino, deputy director of SNAP at the Food Research and Action Center. “States will manage to keep their high error rates, then come fiscal year 2028, they can delay it, versus states that are trying incredibly hard to lower down their error rates – they will be penalized. … It makes no sense.”

Katie Bergh, a food assistance policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said Republican senators’ last-minute push to exempt some states from cost sharing was a “signal” that they “recognized the immense harm that this provision would cause to their state.” Covering these new SNAP costs, she said, will require states to raise revenue or cut spending on other state-funded programs.

“If they can’t do that to the point that they can pay the required cost shift, then the consequences for low-income families would be very dire,” she said.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) put it a little more bluntly in a social media post early in the morning of July 1, ahead of the chamber’s vote.

“They are rewarding errors,” Klobuchar, the top Democrat in the Senate Agriculture Committee, wrote on X.

Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) – chairman of the House Agriculture Committee – said he believes the delay will not keep states that qualify for it from eventually participating in the cost sharing.

“The time has come to impose clear incentives for states to improve their service to SNAP participants and control costs, and the only way for that to occur is for them to have some level of skin in the game,” Thompson said.

Changes to the food assistance program were one of the ways Republicans tried to offset the cost of the tax cuts. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill’s SNAP provisions – as originally written, before the exemption was added – would reduce federal spending by $295 billion over 10 years.

While Republicans originally proposed a SNAP carve-out just for Alaska, that idea was shot down by the Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan adviser to the chamber that examines Senate amendments to ensure they comply with reconciliation rules. But later in the negotiations, the parliamentarian let stand the option that delayed all states with error rates higher than 13.34 % from participating in the cost-sharing requirement.

Soon after she voted to advance the bill, Murkowski said that while she “worked to improve the present bill for Alaska, it is not good enough for the rest of our nation – and we all know it.” Her office didn’t respond to a request for comment on the SNAP changes.

But even in states that are expected to qualify for the two-year delay, lawmakers say they worry about how the law will impact their budgets.

“(The SNAP exemption) doesn’t really change anything. All it means is we get a couple more years before this hits our budgets,” New Mexico House Speaker Javier Martinez (D) said. “… So it’s a shell game that these guys are playing in order to give a huge tax giveaway to their wealthy friends.”