During the government shutdown, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has been reviewing data from 29 states administering the food stamp program. Rollins’s review has found EBT cards that have been carrying balances of more than $10,000. It found cards that haven’t been used in years. It found cards issued to people who never existed.
“It’s a broken and corrupt program,” she told reporters.
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), as food stamps are formally known, has been around since the Great Depression but ballooned under the Biden administration and now serves 42 million people in the US, one-eighth of the population. What’s happening? Is the program running efficiently and properly? Will the shutdown really “starve children” as the Trump administration’s critics are charging?
Joining host Eric Eggers on The Drill Down podcast is returning guest Andrew McClenahan from the United Council on Welfare Fraud. McClenahan’s organization represents state-level investigators of welfare fraud. And it turns out there is a lot of it to investigate.
The SNAP program began in the 1930s but “exploded” more than 40 percent during the Biden administration years, according to President Trump’s Agriculture Secretary, Brook Rollins. She told Fox News recently that her office asked every state to send its data on SNAP usage so it could better understand the details of the enormous spike in cost and participation rates.
The federal government funds SNAP, but it is administered by each state, which sets benefit levels and eligibility requirements. Twenty-nine states have complied with the data request so far, and it has already found “thousands and thousands of illegal uses of the EBT card,” Rollins told reporters. Since they began reviewing this information, “we’ve got almost 700,000 people moved off,” she said, “and we’ve arrested about 118 people.”
The review found one man who was receiving SNAP benefits from six different states at the same time.
McClenahan, a career welfare fraud investigator, is not surprised. “I think it’s pretty telling when the secretary of USDA calls it a broken and corrupt program,” he tells Eggers.
“I think this has brought an appropriate focus,” McClenahan says, adding that Rollins’s findings are only from the states that have complied with her request, which are mainly red states. Democratic-run states such as New York, California, and Illinois have so far refused, filing lawsuits to avoid complying.
The surge in SNAP enrollment after Biden took office was partially driven by the COVID pandemic. Biden also changed the thrifty food calculation part of the program, which increased its average benefit level across the board. “The net cost to taxpayers was a $28 billion increase under Joe Biden,” McClenahan says. Trump cut that amount from the SNAP program in his budget.
During the government shutdown, Rollins is trying to understand where all that money had been going, despite the refusal of Democrat-led states to help.
“The fact she mentioned that 700,000 people have been removed from the program” is huge, McClenahan tells Eggers. Even in the red states, the review found illegal immigrants on the program, which is prohibited. No one knows how many illegal immigrants are receiving funds in states like California, New York, Minnesota, and Illinois that have attracted large numbers of them into their states.
In 1996, he notes, President Bill Clinton signed changes that specified non-citizens are not eligible for program benefits. It was never enforced.
Previously, “the federal government has not been incentivized to really look into it,” Eggers says.
Once benefits are issued to someone, EBT cards get monthly electronic deposits from the state government. Their benefit level is set to what that person and his or her family need for the entire month. Rollins’s review has found EBT cards that have been carrying balances of more than $10,000.
“In my experience, I’ve seen cards with as much as $20,000 on an EBT card,” McClenahan says.
The agriculture department’s review has found cards that have not been used in years. They found cards issued to people who never existed.
GAI did a full report on fraud in the SNAP program several years ago that exposed error-rate fudging, SNAP money being wired to Middle East terror organizations, and enormous amounts of retailer fraud. Cards were sold, at a discount, for cash.
“People are just kept on the program for years and they keep rolling these balances up, whether they’re using the card or not. [The government] is supposed to expunge unused benefits after nine months, but if all you do is buy a stick of gum once every nine months, your balance stays on your card. Even if you are no longer on SNAP, that card is still good,” McClenahan tells Eggers.
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