For perspective, SNAP constitutes somewhere around 1.5% of the total Federal budget[0], and provides supplemental income for over 41M Americans[1].
So they're making everyone reapply because their disbursement headcount is off by less than 1% (180k vs 41M). It's hard not look at stuff like this and not see gross oppression.
Half of my tax dollars (excluding SS/medicare taxes) go the military and subsidizing an entire defense industry, companies like Boeing, Lockheed etc. So some of my tax dollars going to a few people who aren’t eligible for SNAP benefits is the very least of my concerns.
A quibble… The 180k is just for the states that responded, if I understand correctly. They suspect that the rate of fraud could be much higher in other states. How much high? I have no idea. I don’t think anyone does. I think they want to reboot the program to try to remove the corruption.
>> I think they want to reboot the program to try to remove the corruption.
A reasonable thing to do - in principle. In practice that many people applying at once is going to cause all kinds of problems and delays for people. No big deal to inconvenience fraudsters, but delaying for people legitimately in need isn't good. Forced reapplication 5 percent at a time would be better. Or maybe thats what they're doing?
I would also keep in mind that the 180k number is almost certainly inaccurate, if we go by this administration’s behavior during the DOGE efforts of manufacturing false claims of “fraud” out of benign circumstances as an excuse to tear down the social safety net systems.[1]
> Bobba [DOGE engineer] had sorted people with a Social Security number by age and found more than 12 million over 120 years old still listed in the agency’s data. Bobba said he knew these people weren’t actually receiving benefits and tried to tell Musk so, to no avail, according to SSA officials. Dudek [SSA employee] watched in horror as Trump then shared the same statistics with both houses of Congress and a national television audience, claiming the numbers proved “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.”
You don't starve 41 million people even if you think there is some corruption, that's absolutely inhumane shit. Enemy of humanity shit.
Sometimes I wish we could go back to just living in Dunbar -sized groups.
If a hunter came back to the tribe and people start gathering around to eat and the hunter said "A few of you in the past have taken too much meat for themselves without doing their fair share.. I suspect. Nobody is gonna eat until we figure this out."
You know what would have happened? The village would have taken that hunter and thrown them off the cliff onto the rocks, because that motherfucker was a problem and a danger to the rest of the tribe.
The guy bringing food he personally hunted back to the tribe and trying to ration and apportion according to everybody's input & needs is the enemy? Terrible analogy.
Oh it was certainly no Aeneid, and I'm open to hearing a better one.
In the tribal societies I'm familiar with, hunter isn't a position of honor or something, it's just a job. The hunter is a tool, like the basket weaver or the primitive doctor.
The part about "their kill" is not familiar to me in the tribal way because that's the tribe's kill. The tribes food. The elder(s) would decide to ration, not the hunter.
That aside, screw the analogy. If you have 40,000,000 people on food rations and decide to withhold said food rations because you think some of them are misappropriated, that's some very stupid thinking. Only an idiot thinks like that. The only other person that thinks like that is a sociopath, one that wishes harm on said group. Either way, they're clearly a danger as a decision maker.
It's funny to me that 1% of poor people is "corruption we need to root out" but having worthless billionaires pay less tax than a school teacher is well and good.
If we're going to work out corruption, let's take everything the billionaires have and actually fix some of our systems.
Yes, because clearly this administration is very interested in weeding out corruption rather than making most people's lives harder so that the wealthy can have even more wealth. It's long past time to be accepting their rationale at face value. They have not earned trust, benefit of doubt, or good faith m
You added the "just", not me. But to your point, there are much, much larger and controversial line items in the budget to argue about than feeding the poor. Preventing starvation is important to a functioning society, as widespread hunger has ended many a government throughout history.
Oh at this point, with the way we've treated countries with military action, insane tariffs, masked deportations, embargos/blockades, threatening the sovereignty of a G8 country, threatening to annex another, supporting Israeli genocide, the list goes on...
We're on the downward slope now, but it will take awhile.
The future requires investments in education, infrastructure, healthcare, and energy generation (in particular, cheap energy), and we're simply not doing it. Being lonely sucks, and the US govt has alienated long standing allies. Economically they doesn't bode well.
Imagine if the debt were 1 trillion dollars instead of 38! How hard is it to say "no budget increases this year"? And that wouldn't even eliminate the deficit and they can do it.
The problem here is that healthier food tends to cost more, so you'd essentially be forcing people to buy less food unless you also simultaneously raised the disbursement. And then a certain wing of the media starts screaming about how the poor are eating organic salads on the backs of taxpayers.
Sounds reasonable in theory but has little basis in our current political reality.
I hate this common trope about health food costing more. Beans, lentil, rice, potatos, carrots, onions, cabbage, garlic don't cost a lot, add some additional cheap proteins like chicken and eggs and you're good to go for like $50 or less per week per person. And if you can buy in bulk and freeze, then it can get even cheaper.
Assuming access to a reliable cooker, safe storage, time to food prep and enough education in cooking to be able to cook. Some people on assistance fail all of those boxes, many fail at least one
It’s not a tripe. A lot of these aren’t even available in food deserts, whereas soda and garbage is ubiquitous in every corner stores and gas station etc.
That is part of the problem, yes. Not SNAP itself, which is good, but the fact that it can be used to buy garbage.
You should be restricted from buying soft drinks, chips, candy, etc. with SNAP/EBT, just like you can't buy cigarettes and alcohol with it. But nobody is willing to take on BigFood, and are content to let them prey on the poor with taxpayers footing the bill.
The second problem though is that if you restrict SNAP eligible food, you still have to provide healthy alternatives -- fresh veggies, fruit, grains, etc. -- at subsidized prices for SNAP recipients so they can actually survive on it.
It's such a shameful situation, and one that gets very little attention from either party.
So why not reform it? It seems like an easy way to get bipartisan support and compromise. To put the numbers in perspective, the US only had 3000 deaths due to starvation (almost all of which are mental health issues rather than lack of access to food). This is compared to 280k-500k deaths due to overeating.
Cut the 25% and keep the 75% that is spent on normal food. By the other comments you can see that even that seems quite unpopular as it is seen as policing food for poor people?
Do you know how much money SNAP gives people, and how much junk food and soft drinks cost? Like have you actually done the math on anything that would lead you to your opinion?
It's always a wonder to me that someone can consider spending 1.5% of the federal budget on our own people, so that kids don't go hungry, as excessive (I take that interpretation from those scare quotes), when we spend at least $1 TRILLION of $7 TRILLION on defense spending, which in absolute numbers is greater than 9 of the next most powerful adversaries combined [1]. But where is all the concern over 'fraud and abuse' in that enormous sum?
>“Can you imagine when we get our hands on the blue state data what we’re going to find?” she asked during a Thursday appearance on Newsmax’s “Rob Schmitt Tonight.”
Forcing all SNAP recipients to reapply over such a small discrepancy (> 1% of the 1.5%) is cruel and spiteful. And the comment by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins quoted above is disrespectful and unprofessional at best. But none of this is a surprise, given this administration's past history.
Less than one percent of 1.5% of $7 trillion, around $1 billion. Which is a significant sum, no doubt, but that's also less than $3/person in the US. Given the much larger wasted sums by DOD and other parts of the government, it's an amount I can live with. I'd rather see the real waste and abuse get addressed first, but it won't be. Address this, but address it in a way that doesn't cause undue harm to the 40.8 million people that aren't abusing the system.
SNAP recipients (about 42 million people) receive between $6-$10 per day in food assistance. $42 to $70 per week for groceries doesn't go very far in today's economy.
I'm not sure what you're responding to in my comment, but I think it's the $3/person bit. That's taking the approximately $1 billion and dividing it over all 340+ million people in the US. I'm saying that we have to have an average of $3/person in tax revenue to cover this apparent fraud (I don't trust this administration at all so I won't say anything other than "apparent").
Agreed with everything you said, but people would say the exact same thing about some of the more wasteful programs that were shutdown. "It is only $50 million" etc got really old... It is not like you can expect to just find massive line items that can be easily removed
Some of those items were about feeding starving kids, others weren’t. Perhaps we shouldn’t pretend that anyone equating them is saying something worth listening to or taking remotely seriously.
1% of 1.5%, so ~0.015%. I think it's fair to question if the juice is worth the squeeze here. To say nothing of if the most efficient way to go about it is really to make 41 million people reapply and reprocess all those applications.
That's the thing. If they've identified some tiny percent of fraud, investigate that. Implement policy or protocol changes to prevent it from happening again in the future. Requiring everyone to reapply on top of whatever else they're doing is probably more costly than any gains.
It seems the biggest fraud and waste here is in the administration.
There are much bigger wastes of money. Tax cuts for billionaires for example. Even SNAP itself is effectively welfare for billionaires - it means they don't have to pay a fair wage.
There are a limited number of children/families in need of this help. Feeding them is great for the economy. There is no need to spend more than that on the program, although there are other social programs that do contribute to making them into more productive individuals in the future, like education and healthcare.
May I recommend leaving out the snark in the future - it gives the impression that you are a heartless person who wants others to suffer. Your life is short - go outside and touch the grass, it'll do you some good.
Feeding families is a nice thing to do but economically speaking, these families are not very productive. I'm not a heartless person, but I'm also not brainless either. I should not need to nod along with a bunch of BS to be considered civil.
> I'm not a heartless person, but I'm also not brainless either.
You aren't making a strong case for either assertion. The fraud is 1% of 1.5% - that was already explained to you, and you are still trying to defend this garbage comment.
The comment where I started replying claimed that each dollar spent on SNAP yielded a 60x return in terms of productive economic activity... That is a literal braindead comment and I don't have to walk on eggshells to debunk such a preposterous thing.
1.5% fraud is awfully high for such a large program. You can call that take heartless if you want, but what better use could that fraudulently stolen money be put to? My one and only experience with food stamps is that I couldn't get more than like $50 monthly while I was unemployed and in dire need, and that was requiring lots of documentation. (Ghetto people and illegal immigrants are getting thousands these days, lol) Maybe someone like me back then might have gotten something worth my time if there was zero fraud. With the country facing bankruptcy every dollar counts, frankly.
Additionally, requiring people to reapply for food stamps is not going to actually disqualify any people who meet the acceptance criteria, but for a very small number of dumb ones. You either qualify or you don't. If you do then nothing changes. So, my take is actually both compassionate and absolutely right.
> I couldn't get more than like $50 monthly while I was unemployed and in dire need, and that was requiring lots of documentation
why didn't you try fraud if you think it's so easy?
It's mindboggling to see you argue that somehow the rules that made it hard for you to get social support are somehow waived for others.
The country isn't facing bankruptcy because children are getting food. The country is facing bankruptcy because billionaires are getting so much welfare in the form of tax cuts and low wages - their employees can't afford food and rent while working full time jobs to help the leeches amass even more wealth.
>why didn't you try fraud if you think it's so easy?
Because I'm not a criminal? I have too much to lose, and frankly I don't know the system. I know roughly the kinds of things that would get me paid but it's not easy for an honest person. Some of the fraud is also, no doubt, in the form of under-reporting income or not updating the records with your current household status.
>It's mindboggling to see you argue that somehow the rules that made it hard for you to get social support are somehow waived for others.
The rules apply VERY differently based on a large number of factors. Without going too far into it, I am 100% certain that being an "asylum seeker" (aka an economic migrant to those of us who know) will get you paid. I can't fake that, it's not worth it. Also, I'd have needed it 10+ years ago, not today.
>The country isn't facing bankruptcy because children are getting food. The country is facing bankruptcy because billionaires are getting so much welfare in the form of tax cuts and low wages - their employees can't afford food and rent while working full time jobs to help the leeches amass even more wealth.
The rich are getting richer but it's mostly because they know how to work the system. It's NOT because poor people are getting screwed generally, or because they deserve more money in an economic sense. Every productive industry is being outsourced or else flooded with immigrant workers, and this has gone on for decades. The rich don't HAVE enough to pay for the welfare state or higher wages for uncompetitive workers. If you want to be mad about something, be mad that our politicians allowed the country to be hollowed out.
I mean industry as a sphere of human activity, not industry as a collection of corporate interests. Of course it's all about money, but that doesn't excuse all the plebs who have been brainwashed into supporting infinite immigration.
> It is always a wonder to me when people downplay something that is "just" 1.5% of nearly $7 TRILLION
If (assuming correct) it is 1.5%, then it is 1.5%
Which is a tiny percentage. That's how percentages work. Adding that it is a large number out of a huge number doesn't change anything, it is still 1.5% which means not much at all.
Anyone who has ever worked on any sort of sales funnel knows: every time you ask someone to take an additional action, you lose people. Ask everybody to reapply, you'll end up with fewer people. You can say that's evidence of previous fraud, but it's largely just going to be people who didn't make it through the additional friction.
These extra steps can cause him weeks of stress, physical and mental. These extra steps cost him money he does not have. The stress can set him back physically for weeks.
Reapplying, waiting on hold for half a day, going down to offices, etc are not easy for some folks. People fall through the cracks and die.
This is called forced attrition. It's pretty common in the business world when companies don't want to fire people. Make it too difficult to bother, so folks stop bothering. Unfortunately this is a literal lifeline for millions of people, so it's more like make it too difficult to bother, so folks start dying.
It doesn't pass the sniff test. If they "know" 186,000 people are deceased who are receiving benefits, then they can simply stop disbursements to those accounts. It doesn't require any action from those who are alive.
> If someone doesn't reapply for food stamps then they weren't that critical for their survival.
For a good number it might be that they don't successfully reapply due to living on a knife edge that lacks the slack to jump through yet another hoop.
The experience here in Australia is that raising welfare barriers hurts those that need welfare the most, the actual fraudsters have the resources to beat the system.
> somehow incapable of doing basic things for something they care about
Even my ADHD often made me incapable of doing basic things for stuff I cared about. I can't imagine the struggle for people with more severe live conditions. Same goes for you, apparently.
You go through the process of actually calling, get sent through a 4-5 week rabbit hole, and then people wonder why less people make it through the funnel that has more holes than a grater.
Remember the whole "waste fraud and abuse" stuff in the beginning of the year? Yeah, there's a lot of waste in how inefficient it is signing up for this government stuff.
> Hate this argument so much. You lose people in your sales funnel because they didn't actually care all that much about the product to justify the extra effort.
On more than one occasion I've been the primary decision maker for a technology choice that was going to be worth tens of thousands of dollars or more per year.
For reasons that aren't relevant here, didn't have a ton of time to do the evaluation... extreme prejudice was exercised against anything that didn't have a 'download now and get started button'.
Even if I wanted to jump on a sales call, I didn't have 2 and 1/2 days to wait for you to get back to me.
Maybe a sales funnel is the right tool for certain industries but when your primary user is technical, don't make them jump on a phone call. Get out of their way and make sure the documentation is good. If they like what they see and they have questions, they will chase you down. That is when you should do the pitch call...
I have a friend with life circumstances that are complicated and she survives on SNAP. Every move like this is detrimental and jeopardizes the ability for her to stay alive. I do not understand or fathom why this program is run in such a cruel, uncaring way. I’m sure there is fraud, but there are many people with permanent disabilities and other things going on who don’t have the capacity to “just reapply” without significant effort. There is no need to do this when they can simply audit the usage.
Ugh, this again? I bet it's the same thing with all the "voter fraud" they find.
They get two lists of people (list of votes/program enrollees and one of "dead" people, etc) that were not designed/cleaned for this, and do a very loose match and then declare just based on that it must be fraud.
Are there some that are fraud, probably, a bit of that is just the cost of dealing with the public. Private companies get it just as much.
But I'll bet almost all of it is either bad matching, poor record keeping, or honest mistakes.
Of course. They’re doing all this over $52 million dollars per month. It’s going to cost more than $52 million to have everybody reapply. They want these people to starve to death. It’s a death cult.
>The secretary said after receiving data on SNAP recipients from 29 red states that “186,000 deceased men and women and children in this country are receiving a check.”
>“Can you imagine when we get our hands on the blue state data what we’re going to find?”
They’ll have a few weeks to up and die while the reduced, overworked government staff processes applications. They’ll certainly not slow walk the re-ups…
1) 42 million people underfed in the richest nation in the world is worrisome
2) killing one person is headlines, killing millions is statistics. Today, replace killing with starving
3) people reached at the state to need SNAP because of other incidents (health issues, loss of job, bankruptcy) which are much more expensive to prevented
4) saying to millions just to reapply seems more like social bulling to bring cheels to the masses than an effective fraud measure
Also from the outside looking in here: those numbers appear mind boggling. More than 1 in 10 people are on the edge of survival? That's many times more than the mythical 3% who toppled British rule in the USA.
For context, state-administered food programs paid for by SNAP already treat recipients like criminals with extensive salary, income, assets, and life situation reporting and verification every 6 months to 12 months max. It comes across as just yet another way look down on poor people, waste their time, and spend more money on duplicated means testing already costing significantly more than whatever hunting down every marginal unqualified case hoped to save like "finding" the "welfare queen" or "voting fraud" bogeyman that doesn't exist to demonize one group or another.
UBI would probably be a whole lot cheaper than micromanaging what people can and can't buy while not treating the most desperate people with unkind, perpetual suspicion.
The truth is this is yet another rug pull surprise to screw over poor people. Not just health insurance subsidy revocations or Medicaid cuts, because some people just aren't satisfied with trillions or all the power.
This is utterly disgusting. It took me 6 months to actually fully apply to SNAP (and I count the time it took for me to actually get a card). I seriously can't imagine this is legal, but if it somehow is ruled to be so, I can't imagine the idiots doing this actually have a plan for processing the millions and millions of applications. This is the same government who thought putting a bunch of teenagers in charge of making the government more "efficient" was a smart idea, so I imagine this will go just as badly, if not worse.
Most functional states / local county offices have emergency benefits issuance processes that offer same-day service. I'm not sure but I don't think anyone gets SNAP directly, every state has an EBT-based "food stamps" program.
The Republican government protects pedophiles while starving and abusing the poor. What will it take to wake people up? These people *despise* anyone who's not part of their sick little cabal.
So they're making everyone reapply because their disbursement headcount is off by less than 1% (180k vs 41M). It's hard not look at stuff like this and not see gross oppression.
0: https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-federal-gover...
1: https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/a-closer-look-...