House Republicans Want to Force States to Cut SNAP for Them

“You’re [between] a rock and a hard place in that, OK, you have a higher error rate—in order to get your error rate down, or to implement other things that will reduce your costs, you need more administrative investment, probably. But where will that be coming from?” she said. “You had an atypical situation the last few years, and so you’re predicating the program on an atypical situation, but without diagnosing why things are the way they are, and what would be required to make them better.”

As nearly every state has some form of balanced budget requirement, they may not have the leeway to expend greater funds on providing SNAP benefits. “What states cannot do, that the federal government can, is they cannot infinitely borrow to run an entitlement program,” said Lauren Bauer, associate director of the Hamilton Project. “Pushing things off onto states who do not have the capacities that the federal government does is a way to push responsibility onto people who don’t have every tool that they would need to to prevent the shrinking of these programs.”

States would have limited options for finding the funds to cover increased SNAP costs that Republicans are proposing. One potential route states might take would be eliminating “broad-based categorical eligibility,” a policy that allows households to participate in the program if they qualify for certain other benefits. Eliminating this policy would increase bureaucratic red tape for families who would suddenly be dealing with a more complicated application process and potentially result in people losing their benefits. This, in turn, would affect access to other programs—for example, children would no longer be automatically enrolled in free school meals or immediately qualify for early childhood nutrition programs.