Senate Plan Would Lower Burden of Cost Shift to States for Food Stamps

 U.S. Senate Republicans will propose more moderate changes to the major federal food assistance program than their House counterparts, Senate Agriculture Chairman John Boozman said Wednesday, detailing a provision in a giant tax and spending cut bill that would penalize states less harshly than the House GOP version.

The Agriculture section of the Senate’s budget reconciliation bill, like the House version that passed last month 215-214, would create the possibility that states for the first time would shoulder some of the cost of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits starting in 2028.

But unlike the House version, the Senate’s language would allow states an opportunity to avoid paying anything if they hit an efficiency benchmark, Boozman, an Arkansas Republican, told reporters at the Capitol.

The highest share states would be responsible for would be 15% under the Senate’s proposal, down from 25% in the House version.

Boozman said Senate Republicans sought to temper the House proposal, which would impose a minimum 5% cost-share on all states, with most states paying for 25% of the benefits.

The House approach would saddle states with at least around $5 billion per year for the program that provides about $100 billion per year in benefits, but the actual costs to states would likely be much higher.

“A lot of people were concerned about the significant bill to the states with the 5% cost-share,” Boozman said. “So this was an effort that’s the best of both worlds in the sense that it allows the states, through efficiencies, to make it such that they don’t have to worry about that, but we still recoup the money.”

In practice, the House plan would likely impose closer to $14 billion per year in new costs to states because most would not qualify for the lowest cost-share, according to an analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that also projected that more than 3 million people would lose benefits under the House plan.

The changes to SNAP are part of Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill” that would also extend the 2017 law that provided individual and corporate tax cuts, bolster federal spending on border security and defense, overhaul and cut portions of the Medicaid health care program, and much more.

GOP leaders are moving the package through the complex reconciliation process, which has strict rules in the Senate and will likely include a marathon amendment voting session later this month, known as a vote-a-rama.

Lower savings

The federal government currently pays for all costs of SNAP benefits. House Republicans argued that left states without an incentive to reduce errors in payments and proposed the requirement that states share some of the cost in proportion to their error rates in administering SNAP benefits.

The Senate would also peg a state’s cost-share to its error rate, but would make states’ costs lower across the board.

States with error rates at 5% or lower would continue to not pay anything for their SNAP benefits, and states with error rates from 10% or higher would pay for 15% of benefits. The Senate bill would also create two intermediate levels, Boozman said.

The national error rate in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, was 11.7%, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. More than two dozen states had error rates of 10% or more.

The Senate’s proposed changes to the cost-share would result in a lower federal savings than the House version, Boozman said. His version would save about “$52 or $53 billion,” about $20 billion less than the House version, he said. It’s not clear where those savings might occur instead.

The Senate would also exclude a provision of the House bill that would have changed the cost-share of administering SNAP. States currently pay for 25% of administrative costs, with the federal government picking up the rest of the bill. The House bill would change that rate to 50% each.

A smaller tweak on the Senate side would exempt single parents of children younger than 10 from meeting work requirements. The House bill would set that age at 7 years old. No age limit currently exists.

Reconciliation

The differences between House and Senate Republicans are among several issues the chambers will negotiate in the coming weeks as Republicans seek to pass the massive legislative package through the procedure known as budget reconciliation.

The process involves several committees writing bills that the Senate Budget Committee then packages together before sending it to the floor.

Full language of the Senate Agriculture Committee’s instructions would be published late Wednesday, Boozman said.

The reconciliation process allows Senate Republicans to skirt the chamber’s usual 60-vote threshold for legislation.

But with razor-thin majorities in each chamber — and a host of policy disagreements among Republicans — GOP leaders face a delicate task in crafting a bill that can pass both chambers.

–Jacob Fischler and Jennifer Shutt, Florida Phoenix