Closing Food Stamp Loopholes Won’t Starve a Single Child
Every time a state or Congress moves to clean up fraud and corruption from the food stamp program, the same ludicrous claim resurfaces: Program integrity is just a cover for starving low-income families.
It’s a good talking point if you have a penchant for lying or love screaming, “People will die!” during every policy discussion.
Verifying that someone actually qualifies for food stamps before giving them food stamps doesn’t starve low-income families.
Stopping people from double or triple dipping in multiple states doesn’t starve low-income families.
Cracking down on retailer food stamp trafficking doesn’t starve low-income families.
Making sure you don’t have millions of dollars in assets doesn’t starve low-income families.
Keeping dead people off the welfare rolls doesn’t starve low-income families.
What does jeopardize resources for the truly needy is allowing the safety net to be used and abused by activists and bad actors to give as much taxpayer money as possible to as many people as possible with no regard for accuracy or effectiveness. The result has been nearly $10.4 billion in improper payments, billions in fraud, a promotion of soda over vegetables, and millions of Americans trapped in dependency. It wasn’t sustainable, and it perverts what the program was designed to do: Provide nutrition assistance to American citizens who need help.
Requiring states to manage their own payment error rates—and to help cover the cost when those rates run too high—gives states a real reason to get this right. For decades, Washington picked up the entire tab no matter how badly a state botched its eligibility checks. States with error rates above six percent will now have to pay for a share of their own food stamp benefits, and that single reform will be a major catalyst for positive change.
Only people who are ineligible are being removed
The point of food stamp reform is not to eliminate the safety net. The point is to refocus the food stamp program on the population it was designed to serve: the truly needy.
If someone loses access to food stamps under the One, Big, Beautiful Bill, it’s because they weren’t supposed to have access in the first place. That means households whose income and assets exceed federal limits and individuals whose immigration status has never made them eligible. The low-income families for whom food stamps was created will still have full access to their benefits, and cutting waste, fraud, and abuse strengthens the safety net to preserve this access.
Additionally, the able-bodied adults without dependents who refuse to adhere to the work requirements will also be removed. Most are childless adults who could work, but currently aren’t: Nearly 74 percent of able-bodied adults without dependents on food stamps don’t work at all, and only three percent work full time, despite millions of open jobs sitting unfilled nationwide.
The results when states actually enforce the requirement instead of waiving it are dramatic. Within two years of Arkansas implementing work requirements, able-bodied adult enrollment dropped by 70 percent, and those who left welfare for work saw their incomes triple. Mississippi saw a similar turnaround, with incomes more than doubling within two years of the move from welfare to work. Work requirements don’t punish people, they connect people to paychecks and put them on a path to a better life.
Free school lunches won’t be affected
Opponents love to invoke school lunches, warning that reform will leave children without meals. The numbers say otherwise. Free and reduced-price school lunches run through their own eligibility rules—household income below 130 percent or 185 percent of the federal poverty level, along with universal free meal programs that already cover most students in most states. FGA’s research on this issue found that 99.8 percent of children currently on food stamps would remain eligible for free or reduced-price lunch through these other pathways. Fewer than 2,900 students nationwide would see any change at all, and those students never qualified for free lunch in the first place. Needy children will continue to have access to food.
Massive food stamp spending fueled inflation under Biden
The price of enrolling as many people as possible onto food stamps is more than just the cost of running the program itself—it includes the skyrocketing inflation that comes from unchecked welfare growth.
In 2021, the Biden administration unilaterally hiked food stamp benefits by 27 percent, the largest permanent increase in the program’s history, without waiting for Congress to sign off. Monthly food stamp spending more than doubled between 2019 and 2022, and the expansion is projected to cost taxpayers up to $250 billion over the next decade. Americans are still feeling the effects of that spending.
Researchers reviewed more than a decade of retail scanner data covering roughly half of all U.S. grocery store sales and found that a one percent increase in per-capita food stamp benefits raised grocery prices by 0.08 percent. Put plainly, every 12.5 percent jump in food stamp spending pushes food prices up another one percent.
Grocery prices climbed by at least 15 percent as a result of Biden’s expansion alone—a cost every family paid at checkout, whether or not they received a single food stamp benefit. More welfare won’t solve cost-of-living issues. Reining in welfare waste, fraud, and abuse is absolutely essential.
Americans want program integrity measures in food stamps
Voters across the political spectrum want the food stamp program to work the way it was designed to. Polling from the Center for Excellence in Polling found that 72 percent of likely voters support requiring able-bodied adults without young children to work, train, or volunteer at least part time as a condition of food stamp eligibility—including majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike. Sixty-seven percent support limiting future food stamp benefit increases to the rate of inflation unless Congress explicitly approves a larger change, and 72 percent support requiring states to pay a share of food stamp benefit costs for enrollees in their own state.
The Center for Excellence in Polling also polled blue state voters and found similar results:
- 79 percent of likely voters in Maryland support monthly checks of federal and state data to ensure food stamp recipients are still eligible.
- 74 percent of likely Colorado voters support requiring able-bodied adults to work, train, or volunteer at least part time in order to qualify for food stamps, and nearly two-thirds support requiring the state to end food stamp benefits for individuals who are in the United States illegally (61 percent).
- 83 percent of likely voters in Virginia support requiring the state to verify that food stamp applicants are eligible for the program before awarding benefits.
Americans don’t see program integrity as an attack on the safety net. They see it for what it is: making sure the program serves the people it was built for, without leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for waste, fraud, and abuse.
