loading . . . This Is the Real SNAP Fraud When Republican politicians complain about âfood stamp fraud,â they generally mean that some welfare cheat is ripping off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, by falsely claiming eligibility. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, for instance, is fixated on undocumented immigrants accessing the program illegally. âThe Democrat Party,â she said in November, âbuilt its entire strategy around protecting illegal aliens. They know if the handouts stop, those illegals will go back home, and Democrats will lose 20+ seats after the next census.â Never mind that undocumented immigrants canât vote.
MAGA hacks like Rollins seldom acknowledge that a SNAP beneficiary is likelier to be the victim of a crime rather than its perpetrator. So-called targeted benefit fraud is common, costing an estimated $12 billion per year. And Rollins has to know that a thief who steals directly from a SNAP recipient is much likelier to be a hardened criminal than a SNAP recipient who bends or breaks some eligibility rule.
âThis is white-collar crime,â Mark Haskin of the Agriculture Departmentâs special investigations unit told an Atlanta TV news reporter last year. âThis is organized crime.â A Romanian transnational mafia gang known as the Dorneanu Organized Crime Group, for instance, allegedly led by one Mihai Dorneanu, stole over $180 million from California welfare funds, leading in February 2025 to 11 arrests by Romanian authorities, five by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and four by local police. Two members remained at large after they cut their ankle monitors and jumped bail in 2023. One of them was later arrested in Australia.
If some crook hacks your Visa or Mastercard and goes on a shopping spree, Visa or Mastercard will make you whole. Federal law limits to $50 a consumerâs liability for credit card fraud, and the more reputable credit card companies typically wonât hold you liable at all. But if youâre a SNAP recipient and some crook hacks your electronic benefits transfer, or EBT, card, youâre out of luck. No federal statute extends you the slightest protection, and, except California and Maryland, no state will reimburse you out of its own funds. You just go hungry.
Bianca Hunter, a mother of two, had her SNAP EBT card declined last winter at Samâs Club. When she checked the EBT app on her phone, it showed that somebody in Chicago had purchased $559.49 worth of food, emptying her account. Hunter didnât live in Chicago; she lived in Overland Park, Kansas. When she sought help at the Kansas Department for Children and Families, she told KCTV in Kansas City, she was advised, âThere was nothing they could do about it.â
âSo yâall arenât going to replace my food stamps at all?â she replied. âWhat am I supposed to do with my two kids; how are we supposed to eat?
âThey said weâll just have to go to food pantries.â
It wasnât always this way. At the end of 2022, Congress, noting a Covid-era uptick in targeted benefit fraud, authorized the states to reimburse at least some SNAP victims. (SNAP is funded by the federal government and administered by the states.) But the legislation stipulated that, to be reimbursed, your benefits had to have been stolen between October 1, 2022, and September 30, 2024, later extended to December 20, 2024. As the December deadline approached, Congress bowed to the reality that the surge in targeted benefit fraud was still growing and extended the deadline through September 2028. This was in a continuing resolution, or CR, that House Speaker Mike Johnson introduced on December 17, 2024.
Then a tweetstorm by the richest man in the world killed the CR.
âThis bill is criminal,â Elon Musk tweeted December 18. Musk also tweeted âStop the steal of your tax dollars!â and âEver seen a bigger piece of pork?â and âAny member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!â The number of Musk tweets and retweets that day exceeded 100.
Much of Muskâs information, gleaned all or in part from the conservative Twittersphere, was wildly inaccurate. Musk said the CR raised congressional pay by 40 percent; it actually raised congressional pay by 3.8 percent and, technically, wasnât a raise at all but a cost-of-living adjustment. Musk said the bill gave Washington, D.C., $3 billion to build a new football stadium; it gave D.C. no money at all, but rather transferred control of the site of the former RFK Stadium to D.C. And so on.
In a sane world, Johnson would have ignored Muskâs ignorant cyberkibitzing. Joe Biden was still president, and Musk a mere functionary-in-waiting, designated by President-elect Donald Trump to run some pseudo-government agency (really just a White House office) called the Department of Government Efficiency.
But ours is not a sane world. Trump famously hates to be upstaged, so he quickly followed Muskâs fact-challenged tantrum with his own fact-challenged demand for a fresh CR âWITHOUT DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS.â By weekâs end, Johnson pushed through the House a substitute that jettisoned the offending provisions, including Congressâs tiny cost-of-living pay adjustment and the D.C. land transfer, which was later passed as a separate bill. Neither Musk nor Trump had singled out the SNAP deadline extension for criticism, but the substitute CR excluded that, too.
Last spring, a bipartisan group of Senate and House members, including Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, and Representative Mike Lawler, Republican of New York, introduced legislation to resume and extend indefinitely reimbursement to SNAP victims of targeted benefit fraud. The bill went nowhere. Instead, Trumpâs Big Beautiful budget reconciliation bill cut SNAP spending by imposing work requirements and increasing statesâ share of administrative expenses from about 50 percent to about 75 percent. The latter will increase annual state spending from anywhere between $13.9 million in Idaho to $128 million in Wisconsin annually, according to the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center, or FRAC.
In addition, the reconciliation bill for the first time will require states to share with the federal government the cost of the benefits themselves, assigning them a portion of 5 to 15 percent, depending on an individual stateâs rate of payment errors (typically overpayments). Under the new law, a state starts losing federal funds if its error rate exceeds 6 percentâas all but eight states did in 2024. A state error rate of 6 to 8 percent will require a 5 percent match; an error rate of 8 to 10 percent will require a 10 percent match; and an error rate over 10 percent will require a 15 percent match. Since 2024âs average state error rate was about 11 percent, most states will end up paying 15 percent. Cost sharing will drain tens of billions annually from state budgets; big ones like Florida and New York will pay more than $1 billion more, and the biggest, California, will pay over $2 billion more, according to FRAC.
Between the federal governmentâs determination to cut SNAP spending 20 percent over 10 yearsâthe largest reduction in the six decades of the programâs existenceâand the massive increase in what states will have to spend on SNAP, thereâs little appetite at the federal or state level to resume reimbursing beneficiaries whose benefits get stolen. Instead, interest has shifted toward making the EBT cards that SNAP recipients use to pay for food more secure. But progress here is slow, because that costs money, too.
People call SNAP the âfood stamp programâ because a predecessor program created during the Great Depression distributed the benefit through post offices in orange-and-blue stamp books. When the modern food stamp program was initiated in 1964, the benefit was a paper coupon distributed by the states. As the program scaled up, opportunities for fraud increased. Most famous was the case of the âwelfare queenâ about whom Ronald Reagan demagogued endlessly during his 1976 presidential campaignâa woman named Linda Taylor whose life story turned out to be too extravagantly dark and weird to make her an example of anything. The more run-of-the-mill type of food stamp fraud was enabled by the ease with which paper coupons were stolen or counterfeited. Paper coupons were also conspicuous, which created a stigma at the checkout line for SNAP recipients.
Riding to the rescue in the early 1990s was retirement of the âknuckle busterâ imprinter, a clumsy manual device used to make a carbon of every credit card purchase, and introduction of the much faster and easier electronic point-of-sale, or POS, device. If a retailer could use this digital marvel to extract credit or cash instantaneously from a bank account, policymakers realized, then surely that retailer could also use it to extract Âpreassigned transfer payments from the Treasury. Paper coupons redeemable to buy food were as much of a nuisance as finger-bluing carbon receipts. Why not use POS devices instead? No more fraud, no more stigma, I remember an Agriculture Department official crowing when I wrote about the anticipated shift as a young _Wall Street Journal_  reporter.
Independent owners of corner grocery stores and bodegas were resistant to purchasing new point-of-sale equipment that would accommodate EBTs, so it took a succession of federal laws to effect the changeover, culminating in 1996 with a provision in President Bill Clintonâs welfare reform bill requiring states to deliver SNAP benefits electronically by the start of fiscal year 2003. (Yes, the same bill that fulfilled Clintonâs campaign pledge to âend welfare as we know itâ digitized food stamps.)
But criminality abhors a vacuum. The advent of digital commerce prompted international crime rings to exploit the insecure magnetic stripes on credit and debit cards with a technique called âskimming.â Self-serve fuel pumps, automated teller machines, and POS machines were altered to read and transmit keystrokes, enabling criminals to obtain credit and debit card numbers and PINs. Often these devices were as simple as an ultrathin layer of plastic placed atop the keys.
The credit card companies countered by developing more secure chip and âtap-to-payâ features, and by loading credit cards onto cell phones. Adoption of the new technology was initially slow, but demand skyrocketed during the Covid pandemic as customers sought contactless forms of payment, especially at grocery stores, the most difficult type of retail establishment to avoid. The other thing that happened during Covid was that Congress expanded SNAP eligibility and increased the average monthly benefit from about $120 per person to about $230. Ever-adaptive, criminal gangs shifted their target from newly secure credit cards to newly flush SNAP EBTs, which still relied on insecure magnetic stripes.
The obvious solution is to upgrade all EBTs with chips and tap-to-pay. But only one state, California, has done that so far, because itâs expensive.
The obvious solution is to upgrade all EBTs with chips and tap-to-pay. But only one state, California, has done that so far, because itâs expensive; Californiaâs upgrade cost about $75 million. And because those corner grocery stores and bodegas will once again be slow to upgrade their POS devices, Californiaâs new card has a magnetic stripe, too, which still leaves it somewhat vulnerable to fraud. Senators Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, and Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, introduced a bill in 2024 requiring states to make the changeover, but it didnât have enough stand-alone support, and a hoped-for farm bill to which it might have been amended failed to materialize. Today, with partisan divisions leaving congressional appropriators limping from one short-term CR to another, no farm bill seems likely anytime soon.
In November 2024, then-Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack sent a letter to governors in 50 states announcing that the nonprofit American National Standards Institute had developed technical specifications showing how states could transition to the more secure chip and tap-to-pay technology. That same year, the Agriculture Department directed grocers to an online guide to help them make the changeover and said a proposed regulation would be forthcoming to âestablish timeframes for upgrading to secure payment technologies.â
Weâre still waiting for that proposed regulation. Vilsackâs successor, Rollins, included SNAP benefit theft among the items targeted in her âNational Farm Security Action Plan,â but her main solution was to punish retailers judged insufficiently vigilant. In general, Rollins seems more preoccupied with chasing undocumented immigrants, penalizing states that didnât suspend full SNAP payments during the government shutdown, and making all SNAP recipients reapply for benefits. Addressing actual SNAP fraud committed by real criminals like the Dorneanu Organized Crime Group is a low priority. âThey conflate fraud, and payment error, and abuse,â one Democratic congressional staffer told me. âThey just want to talk about things in a general miasma. https://newrepublic.com/article/204257/snap-targeted-benefit-fraud