The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
As Republican congressional leaders look for ways to offset more than $4 trillion in tax cuts heavily tilted in favor of the wealthy, Ohio’s food bank leader says cuts to the federal food safety net would be devastating.
When the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee earlier this month released its piece of a federal budget bill, Chairman John Boozman, R-Ark., said it took a “commonsense approach” to the federal Supplemental Assistance to Needy Families, or SNAP program.
However, the approach could also be seen as an unfunded mandate to states and local governments — and an attempt to hassle some of the most vulnerable off of a program meant to keep them from going hungry, critics say.
The changes to the program colloquially known as food stamps are part of President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which faces a July 4 deadline.
It would give $4.6 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years. In an analysis, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, estimated that 70% of the benefit would go to the “top 10% of the income distribution.”
To try to pay for it, congressional Republicans want to slash federal programs for the poor. They include cuts to Medicaid that could cost 770,000 Ohioans their health coverage.
They also include an estimated $300 billion in cuts to SNAP — by far the largest in history. That would cost millions of children, elderly, disabled and working Americans nutrition assistance, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported. About one in nine Ohioans would be among them.
Anti-hunger advocates are scrambling to keep up with whether the provisions in the Senate Agriculture committee bill will meet parliamentary muster. But they seek to shift the burden onto states in multiple ways.
One is to increase states’ share of the cost to administer the program from 50% to 75%. Another is to make states start paying a share of the program cost based on their error rates.
The two measures would work together to dramatically increase state costs and fundamentally alter the program, said Joree Novotny, executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks.
“There are underlying, systemic threats to the benefits of every eligible person because of the way the reconciliation package is designed,” Novotny said Wednesday. “I fundamentally believe that every child — if they’re seven or 10 or 14 — if they’re in a household in need of benefits, we need to make sure they’re nourished and that we live up to the commitment that we collectively made as a country.”
The program provides debit cards for food. To qualify, Ohio recipients generally have to have net income at or below federal poverty guidelines — $32,150 a year for a family of four. Benefits averaged $6.28 per person, per day last year.
The reconciliation bill would force states to pay for part of the program on a sliding scale based on error rates. They’d have to pay starting at 5% and up depending on how often they were found to pay recipients too little or too much in benefits.
It also would greatly increase error rates by eliminating the current tolerance for small errors — those up to $57.
The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and the large counties that administer the program gather information on gross income, family characteristics and living expenses to determine eligibility, and at what level.
“It’s really complicated, but that determines what eligibility is for that household,” Novotny said. “If at any point in that process, there is any error made at all — if the benefit amount is calculated a dollar too low or a dollar too high — that will count toward the error rate.
“Right now there’s a certain level of forgiveness because of the complexity of the calculation, but that would end. The error rate will go up. It will be impossible for a state to stay below a threshold of 5% because we’re talking about millions and millions of touches.”
If Ohio had an error rate of 6% or less — which it doesn’t, even under the current, more-tolerant system — the state would have to pay $158 million more a year into the program, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. At the top end, with an error rate of 25% or more, Ohio would have to pay $790 million more a year.
Under Ohio’s most recent, more-forgivingly calculated error rate, 15%, the state would have to come up with $473 million a year.
“An error rate is not fraud,” Novotny said. “It’s not the fault of the person applying for benefits. It’s a worker or a computer system making an error.”
In addition, by forcing states to pick up a huge additional chunk of the cost to administer the system, error rates stand to go up even further.
Ohio’s benefits system is now so under-resourced that SNAP beneficiaries face a two-to-three-hour wait time when they call to start or annually re-enroll for benefits, for their six-month check-ins, and when they need to report material changes in income, Novotny said. Adding 50% to states’ administrative burden would only increase wait times and the chances for harried workers to make mistakes, she said.
“Our system is already under a lot of duress in terms of access,” Novotny said.
She added, “People have trouble getting through the system already. That’s already part of the program. That’s not new. What the reconciliation text would do is exacerbate that in many ways. It would take away federal funding to support that process. So the state and the counties would have to invest more in just maintaining that level of service, which is already underfunded. And it would introduce additional complexity into every touch that is made with every household.”
On Tuesday, Novotny traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with aides to Ohio Sens. Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno, both Republicans. She said neither official is on the Agriculture Committee and she wanted to explain how the SNAP changes would manifest in Ohio.
“We’re trying to talk to them about the impact it would have on Ohio,” she said. “It really is a serious, permanent, structural change to the program that we believe should be undertaken much more thoughtfully.”
