A program-integrity crisis became a checkout-line morality play, with poor people cast as the suspects and government agencies treated like innocent bystanders

As someone who receives SNAP, I have spent months watching politicians perform outrage over soda, candy, cake, sports drinks, chewing gum, and whatever else they decide poor people have not earned the right to enjoy. The script is always the same. A lawmaker points at a shopping cart, invents a reckless recipient in their head, and presents grocery policing as fiscal responsibility.

Then the federal government released the number that should have stopped that performance cold: $10.1 billion in improper SNAP payments during fiscal year 2025. That figure represented 10.62 percent of the benefits reviewed under the national payment-accuracy system, well above the 6 percent congressional threshold. The government was busy inspecting candy bars at the register as the administrative machinery behind SNAP was producing incorrect payments equal to roughly one dollar out of every ten.  

That is the story. It is not a story about a mother buying a birthday cake, a disabled man buying a bottle of soda, or a tired worker grabbing a sports drink. It is a story about state agencies, federal supervision, outdated systems, inconsistent case processing, unstable staffing, confusing rules, weak follow-through, and a political culture that finds it easier to shame poor people than admit government administration is failing at scale.

One factual correction is needed before we light the match. The federal government did not hand state treasuries a single $10.1 billion overpayment. The figure is an estimate of incorrect household benefit amounts produced through state-administered eligibility and allotment decisions, and it includes both overpayments and underpayments. That distinction does not excuse the failure. It tells us where to aim the criticism so officials cannot escape by pointing to an imprecise claim.

The national overpayment rate for fiscal year 2025 was 9.28 percent, and the underpayment rate was 1.33 percent. Applied to the reported total, the figures equal roughly $8.8 billion paid above the correct amount and about $1.3 billion denied to households that should have received more. An improper-payment rate is not a fraud rate, and anyone calling all $10.1 billion “fraud” is either uninformed or selling a political story.  

The honest description is still damning. Government agencies miscalculated billions in food assistance, then political leaders directed public fury at what recipients placed on a grocery belt. That is not program integrity. It is class surveillance dressed in fiscal language.

Fix the Claim, Then Follow the Money

SNAP is federally funded and administered through state agencies. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service sets federal rules, oversees state performance, offers guidance, reviews samples, and can require corrective action. State agencies process applications, verify income, calculate deductions, determine eligibility, issue benefits, and respond to reported changes.  

This split structure creates a very convenient blame machine. Federal officials can say states made the errors. State officials can say federal rules are dense, federal data arrive late, and federal funding is insufficient. Governors can blame recipients. Legislators can hold hearings about fraud. The household at the center gets a notice, an interrupted benefit, an overpayment claim, or a debt it never intended to create.

The $10.1 billion figure comes from SNAP’s Quality Control system, which reviews a sample rather than auditing every household case. State agencies examine about 50,000 cases across the country each year, and federal regional offices re-review roughly half of them. USDA then uses the validated state rates, weighted by each state’s share of benefit issuance, to estimate the national payment error rate.  

That method is legitimate statistical oversight, yet it has limits. The number is an estimate, not a stack of 10.1 billion dollar bills found missing in a warehouse. It combines many kinds of error: wrong income figures, missed deductions, late action on reported changes, outdated wage data, policy mistakes, clerical failures, incomplete paperwork, household confusion, and benefits issued to ineligible households. The rate can rise when agencies overpay, when agencies underpay, or when both happen at once.  

A 10.62 percent error rate still means the system failed to produce the correct benefit amount with unacceptable frequency. It should trigger hard questions about administration, contractor performance, technology, staffing, training, federal supervision, and the design of the rules themselves. It should not be flattened into a cheap claim that one in ten SNAP dollars was stolen by recipients.

The distinction between error and fraud is more than a semantic favor to poor people. It is basic accounting. An agency worker can misapply a shelter deduction. A state computer system can fail to process a wage update. A household can misread a reporting rule. A recipient can intentionally conceal income. A retailer can traffic benefits for cash. Those events are not morally or legally identical, and a serious government should not pretend they are.

Federal regulations recognize separate categories for intentional program violations, inadvertent household errors, and agency errors. An agency-error claim exists when an overpayment was caused by a state agency’s action or failure to act. The legal framework itself admits what the political rhetoric often hides: government can create the debt and still pursue the household for repayment.  

Read that again in plain English. The agency can calculate the benefit incorrectly, issue too much, discover its own mistake later, and classify the overpayment as a claim against the household. Yet politicians want the public staring at the recipient’s candy bar rather than the agency’s calculation sheet. The person with the least money becomes the face of waste, and the institution that created the error remains an abstraction.  

Ten Billion Dollars Does Not Happen by Accident Once

A single year at 10.62 percent would be alarming. The recent pattern is worse. SNAP’s national payment error rate was 11.54 percent in fiscal year 2022, 11.68 percent in 2023, 10.93 percent in 2024, and 10.62 percent in 2025. The rate has improved modestly from its recent peak, yet it has remained above 10 percent for four measured years in a row.  

The historical comparison strips away every excuse that this is simply the unavoidable cost of running a large program. SNAP posted a combined error rate near 3.2 percent in fiscal year 2013, then the lowest recorded level under the modern measurement system. A program that once operated near three percent can operate far below ten percent.  

The pandemic disrupted state agencies, changed benefit rules, increased caseload pressure, and led Congress and USDA to grant temporary flexibilities. Fiscal year 2022 was the first year after 2019 in which USDA could establish national and state payment error rates, and the jump from 7.36 percent in 2019 to 11.54 percent in 2022 reflected a system emerging from extraordinary conditions. That context explains part of the increase. It does not provide a permanent waiver from competence.  

By fiscal year 2025, agencies had years to absorb the lessons. Federal officials had years to identify recurring causes. States had years to repair systems, train staff, adjust workflows, and test whether corrective plans worked. A four-year run above ten percent points to structural failure, not a temporary stumble.

USDA and the states already possess a formal correction system. States with high rates can be required to submit corrective action plans, identify root causes, report progress, and face fiscal liability. GAO reported in 2024 that Food and Nutrition Service regional offices monitor state plans and validate whether corrective steps have been carried out. GAO still found that USDA’s inspector general had deemed the department noncompliant with parts of the federal payment-integrity law for fiscal year 2023.  

That is the part officials prefer to bury under slogans about “waste, fraud, and abuse.” The oversight structure existed. The reports existed. The regional offices existed. The corrective plans existed. The warning signs existed. The error rate stayed in double digits.

At some point, another plan is not accountability. Another memo is not accountability. Another training webinar is not accountability. Accountability means knowing which error types account for the largest dollar losses, which offices produce repeat failures, which contractors built defective systems, which managers missed their targets, which states failed to carry out approved corrections, and what changed after the failure was identified.

The public should receive that information in a form ordinary taxpayers can read. State-by-state rates are useful, yet a single percentage cannot explain whether a state’s problems come from earned-income calculations, shelter deductions, delayed reporting, improper denials, staff vacancies, software defects, or flawed data matches. A government serious about accuracy would publish root-cause data with the same energy it uses to publish photographs of soda bottles.

The System Is Built to Produce Error, Then Blame the Applicant

SNAP eligibility is not a simple question of whether a household is poor. Agencies must evaluate household composition, countable income, earned-income deductions, shelter costs, utility allowances, medical deductions for eligible members, child support, student rules, immigration status, work requirements, certification periods, reporting duties, and changes that occur after approval. Each rule creates another place where stale data, delayed paperwork, staff judgment, or software logic can produce a wrong result.  

Income volatility adds another layer. Many low-wage workers do not receive the same paycheck every week. Hours shift, tips change, seasonal work ends, gig income varies, and employers report data on different schedules. A household can report accurate information that no longer matches a database by the time a caseworker reviews it, or a database can appear authoritative when it is weeks behind reality.

GAO reported that, according to USDA’s 2019 financial report, 60 percent of SNAP payment errors were caused by state agencies rather than beneficiaries. That figure is historical and should not be presented as the fiscal year 2025 breakdown, which USDA has not published in the same form. It still destroys the lazy assumption that payment error is mainly a recipient problem.  

State agencies face real operating pressures. Staff shortages, high turnover, heavy caseloads, outdated eligibility systems, fragmented data, rushed interviews, and uneven training can turn a lawful application into a bureaucratic guessing exercise. Those pressures deserve serious funding and management, not sympathy without standards.  

The new federal funding structure may make that problem harsher. Beginning in federal fiscal year 2027, states are expected to cover 75 percent of SNAP administrative costs instead of the prior 50 percent share. Beginning in fiscal year 2028, states with payment error rates at or above 6 percent can be required to pay 5, 10, or 15 percent of benefit costs, depending on the rate.  

There is a defensible idea inside that policy: states should bear consequences when poor administration wastes federal money. The danger lies in how states respond. A state can lower errors through better staffing, better systems, stronger supervision, and more accurate verification. It can seek the same result by making enrollment harder, demanding more paperwork, closing cases faster, discouraging applicants, or pushing eligible households out before an error can be measured.

A lower payment error rate is not automatically proof of a fairer program. An agency can reduce overpayments and still increase wrongful denials. It can become more accurate for households that remain enrolled after making access so punishing that many eligible people disappear from the caseload. Payment integrity must include correct access, timely decisions, lawful notices, accurate benefits, and meaningful appeal rights.

SNAP’s negative-case system tracks erroneous denials, terminations, and suspensions, yet that side of administration receives far less political attention. South Dakota’s fiscal year 2025 payment error rate was the nation’s lowest at 2.47 percent, and its negative-case procedural error rate was 6.19 percent against a national rate of 38.34 percent. That national procedural figure suggests the government has a second accuracy problem at the door, where people are denied or removed, not merely at the payment stage.  

The public argument rarely reaches that point. “Fraud” is easier to sell than administrative failure. “Candy” is easier to photograph than a defective eligibility notice. A poor person with a cart is easier to shame than a state agency with a 14 percent error rate.

Iowa’s Candy Crusade Was a Distraction From Real Administration

Iowa provides the sharpest illustration of the political mismatch, though the state’s current payment accuracy deserves a fair reading. Iowa’s fiscal year 2025 overpayment rate was 4.63 percent, its underpayment rate was 0.71 percent, and its combined rate was 5.34 percent. That placed Iowa below the 6 percent threshold and far below the national rate.  

Iowa should receive credit for lowering its rate from 6.14 percent in fiscal year 2024. The state appears to have avoided the new benefit cost share for the first applicable year, and Iowa HHS had identified staff training, internal case reviews, policy updates, and business-process changes as part of its accuracy work. A serious critique does not erase progress merely to preserve a political line.  

Yet the state’s grocery restriction campaign remains indefensible as a statement of priorities. Iowa sought and received federal permission to prohibit SNAP purchases of taxable food items, with exceptions for food-producing plants and seeds. In practice, the policy reached beyond a neat “soda and candy” slogan and pulled retailers and recipients into Iowa’s sales-tax classifications.  

The rule created a moral hierarchy at the checkout line through tax-code definitions. Some products that looked nutritionally similar were treated differently. Certain drinks, candy-coated items, gum, vitamins, prepared foods, and other taxable products could be rejected, leaving recipients and cashiers to sort out a policy that state officials had marketed as common sense.  

A federal judge struck down the legal basis for the restrictions in June 2026. Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that USDA could not use waiver authority to contradict Congress’s definition of food, which permits SNAP purchases of food for home consumption with listed exceptions such as alcohol, tobacco, and hot prepared foods. Her ruling did not declare soda healthy. It declared that executive agencies cannot rewrite federal law merely by calling the rewrite a pilot program.  

That point should have ended the public-relations spin. Iowa was not slapped down for encouraging healthy eating. It was slapped down for using an unlawful route to redefine what federal food assistance could buy. The state built a complicated checkout restriction, forced stores to alter systems, placed recipients under new scrutiny, and then watched the legal foundation collapse.

Governor Kim Reynolds and federal officials framed the dispute as a defense of health and taxpayer money. Yet Iowa’s own payment-accuracy work shows what real program integrity looks like: train staff, review cases, improve procedures, track errors, and correct the calculation. The candy rule did none of that.

It did not fix a wrong shelter deduction. It did not update a wage database. It did not prevent a caseworker from missing a reported change. It did not repair an eligibility system. It did not reduce an agency-caused debt. It simply changed which products a poor person could place beside the bread and milk.

That is the political appeal. Grocery restrictions create a visible target. Administrative reform takes years, costs money, requires competent managers, and produces no viral photograph. Politicians prefer the soda bottle since the soda bottle cannot testify at an oversight hearing.

The Federal Government Has Been Supervising This Failure

State agencies deserve direct scrutiny, but USDA cannot pose as a shocked auditor arriving after the money vanished. The federal government sets the rules, oversees state operations through regional offices, validates samples, reviews corrective plans, reports the rates, and maintains the regulatory framework for sanctions and claims. It has had repeated notice that the national rate was far above historic levels.  

GAO’s 2024 review described a two-tier quality-control process and a regional oversight system that monitors corrective action plans. The same report recorded that several GAO recommendations tied to SNAP trafficking estimates and penalties remained open. It noted USDA inspector general concerns about compliance with the Payment Integrity Information Act.  

Federal supervision cannot be reduced to issuing a press release after the rate is calculated. USDA should know which states repeatedly miss deadlines, which root causes recur, which correction plans fail, and which technical-assistance efforts show measurable results. When the national rate remains above ten percent for four measured years, the overseer is part of the failure.

The new federal posture contains its own contradiction. USDA has pushed food restrictions in numerous states under a health campaign, devoting legal, administrative, and public-relations energy to product bans. At the same time, the agency announced a $10.1 billion payment-accuracy problem and blamed state accountability.  

Both issues can exist at once, but they are not equal in fiscal scale. One concerns whether a recipient buys a soda with a limited monthly benefit. The other concerns billions in incorrect benefit calculations across a national program. One is a symbolic fight over personal behavior. The other is a management failure measured in ten digits.

The symbol won the headlines. It gave politicians a villain who could be pictured, judged, and disciplined. A state eligibility system cannot be sneered at from a podium with the same emotional payoff, so the public was invited to police grocery carts instead.

USDA’s language makes the strategy plain. The agency called the 2025 rate proof that state accountability was severely lacking and promoted new financial consequences. That description is fair. The missing sentence is the federal admission: “We supervised this system as the rate stayed above ten percent year after year.”

Leadership means accepting responsibility for what an agency knew, what it ordered, what it funded, what it failed to fix, and what it chose to prioritize. A federal department cannot celebrate itself as the guardian of taxpayers when its loudest public campaign examines candy wrappers more closely than correction plans.

Underpayments Are Government Taking Food From Eligible People

The phrase “improper payments” sounds like money flowing in one direction, out of the Treasury and into undeserving hands. Fiscal year 2025 included an underpayment rate of 1.33 percent, representing roughly $1.3 billion that eligible households should have received but did not.  

An underpayment is not a harmless bookkeeping offset. It is fewer groceries in a household already judged poor enough to qualify. It can mean less meat, fewer fresh items, skipped meals near the end of the month, or another trip to a food pantry whose shelves are already strained.

The national formula adds overpayments and underpayments together when it calculates the combined error rate. That makes sense as a measure of administrative accuracy. It can distort the public debate when officials use the total as shorthand for taxpayer loss, since an underpayment is money government wrongly withheld from an eligible household.  

The moral asymmetry is striking. When a recipient receives too much, the system can establish a claim and seek repayment, including claims rooted in agency error. When the recipient receives too little, the harm is treated as a statistic to be corrected later.  

A household cannot retroactively feed a child with benefits that arrived months late. A person managing diabetes cannot purchase last month’s groceries after a successful appeal. An older adult cannot undo the physical effect of eating less during a period of wrongful underpayment.

Program integrity must protect recipients from government error in both directions. A system obsessed with overpayments and casual about underpayments is not accurate. It is fiscally selective.

Any serious reform should publish overpayment and underpayment rates separately in every public statement. Officials should identify the dollar value of each, the leading causes of each, the average time to correct each, and the share attributed to agency action, household error, and intentional misconduct. That would force the public debate to confront the full record rather than treating every mistaken dollar as stolen money.

What Real Accountability Would Look Like

The first reform is radical only by government standards: tell the public what caused the errors. USDA should publish state-level root-cause tables showing the dollar share tied to earned income, unearned income, shelter deductions, household composition, delayed action, verification gaps, software faults, policy mistakes, and household reporting. Rates without causes are scoreboards without game film.

The second reform is to audit the systems and contractors behind eligibility decisions. States spend large sums on software, call centers, document processing, data matching, and case-management platforms. When a system produces repeat errors, taxpayers deserve the contractor name, contract value, performance measures, missed benchmarks, penalties assessed, and correction schedule.

The third reform is to protect households from debts created solely by agency action. Federal rules recognize agency-error claims, and states can pursue households after the agency issued the wrong amount. Congress should sharply limit recovery in cases where the household reported information accurately and the agency failed to act, miscalculated the case, or relied on defective data.  

The fourth reform is to fund accurate administration rather than demand accuracy after cutting administrative support. Shifting the state administrative share from 50 percent to 75 percent may force states to invest their own money, yet it may prompt staffing cuts or access barriers in states already under fiscal strain. Any cost shift should include minimum service standards, staffing transparency, timeliness rules, error-correction deadlines, and protections against wrongful case closures.  

The fifth reform is to stop using payment-error targets as an excuse to suppress enrollment. States should be judged on correct approvals, correct denials, timely processing, lawful notices, call-center access, appeal outcomes, and benefit accuracy. A state that cuts eligible people off to reduce its denominator has not improved integrity; it has hidden failure behind caseload decline.

The sixth reform is to separate intentional fraud reporting from payment-accuracy reporting. Fraud investigations, retailer trafficking, benefit theft, identity misuse, inadvertent household mistakes, and agency errors should never be blended into a single rhetorical bucket. Each problem needs its own measure, remedy, enforcement process, and public report.

The seventh reform is to use nutrition policy that supports people instead of humiliating them. Fruit and vegetable incentives, higher benefit adequacy, grocery access in food deserts, transportation support, nutrition education, medically appropriate food programs, and clear labeling can improve dietary choices without turning cashiers into food police. A state interested in health can build options rather than manufacture shame.

The eighth reform is congressional honesty. Congress wrote the statutory definition of food. If lawmakers want national product restrictions, they should debate them in public, vote on them, define the terms, fund the retailer changes, study the health evidence, and accept responsibility for the result. Executive waivers should not become a back door for rewriting a federal program.

The ninth reform is public consequence for repeat administrative failure. State agency directors, federal regional leaders, and contractors should appear at open hearings when rates remain above target. Their testimony should address causes, missed corrections, money recovered, money restored to underpaid households, and the measurable result of each action plan.

The tenth reform is a plain-language annual statement sent to every SNAP household. It should explain the state’s error rate, the household’s rights, how agency-error claims work, how underpayments are corrected, where to appeal, and how to report a suspected calculation problem. Recipients should not need a lawyer to learn whether government made the mistake.

Stop Auditing the Poor More Aggressively Than the Program

The public has been trained to picture SNAP misuse as a person standing in front of a cashier with something sweet in the cart. That image is politically useful and statistically dishonest. The fiscal year 2025 data point to a national administrative failure involving state decisions, federal supervision, household reporting rules, software, staffing, and program design.

The $10.1 billion figure is not proof that SNAP recipients stole $10.1 billion. It is proof that the government failed to issue the correct amount at a rate no competent administrator should accept. Roughly $8.8 billion reflected overpayments, about $1.3 billion reflected underpayments, and the total came from a quality-control estimate spanning state-run systems under federal oversight.  

Iowa’s own record adds a bitter twist. The state reduced its payment error rate to 5.34 percent, a genuine administrative gain, yet it spent political capital building a grocery restriction around tax classifications that a federal judge found unlawful. Iowa proved it could work on the actual machinery of accuracy, then chose to stage a morality play at the checkout line anyway.  

There is nothing fiscally serious about shaming a person over a two-dollar candy bar when agencies are miscalculating benefits by the billions. There is nothing health-centered about creating confusing product bans without fixing access to affordable nutritious food. There is nothing accountable about blaming “fraud” when government data combine agency mistakes, household mistakes, overpayments, and underpayments.

As a SNAP recipient, I am tired of watching my grocery cart treated as public evidence. I am tired of politicians acting as though poverty cancels adulthood, taste, celebration, convenience, disability, fatigue, and dignity. I am especially tired of government demanding perfection from people living on the narrowest margins yet accepting double-digit error rates from the institutions paid to administer the program.

The next time a politician holds up a soda and asks whether taxpayers should pay for it, hold up the USDA report. Ask who approved the wrong benefit. Ask which system failed. Ask which correction plan did not work. Ask why the federal overseer watched the national rate remain above ten percent for four measured years.

Then ask the question officials have worked so hard to avoid: Why is the poor person always placed on trial, yet the agency that got the math wrong gets another committee, another plan, another contract, and another year?

That is the real SNAP scandal. The government can miscalculate $10.1 billion, send bills to households for some agency-created errors, underpay eligible families, and still persuade the public that the urgent threat is a candy bar.

References

Associated Press. (2026, June 22). Federal court ruling on SNAP purchases of candy and sugary drinks.  

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (2014, July 2). SNAP error rates at historic lows.  

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (2024, June 21). SNAP payment-accuracy safeguards and pandemic-era context.  

Government Accountability Office. (2021, February 25). State use of data to verify eligibility in selected federal programs.  

Government Accountability Office. (2024, September 26). USDA oversight of SNAP improper payments.  

Iowa Legislative Services Agency. (2026, January 7). Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program fiscal note.  

U.S. Department of Agriculture. (2026, June 24). Fiscal year 2025 state payment error rates in SNAP.  

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service. (2026). Fiscal year 2025 SNAP quality-control payment error rates.  

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service. (2026). Iowa SNAP food-restriction waiver materials.  

U.S. Code of Federal Regulations. (2026). Claims against households under 7 C.F.R. § 273.18.