A House subcommittee convened in Washington on June 25 to scrutinize waste, fraud, and abuse inside the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, with testimony revealing that flawed oversight has left the country’s largest food assistance program losing more than $10 billion a year to improper payments alone.
What the Hearing Covered
The Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency took up SNAP integrity after the Government Accountability Office identified structural weaknesses in how the program is administered — gaps that leave it exposed to fraud, eligibility errors, and payments that should never have been made. Members heard from federal inspectors, researchers, and anti-fraud officials about how those problems have compounded over time.
SNAP now spans more than 250,000 authorized food retail locations where benefits can be exchanged for food. That scale, witnesses said, makes consistent oversight difficult and creates opportunities for bad actors at multiple points in the system.
EBT Skimming, Cash Laundering, and Phantom Addresses
USDA Inspector General John Walk described a growing criminal threat to the benefit delivery system itself. “Criminals use skimming technology to capture information such as the card number and pin code,” Walk testified. “The data captured is then used to clone the victim’s EBT card.”
Beyond high-tech theft, some authorized retailers have been found to trade SNAP benefits directly for cash — a form of benefits laundering that strips food assistance of its core purpose and diverts public dollars into untraceable cash flows.
Eligibility enforcement drew attention as well. One example cited in testimony described a single one-bedroom efficiency apartment registered as the address of 27 SNAP beneficiaries and 12 Medicaid recipients — a figure that raised immediate questions about how thoroughly states are verifying where applicants actually live.
Cross-State Delivery Loophole Still Open
A pandemic-era rule that allows SNAP benefits to be used for deliveries across state lines has never been formally rescinded. Under current policy, an EBT card issued in Nebraska can be used to order items for delivery or pickup in Kentucky. Critics at the hearing argued that the loophole makes it harder to track whether benefits are reaching intended recipients — or whether the cross-state flow is being exploited.
Enrollment Up, Poverty Down — and Improper Payments Soaring
Rachel Greszler, a policy researcher who testified at the hearing, highlighted what she described as a striking disconnect: since 2008, the national poverty rate has fallen while SNAP enrollment has climbed more than 50 percent. The program has grown substantially even as the population it was designed to serve — people in poverty — has, by official measures, shrunk.
The financial cost of that mismatch is substantial. The national improper payment rate reached 10.9 percent last year, translating to $10.2 billion in payments that were either wrong in amount or went to ineligible recipients. Witnesses noted that figure likely understates the full problem: much outright fraud — such as card cloning and benefit laundering — occurs after benefits are delivered and is never captured in official improper-payment tallies.
State-level performance varied widely. South Dakota reported an improper payment rate of just 3 percent, while Alaska’s rate reached 25 percent. Despite that eight-fold gap, the federal government reimburses states at the same rate regardless of how well or poorly they manage payments — removing a key financial incentive for states to tighten controls.
Dawn Royal, director of the United Council on Welfare Fraud, offered a pointed summary of how the program arrived at this point. “Unfortunately, too many of the safeguards of our nation’s SNAP program have been weakened, delayed or inconsistently implemented,” Royal said.
What Comes Next
The House Oversight Committee is expected to examine SNAP reform proposals in the coming weeks, with program integrity provisions among the issues under active review. The hearing follows a USDA announcement earlier this year that nearly 700,000 SNAP recipients had been flagged through cross-state data sharing — a sign that the current administration is pressing states to identify duplicate or fraudulent enrollment.
For Idaho families who depend on SNAP and for Idaho taxpayers who help fund it, the outcome of those reform efforts could affect both benefit security and how strictly the state administers eligibility. The hearing also fits into a broader MAHA-aligned push to redirect federal food spending toward legitimate need — a conversation that intersects with ongoing debates over what foods should qualify for federal nutrition programs and what standards retailers must meet to participate.