Welfare

States Will Soon Face Huge Penalties for Their Food Stamp Mistakes

More than $1 of every $10 in SNAP benefits went to people who didn't qualify in 2025.

Eric Boehm | 7.10.2026 12:20 PM

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(Illustration: Midjourney)

More than one out of every $10 in federal food stamp payments was made in error last year—and states with high fraud rates will soon be paying a hefty price.

The latest figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) show that payments made through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps, were rife with waste once again in 2025. Though the figures vary widely from state to state, the USDA calculates that 10.62 percent of all food stamp payments were made in error—a slight decrease from the 10.93 percent error rate recorded in 2024.

Overpayments are about seven times as common as underpayments, according to the USDA data.

"The report confirms what has long been true: SNAP is structurally prone to waste, fraud, and abuse, and the states running it have too little financial incentive to fix it," write Romina Boccia and Tyler Turmin, a pair of budget policy experts at the Cato Institute.

Indeed, the fundamental flaw in the food stamp program has long been its dual nature. The federal government provides all of the funding, but state governments get to administer the benefits. That's likely part of the reason why food stamp enrollment, spending, and error rates have........

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