After the shutdown, SNAP will still be in trouble

Summary

Planet Money (NPR)

Episode: After the shutdown, SNAP will still be in trouble

Date: November 1, 2025

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Overview

This episode examines the cascading problems facing the SNAP (food stamp) program after a recent government shutdown, focusing especially on a new law (the "one big beautiful bill act") that fundamentally changes who pays for SNAP, introduces stricter financial penalties for states with higher error rates in SNAP benefit calculations, and slashes federal administrative funding for the program. Through Oregon’s struggle to meet new federal standards, the episode provides a human and bureaucratic look at the interplay between policy, administration, and the daily realities of those living with food insecurity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personalizing Policy: Nate Singer’s Challenge

• [00:24–04:18]
  • Nate Singer, head of Oregon’s food stamp administration, learns of sweeping changes to SNAP over an Independence Day barbecue, reading and highlighting the new bill as he flips burgers.
  • The new law shifts some SNAP costs from the federal government to the states—the more eligibility errors a state makes, the more financial responsibility it must assume.
  • Oregon’s error rate is stubbornly high (14%) and must fall below 6% or the state will owe $250 million/year.
  • Quote:

    “If he couldn’t [reduce errors], the state of Oregon was going to be on the hook for $250 million a year, which basically means the fate of Oregon’s food stamp program now largely depends on Nate.” (Nick Fountain, 04:11)

2. How SNAP Eligibility—and Errors—Work

• [06:31–08:05]
  • Oregon had a 23% error rate (third worst), now reduced to 14%—but still nowhere near the needed 6%.
  • Determining SNAP eligibility is complex, based on income, assets, expenses, and family size; errors often occur in gathering or processing this information.
  • Error is defined when wrong benefits are issued by more than $57 in a month.
• [10:53–14:25]
  • Errors come from:
    1. Interviewers failing to ask all necessary questions.
    2. Applicants being mistaken or not forthcoming.
    3. Typos or data entry mistakes.

3. On the Ground: The Applicant’s Perspective

• [08:31–10:53]
  • Vicki Aguilar, a single 59-year-old working part-time at Safeway, applied for SNAP after losing her caregiving job.
  • She navigates an interview and paperwork, with minor confusion (e.g., gross vs. net pay), highlighting how innocent mistakes (not fraud) often cause errors.
  • Quote:

    “I said it wrong to her, and she goes, ‘Are you sure that’s right?’ I was like, ‘Oh, wait a minute. No, no, no, it’s not. This is what it is. Void what I said, this is what it is.’” (Vicki Aguilar, 12:23)

4. The Bureaucracy Responds: Eligibility Interviews and New Tools

• [14:25–16:44]
  • Eligibility workers, like Bridget Foust, are retrained to be more thorough and less robotic—using checklists, prompts, and an AI "Eligibility Bot" (‘Ellie’) to reduce errors.
  • Constant changes and updates (from new legislation) increase confusion and error rates.
  • Quote:

    "Her bosses have dragged her into training after training, trying to make her less of a data entry person and more of a—not a detective, but someone who thinks about what the person applying is saying." (Nick Fountain, 15:13)

5. The Audit: How Error Rates Are Measured

• [17:58–22:35]
  • Shelley Wickersham and an 11-person audit team randomly sample and review 100 cases monthly, redoing initial interviews exhaustively to find mistakes.
  • Auditing demands detailed documentation from recipients—a burden at odds with user-friendly service.
  • More documentation lowers error rates but decreases participation (by making it harder to apply).
  • Quotes:

    “If eligibility workers did it at the very first interview, the error rate would drop, like, a ton. But… those states have lower participation rates, fewer people on food stamps.” (Nick Fountain & Jeff Guo, 21:34)

6. Administrative Tightrope: Preventing Exclusion or Cutting Benefits

• [24:36–25:52]
  • Nate Singer is making technical upgrades (like linking payroll verification in real-time) to chip away at the error rate, but reaching below 10% seems daunting without burdening applicants.
  • Quote:

    “The other 4% is a mixture of hope and a prayer.” (Nate Singer, 25:34)

  • Increasing documentation may reduce errors, but will likely discourage eligible people from applying.

7. Governor's Dilemma: No Win Solutions

• [26:01–29:29]
  • Governor Tina Kotek is aware of the stakes: there is no $250 million to spare, and the newly imposed administrative burden coincides with a cut in federal support for running SNAP.
  • She rejects tying state funding directly to error rates, arguing that complexity—not fraud—drives most errors, and calls for federal simplification.
  • Quotes:

    “There is not $250 million just sitting on a shelf somewhere… As a result, people will not be able to go to the grocery store and buy their own food.” (Governor Kotek, 27:04) “The idea that the error rate is such a good signifier [of waste and fraud] is faulty... the federal government could make the program simpler.” (Governor Kotek, 27:35)

8. Human Cost: Recipients Face Uncertainty

• [29:30–31:16]
  • With SNAP funds halted due to the shutdown, Vicki is worried—mainly for others, but also for herself. She’s job hunting, and managing with what food she has, but not everyone is as resourceful.
  • Quote:

    “I feel sorry for them. I really do.” (Vicki Aguilar, 30:21)
    “Even if I just eat a bowl of cereal, I’m good...” (Vicki Aguilar, 30:31)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The fate of Oregon’s food stamp program now largely depends on Nate.” — Nick Fountain ([04:11])
• “Did we process it right, and did you get the right benefit amount?” — Nate Singer ([03:11])
• “If he couldn’t [reduce the error rate], the state of Oregon was going to be on the hook for $250 million a year.” — Nick Fountain ([04:00])
• “Are you up for this challenge?”
  • "I would say yes. Yes. Yes. … Better with more confidence for you. Yes.” — Nate Singer ([04:29])
• “Her job was to make food stamps more accessible.” — Jeff Guo, on Governor Kotek ([26:52])
• “There is not $250 million just sitting on a shelf somewhere.” — Governor Kotek ([27:04])
• “The idea that the error rate is such a good signifier of [waste, fraud, and abuse] is faulty...” — Governor Kotek ([27:35])
• “Even if I just eat a bowl of cereal, I’m good.” — Vicki Aguilar ([30:31])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:24] - Nate Singer reads the new law at a barbecue
• [03:11] - Error rate explained and what’s at stake for Oregon
• [06:31] - History of Oregon’s error rates
• [08:31] - SNAP application process from Vicki’s perspective
• [12:23] - Mistake over pay stub (net vs. gross)
• [15:02] - Bridget Foust, eligibility worker, describes new procedures and tools
• [17:58] - Audit process, error measurement, balancing documentation with accessibility
• [24:36] - Technical fixes to reduce error rate
• [26:12] - Governor Kotek on the dilemma, system design flaws
• [29:30] - Options for Oregon: shrink program or exclusion
• [30:21] - Recipient’s fears about SNAP shutdown impact

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Tone & Language

The episode maintains Planet Money’s signature blend of accessible economic analysis, lighthearted banter, and human-centered storytelling. It balances the technical with the personal, layering bureaucratic insights with touching vignettes from real people whose lives are shaped by the system. Speakers joke, empathize, and express frustration, all while communicating the seriousness of the looming policy crisis.

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Conclusion

This episode lays out the wrenching choices—both technical and moral—confronting states like Oregon as new federal policies ratchet up scrutiny and transfer more responsibility for SNAP administration. Nate Singer symbolizes the bureaucratic hero (or scapegoat), while officials like Governor Kotek must contemplate cuts or exclusion. Recipients like Vicki personalize the stakes, showing how policy translates into everyday uncertainty—and sometimes empty bowls.

Transcript

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[Narrator/Host]

This is Planet Money from NPR.

[Nick Fountain]

Like many of us, Nate Singer spent the Fourth of July at a barbecue in jeans and a T shirt.

[Nate Singer]

It was a decent day. It wasn't too hot. Red, white and blue tablecloths.

[Jeff Guo]

Nate is a father of four, and he's one of those dads who likes to hang out, literally, at the barbecue.

[Nate Singer]

Flipping burgers for people.

[Nick Fountain]

Is that normally your job as the burger flipper?

[Nate Singer]

It's a good thing to do. You just hang around the grill. Not so social. It's strange that I work in human services.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, Nate is a big muckety muck at the Oregon Department of Human Services. He runs the division that signs people up for programs like food stamps. And Nate, he's like a bureaucrat's bureaucrat, the type of person who carries around a pen and a highlighter in case he needs to mark up a document.

[Nate Singer]

My kids think that I have my own coloring books that are just really boring coloring books.

[Jeff Guo]

This July 4th barbecue was no exception. Whenever Nate got a break from grilling, he'd pull out some folded up paper from his back pocket and he would read the text of President Donald Trump's signature bill, the one big beautiful bill act.

[Nick Fountain]

You know, this bill, President Trump signed it on July 4th. And the reason Nate was reading it and highlighting it was that this bill made big cuts, including to food stamps, which is a program he oversees.

[Jeff Guo]

This bill had been changing as it went between the House and the Senate. It got amended hundreds of times, but now it was final. And Nate, highlighter in one hand, you know, greasy spatula in the other, was surveying the damage.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, like, how bad is this for food stamps? And the one out of every six Oregonians, 750,000 of them on the program. And what he sees is that the bill cuts who qualifies for food stamps, how much they'll get. And maybe most importantly for him, it changes who pays for the food stamp program.

[Jeff Guo]

And that part, that is a big deal. The federal government has always paid for all of the food stamps that go out. But this law, for the first time, shifts some of that cost to states. And the rationale here is that states themselves, they're the ones in charge of giving food stamps out. They're the ones with teams of bureaucrats reviewing applications, figuring out how much each applicant gets. So the White House and congressional Republicans, they want states to be more accountable and to cut back on what they're calling waste, fraud, and abuse.

[Nick Fountain]

How much are states going to have to pay? Well, Nate gets to the section about this, and he reads that lawmakers have tied the amount that states are going to have to pay to an obscure statistic called the payment error rate. Basically, whether Nate's team is accurately determining how much people should be getting in food stamps is, and if not, how far off they are.

[Nate Singer]

Did we process it right and did you get the right benefit amount?

[Nick Fountain]

The higher that error rate, the less the federal government will pay for Oregon's food stamps in the future. Which was a problem for Nate in particular because he's been working on getting Oregon's stubbornly high error rate down for years now with serious progress, but not nearly enough to meet this new goal. When you read that line, When I.

[Nate Singer]

Read that line, I flipped burgers for the next half hour at the barbecue and just thought in my own head, how much would this be because of.

[Jeff Guo]

Where we are right then and there? Nate did the math. If he could get the error rate down to this goal that the law set for him to under 6%, the feds would continue to pick up the entire tab for food stamps. But if he couldn't, the state of Oregon was going to be on the hook for $250 million a year, which basically means the fate of Oregon's food stamp program now largely depends on Nate.

[Nick Fountain]

So they've set up a challenge for you.

[Nate Singer]

It is a challenge. Yes.

[Nick Fountain]

Are you up for this challenge?

[Nate Singer]

I would say yes. Yes. Yes. Let me try that. Better with more confidence for you. Yes.

[Nick Fountain]

No offense to Nate, but that is not the sound of confidence. Hello and welcome to Blade of Money. I'm Nick Fountain.

[Jeff Guo]

And I'm Jeff Kuo. There is obviously a lot happening in food stamps this week. Thanks to the government shutdown, people may not be getting their food stamps at all. That is a huge deal. But this change that we're talking about, shifting who pays for food stamps, it is arguably a much bigger deal.

[Nick Fountain]

Today on the show, the looming crisis in food stamps, we go to Oregon to find out how Nate is going to try to cut Oregon's error rate by more than half without inadvertently knocking people off food stamps, without making people go hungry.

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[Nick Fountain]

More at applecard.com Nate Singer, lover of highlighters and director of the Oregon Eligibility Partnership, has been in charge of getting Oregon's error rate down for a couple of years now.

[Nate Singer]

So our error rate was 23% then. That was not ideal.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, they were third worst in the nation. But in the years since, he has pushed that error rate down to 14%. Ninth place improvement, but nowhere near the 6% they need that error rate to be. That's where they need to get under if they want the federal government to keep paying for all their food stamps.

[Jeff Guo]

Now, the way that food stamps work is that every state determines who qualifies for them and how much they get. And it's based on a bunch of rules that Congress made. Those rules. They're pretty complex, but basically states ask a bunch of questions like how much do people make, how much they have in the bank, how many people in their family they're feeding, what are their expenses? And they plug all the answers they get into a formula and voila, that is how much that person is going to get in food stamp money.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, simple stuff. In Oregon, if you're single, you have to earn less than about $31,000 a year to even qualify, $64,000 for a family of four. The average amount people get is about $5.75 per day.

[Jeff Guo]

Now, states try to follow Congress's rules on how much federal taxpayer money they're giving out, but. But sometimes they are a little off. Sometimes they give out too much, sometimes too little, though that's less common. And if they are off by more than $57 in a given month, the federal government counts that as an error. And the error rate, that is the percentage that they are off overall across the whole state over the year.

[Nick Fountain]

And a big part of getting that error rate down is asking the right questions. That's what most of the people who work in Nate's division are focused on. And we're going to talk with the people who ask those questions. But before we do that, I want you to meet Vicki Aguilar, who walked me through what it's like to answer those questions accurately. Tell me about you, vicki.

[Vicki Aguilar]

I am 59 and single, and I love it.

[Nick Fountain]

We met up with Vicky in front of her mom's house in Salem, Oregon. Should we sit down?

[Jeff Guo]

Mm.

[Nick Fountain]

We sat on a bench next to a wheelchair ramp facing her mom's big flagpole with the American flag flying.

[Vicki Aguilar]

My mom's neighbor's cat, Vicki, told us.

[Jeff Guo]

She actually got her EBT card filled up just the day before. EBT cards are like food stamp debit cards. And when Vicky's card got loaded up, she went to not one, but two grocery stores in search of deals.

[Vicki Aguilar]

I went to Winco, then. Then I went to Safeway.

[Nick Fountain]

Safeway is never cheaper than Winco.

[Vicki Aguilar]

No, but if you get onto the app and download the app.

[Nick Fountain]

Hate the app. I hate how they.

[Vicki Aguilar]

I work there.

[Nick Fountain]

The story of how Vicky ended up getting approved for food stamps starts not long ago, back when she had two jobs. Part time nights at Safeway and also full time as a caregiver for her uncle. She took care of him for 16 years as a home health aide, getting paid 22 bucks an hour.

[Vicki Aguilar]

He had stage two bladder cancer and he was a quadriplegic with a trach. And he was just tired. He was tired. It was just gonna get worse. So he went on to hospice and he passed away August 21st.

[Jeff Guo]

And that was the beginning of a tough time for Vicki. She missed her uncle a lot. And she also no longer had that full time job. She was just down to that part time one.

[Vicki Aguilar]

And my food sort, you know, it was getting short. Yeah, it was getting kind of gone. There was no other income except for Safeway. And they don't really pay that. Great.

[Nick Fountain]

How much?

[Vicki Aguilar]

15, 50. Yeah.

[Nick Fountain]

Vicki says she asked for more hours, but they weren't giving them, so she could barely cover red.

[Jeff Guo]

And that is when Vicki walked into the Oregon Department of Human Services office in her neighborhood. It was pretty busy. The receptionist asked her a few simple questions just to get her into the system, like what's your social? What's your birthday? She gave Vicki an application with some more in depth questions, and right there on the spot. She also gave Vicki an EBT card with the words Oregon Trail and a picture of a covered wagon on it.

[Nick Fountain]

But there wasn't any money on it yet. To get the money for food, the woman told Vicky she'd have to wait For a call from someone who would ask more in depth questions. An eligibility worker.

[Jeff Guo]

And this interview, this is where the errors that Oregon needs to reduce, this is where they start to maybe get introduced. Because the error rate goes up when one of basically three things happens. Either one, the interviewer doesn't ask all the questions that they should, or they don't ask the right questions, or. Or two, the Vickies of the world do not answer those questions accurately or honestly. Or three, someone makes a typo.

[Nick Fountain]

Yes, Vicky did not want to wait for her call, so she called them. A woman picked up and asked her a series of questions like who did she live with? No one.

[Vicki Aguilar]

She asked me how much I paid in rent. What do I pay? As you know, Gas, electric, which I paid the rent, gas, electric, and my cell phone bill.

[Nick Fountain]

You have a lot of bills?

[Vicki Aguilar]

Uh, yeah, just like everybody else does.

[Jeff Guo]

All those bills, they're factored into the way that states, under the rules set by Congress, calculate how much in food stamps Vicki and others are going to get. And each little piece of information that they get from her, that is an opportunity for error.

[Nick Fountain]

For instance, Vicki says the interviewer asked some more questions about income, asked her to pull out a pay stub and tell her what it said next to gross pay. And right here, something really interesting happened.

[Vicki Aguilar]

And so I said it wrong to her, and she goes, are you sure that's right? I was like, oh, wait a minute. No, no, no, it's not. This is what it is. Void. What? I said this is what it is.

[Nick Fountain]

To be clear, Vicki told me she wasn't trying to pull a fast one, she was just confused by the pay stub, who amongst us hasn't been? And she read off the net pay rather than the gross. But the. The state worker on the other end of the line, it turned out she knew the answer to the question because she had access to a database with a bunch of payroll information in it. And she was double checking as much of what Vicki said as she could.

[Jeff Guo]

And Vicki didn't feel offended by the prompt to correct her wrong answer. She thinks it's important.

[Nick Fountain]

Do you think there's a lot of fraud in the system?

[Vicki Aguilar]

Yes, I do. Do you know that just being a cashier. Okay, so I've had customers come through my line using multiple food stamp cards. And, you know, it could be their family members, but, you know, that's not your card. You shouldn't be using it.

[Jeff Guo]

This is a problem. Oregon actually has special cops, a division that looks into fraud. If you get caught, you have to pay back the money.

[Nick Fountain]

Last year, Oregon had 34 cases of confirmed food stamp fraud, total out of 750,000 recipients. But Nate says that the vast majority of errors that stat that the feds care about and that Oregon is going to be punished for those do not come from fraud. They come from inadvertent errors, honest mistakes like the one that Vicky made.

[Vicki Aguilar]

It was like, where is my pay? I could not find it. So, yeah.

[Jeff Guo]

So Vicki's story gave us a good idea of how these errors get introduced. Next, we wanted to understand how Nate and his team of bureaucrats are trying to eliminate these errors. So we went to the office where Vicki first applied for food stamps to talk to the people asking questions on the other end of the call, the eligibility workers.

[Nick Fountain]

When I walked into the office, nobody was waiting to get interviewed in person. So I asked if I could watch as someone did one on the phone. Can I sit next to you while you do your job?

[Narrator/Host]

Of course you can.

[Nick Fountain]

Amazing. Bridget Foust, eligibility worker, former food stamp recipient herself, and judging by the framed photo in her cubicle, big Nick Cage fan. That's amazing.

[Vicki Aguilar]

There's a whole story there, but no time for that.

[Nick Fountain]

Bridget has an interview to do. She dials the client.

[Narrator/Host]

Hi, this message is.

[Nick Fountain]

And voicemail.

[Narrator/Host]

I will try back in five minutes. Thank you.

[Nick Fountain]

Which means we have a few moments to talk game plan with Bridget. How's she going to get that error rate down?

[Jeff Guo]

Bridget has been in the job a couple years now, and she says she has gotten the message that Nate's team is trying to get this error rate down and that she is the first line of defense.

[Nick Fountain]

Her bosses have dragged her into training after training, trying to make her less of a data entry person and more of a. Not a detective, but someone who thinks about what the person applying for food stamps is saying and. And tries to make sense of it.

[Jeff Guo]

So they've given her a checklist to make sure that she asks all the questions, even the awkward ones. And Nate has put nudges into the computer system. She uses that flag discrepancies as she's filling in the boxes. These are like little pings that say, hey, are you sure about that answer?

[Narrator/Host]

Are you sure? You know, they're paying $1,000, you know, rent, and they make, you know, $100 a month.

[Nick Fountain]

This stuff isn't easy. The questions Bridget has to ask are always changing, like, all the time. In the brief few minutes I was sitting with her, a notification popped up on her computer. New guidance about the one big beautiful bill act you just got an email that says HR1 updates and resources.

[Vicki Aguilar]

We get a lot of, a lot.

[Narrator/Host]

Of emails going out.

[Jeff Guo]

Yeah, all these updates and emails, they're actually a big problem for Oregon because every time there is a little teensy change in policy, the error rate goes up. And this big beautiful Bill act, it has a lot of changes.

[Nick Fountain]

So one very of the moment thing that Nate has done to keep those errors down is he's made a little AI tool called eligibility Bot.

[Narrator/Host]

I call her Ellie for short.

[Nick Fountain]

And when Bridget gets stumped by a complicated case, she can just hit up Ellie and get the most up to date information way quicker than before.

[Jeff Guo]

Right. So thanks to the work that Nate's been doing over the last few years, Bridget now has a lot of tools to help her avoid errors.

[Narrator/Host]

This is Bridget at the Oregon Department of Human Services calling for your appointment.

[Jeff Guo]

Yeah, Bridget gets her guy on the phone.

[Narrator/Host]

All right. And just to verify, you are applying for SNAP benefits, is that correct?

[Jeff Guo]

Yes. It's a simple case. Bridget is bouncing back and forth between her checklist of questions, the state website where she inputs all the info, and also the website where she can double check this guy's income.

[Narrator/Host]

And on the system I have that you were married but separated, is that still accurate?

[Jeff Guo]

Yes.

[Vicki Aguilar]

Okay.

[Jeff Guo]

At the end of the call, she gives the good news.

[Narrator/Host]

All right, you are approved for SNAP benefits.

[Nick Fountain]

All right, so we've learned how errors are introduced, we've learned how Nate's team is trying to avoid them, but we also know that errors are still creeping in. How? Why? The person most qualified to answer that question is the person charged with finding the errors and reporting them to both the state and the federal government.

[Governor Tina Kotek]

I'm Shelley.

[Nick Fountain]

Shelley, good to meet you. Shelley Wickersham is a member of the elite 11 person team tasked with finding errors, tasked with all auditing people's food stamp cases. Now, are people thrilled to be audited? No. So Shelley tries to reframe that audit.

[Narrator/Host]

And tell them, hey, we pull 100 cases a month. It's like winning the lottery, you know, yay. Maybe, you know, it's just, it's going to be okay. You know, we try to develop some sort of relationship. And then like, I had a guy tell me the other day, he was.

[Nick Fountain]

Like, yeah, well, if I could buy.

[Narrator/Host]

The lottery, I wouldn't need food stamps.

[Jeff Guo]

So as you can tell, Shelly really does try to put on a charm offensive when she's calling someone, especially when she has to do it for like the 40th time.

[Nick Fountain]

Is there a rule that your Boss gives you on how much calling is annoying.

[Narrator/Host]

No, no, I will. I need to get my information, so if you're annoyed with my calls, probably just give me the information.

[Nick Fountain]

I'm gonna get it.

[Jeff Guo]

Shelly works for Oregon, but she also kind of works for the federal government because remember, all food stamp money up until this point has been federal taxpayer money. So even before this new law, the feds were pushing states to reduce these errors, and they had their own rules and procedures for how to catch them.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, here's how this works. Every month, Shelley's team picks from the 750,000 plus food stamp recipients in Oregon a random sample of 100 or so cases to go through with a fine tooth comb and calculate the error rate. What should these people have been getting in food stamps, and what has Oregon been giving them? And how big is the difference between them?

[Jeff Guo]

So Shelley, basically, she redoes the entire original interview, but unlike the original interviewer, she is required to leave no stone unturned. She will ask the elderly, ma', am, are you in school or do you have any daycare costs? She will search around in their lives for hidden income, getting any side money.

[Narrator/Host]

Coming in, any cans or bottles.

[Nick Fountain]

Really? Cans or bottles is the thing you ask about?

[Narrator/Host]

Yes, because it's. It's income.

[Nick Fountain]

Oops. Yeah. Okay.

[Jeff Guo]

Oops.

[Narrator/Host]

Yeah.

[Nick Fountain]

Does the eligibility interview also do that?

[Narrator/Host]

Should be. Should be.

[Jeff Guo]

Okay. But on the other hand, those initial interviews, the ones that Bridget does, those are often people's first interactions with the food stamp system. So eligibility workers, they're trying to strike a kind of delicate balance between following the federal guidelines, of course, but also getting people food who need it. So during that initial interview, they're not super pushy, and they generally don't ask for a lot of documentation. And that is a choice that the state of Oregon is making.

[Nick Fountain]

Shelley doesn't have that choice. Her job is to ask all the questions. How much rent costs, how much utilities are, how much interest someone is earning from bank accounts, and also get the proof, the documentation. Shelley needs it all. A lot of her time is spent hounding people for that documentation.

[Narrator/Host]

Lisa Shelley with Oregon Department of Human Services. I was calling regarding the email I sent you. He asked me to send you.

[Jeff Guo]

But this. This right here, this is the tension, right? This work of doing extensive interviews, checking documents, of leaving no stone unturned. If eligibility workers did it at the very first interview, the error rate would drop, like, a ton. For sure. Yeah.

[Nick Fountain]

Nate's been talking with states that have low error rates, trying to steal their best ideas and they have told them that they do ask for more documentation during those first interviews, sometimes multiple times a year. So Nate and Oregon officials know that that's an option, but they also know that there's a cost. Those states that ask for more documentation and have lower error rates, they also often have lower participation rates, fewer people on food stamps. And you can see why. Providing documents can be hard. So even people who'd qualify might just give up on trying to get food stamps.

[Jeff Guo]

Yeah, not everyone can convince people to hand over their documents as charmingly as Shelly can.

[Narrator/Host]

Have a great day, bestie.

[Nick Fountain]

I can tell.

[Jeff Guo]

After Shelly's done hounding the lucky folks that she's auditing for their documents, asking every question that she possibly can, she calculates how far off the state of Oregon was, but it doesn't end there.

[Nick Fountain]

The federal government then audits about half of her audits to make sure she's doing it right. And then they compile all the cases that our team has put together and come up with the official error rate. Right now that rate is hovering around 14%, which means unless they can get it down, Oregon is going to have to start paying up for food stamps for the first time ever in a serious way.

[Jeff Guo]

After the break, we're going to talk to the person who's really in charge in Oregon. The 250 million dollar question.

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[Jeff Guo]

Months Nate Singer, the person tasked with saving Oregon's food stamp program, has been working nonstop trying to figure out any way he can to squeeze that error rate down.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, like, remember that system to check people's income, the one that caught Vicky's gross net pay flub? It was janky. So Nate's been working to make it just pop up automatically into the system that eligibility workers input the data into. He is very close to rolling that.

[Nate Singer]

One out next week. Next week?

[Nick Fountain]

Wow. And you're spending all afternoon hanging out with me.

[Nate Singer]

Say it is there. It's built, it's tested. So next week, staff will be able to see it directly in their systems and be able to pull it up and get the information from there.

[Jeff Guo]

Nate is hopeful that with incremental tweaks like that, he can get the error rate down to 10% this year, which would save Oregon from the worst of it.

[Nick Fountain]

Where do you get the other 4%?

[Nate Singer]

The other 4% is a mixture of hope and a prayer.

[Nick Fountain]

Does that mean you think you've squeezed all the juice you can out of this error rate without cutting, making it onerous for people to sign up or keep their benefits?

[Nate Singer]

I think we're approaching that level. There's limited opportunities to continue to improve without changes to really how we approach this in Oregon.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah. Nate says those decisions, they are higher than his pay grade. They are more on the level of this person. Governor, can you hear me?

[Governor Tina Kotek]

I can hear you. How's my sound?

[Nick Fountain]

I can't hear you. Respond. I'm gonna switch headphones. I tried meeting up with Governor Tina Kotek when I was in Salem. She was a little busy. It's been a weird month in Oregon. Luckily, the Oregon State Library has a sound booth. Say some more things. Say who you are and what you do.

[Governor Tina Kotek]

Governor Kotek, state of Oregon.

[Nick Fountain]

You don't usually have to introduce yourself like that, do you?

[Governor Tina Kotek]

Never.

[Jeff Guo]

Governor Kotak, as we learned, is very dialed into food stamp policy. In fact, her first job in the state was working on simplifying the process of getting food stamps.

[Governor Tina Kotek]

It used to be a 20 page application. My job was to try to get it to four pages.

[Jeff Guo]

In other words, her job was to make food stamps more accessible. So the governor definitely knows about Nate's project to get this food stamp error rate down. What she does not know is what they're going to do if they can't make it.

[Governor Tina Kotek]

There is not $250 million just sitting on a shelf somewhere to backfill this reduction that the federal government says we need to take and As a result, people will not be able to go to the grocery store and buy their own food.

[Nick Fountain]

So I think the federal government's like, moral justification behind tying this error rate to what states have to pay is that states administer this program and they should care about waste, fraud, and abuse. Do you think that's legitimate, trying to tie those two things?

[Governor Tina Kotek]

I think we all want to minimize waste, fraud, and abuse. The idea that the error rate is such a good signifier of that is faulty. You know, here's what I would say to the federal government. It the federal government could make the program simpler to administer and then it would make more sense to say, okay, this is a simplified program. Now error rates mean more because we haven't made this so impossible to administer.

[Nick Fountain]

Oregon is in a bind. In order to reduce their error rate, they're going to have to supercharge their bureaucracy, which will make it harder for people to sign up and will be expensive. One thing we haven't mentioned is that the one big beautiful bill act, it also cut in half the funding that the federal government is providing to states to run their food stamp programs. So it's sort of a double whammy. Do more bureaucracy, reduce that error rate, or else we're going to give you less money, but also we're giving you less money for that bureaucracy.

[Jeff Guo]

By the way, we reached out several days ago to the White House and to the Department of Agriculture, which is in charge of the food stamp program, and they did not get back to us.

[Nick Fountain]

The White House did send an automatic reply saying that the shutdown was delaying their responses.

[Jeff Guo]

So the chances that Oregon is going to get that error rate low enough that the federal government will continue to fully fund food stamps are pretty minuscule unless they're willing to make it harder for Oregonians to get food.

[Nick Fountain]

And if the state of Oregon can't find the money to pay for food stamps, they're left with only a couple options. One is to shutter the food stamp program altogether, which might sound extreme, but I've heard from a few sources about states that are considering it. The other option, make the food stamp program smaller by shrinking the population of people who qualify. Is that a road you're willing to go down?

[Governor Tina Kotek]

At the moment, no.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, at the moment, Governor Kotak says they are committed to keeping everyone in the program. People like Vicki Aguilar, that Safeway cashier I met in Oregon. Hello, Vicki.

[Vicki Aguilar]

Uh huh.

[Nick Fountain]

It's Nick Fountain from npr. How's it going?

[Vicki Aguilar]

Oh, good. Just getting ready to head to work. What's up I don't have time.

[Nick Fountain]

You're getting ready to go to work right now?

[Vicki Aguilar]

Yeah, I got called in early.

[Nick Fountain]

We called Vicki a few days ago to check in. It had been a few weeks since our visit and we wanted to talk about this week's news. The Trump administration has said because of the shutdown, quote, that the well has run dry on food stamp funds and that it's going to suspend the program for the first time in history. And the first thing Becky brought up was she's worried about the people whose groceries she scanned. She's worried about how they're going to make it.

[Vicki Aguilar]

I feel sorry for him. I really do. I do feel sorry for other people.

[Nick Fountain]

Are you going to be okay? Personally.

[Vicki Aguilar]

I will. I, you know, I mean, even if I, I could just eat a bowl of cereal, I'm good, you know? Yeah, yeah. You know, and have milk and cereal and eggs. I, you know, I don't mind making breakfast for dinner. I've done it before.

[Jeff Guo]

She says she's been looking for work, putting in applications.

[Nick Fountain]

Any bites?

[Vicki Aguilar]

Nope. Nothing.

[Nick Fountain]

She told me she was planning on going to a job center tomorrow. They're going to look at her resume, help her polish it up. But.

[Vicki Aguilar]

Yeah, yeah, but I got, I gotta get going, though.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, okay. Vicki, take care of yourself, okay?

[Vicki Aguilar]

I will. And thanks for reaching out. All right.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah.

[Vicki Aguilar]

Bye.

[Nick Fountain]

Bye. Hey. Our colleagues at NPR are doing an incredible job of covering what's happening with snap. If you want to keep up to date on the latest, their work [e-mail] or on the old fashioned radio. Also, if you or someone you know needs help with hunger relief, there are resources. We're going to leave some links to those in the show.

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NOTES.

[Nick Fountain]

This episode of Planet Money was produced by James Sneed and Willow Rubin, edited by Marianne McCune and Jess Jiang, and fact checked by Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Debbie Daughtry and Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. I'm Nick Fountain.

[Jeff Guo]

And I'm Jeff Guo. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

[Narrator/Host]

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