Transcript
A (0:01)
Hello and welcome to State Scoop's Priorities podcast. I'm Sophia Foxowell, a reporter for statescoop. This week we're talking about what states can do to reduce their payment error rates in order to comply with upcoming federal changes to snap. But first, here are the biggest state IT stories of the week. Texas governor Greg Abbott last week appointed Amanda Crawford, the the state's chief information officer and executive director of the Texas Department of Information Resources, as the state's commissioner of insurance. Officials say they'll soon announce a replacement to lead the state's technology department. New York State's technology office this week announced Eleanor Hornier Toombs, a United Nations University researcher, has been appointed as chief artificial intelligence officer, replacing Sharia Amin, who spent less than a year in the role. The state also named a new chief digital officer. Florida is strengthening animal welfare protections with the passage of Dexter's Law, a new statute designed to prevent repeat animal abuse and improve accountability across the state. Named after a shelter dog whose inhumane death in 2023 sparked public outrage, the law responds to growing concerns that individuals convicted of animal cruelty and were still able to adopt or obtain pets with little oversight. Reducing error rates in food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has become a top priority for states, especially as more of the financial and administrative burdens shift from the federal government to state and local agencies. HR1, the federal budget bill that passed last year, hill increases work requirements for SNAP recipients, shifting 50 to 75% of administrative cost to states and potentially requiring states to contribute to benefit amounts based on their error rates. Rebecca Piazza, executive director of SafetyNet strategy at Code for America, stressed the urgency for states to find effective solutions before 2027 in order to comply with federal changes such as adopting automation and low risk AI tools to improve accuracy. So at a high level, what does HR1 kind of change about how states are expected to manage SNAP moving forward and how does technology kind of come into play when managing those types of expectations and changes?
B (2:31)
Thanks. So SNAP is a really key program in the safety net. It's really I just want to ground us in this first. It's one of the most impactful anti hunger programs that we have in the country. It's a program that millions of people depend on. You know, it's meant to be a supplementary program, but really a lot of people depend on it for all of their grocery budget. In HR1, there are a number of changes to how it's administered that make it a very different program than it has been to date. It impacts both the number of people who are receiving benefits by expanding work requirements and the number of people who are subject to them. And it changes the administration of the program in ways that are going to create a number of more administrative and financial burdens to states. So looking at work requirements, there have been a number of places throughout the country that have not been subject to them. There have been a number of groups where people have been exempted. Thinking of veterans, people who are homeless, those people are now going to be subject to work requirements. And that's going to put a lot more strain on programs and program administrative staff. There's going to be a lot more work that they need to do with recipients in order to validate work, whether people are meeting those requirements. And that's going to mean that a number of thousands of people are going to lose benefits because they can't show compliance with those requirements. And I say that intentionally. It's not necessarily because they're not working, it's because showing compliance with those requirements is so difficult. What you're also seeing is a big shift in the cost of administering the program going to states. So the HR1 bill changed right off the bat the percentage of administrative costs that states are responsible for from 50% to 75%. And so that is in many states, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. And then it also introduced a new potential cost share for the SNAP benefit amount for the first time. I think something that's a big distinction is there's the cost to run the program, which is administrative costs, and then there's the benefit cost, which is the actual money that is loaded onto EBT cards that people use to pay for food. And states have never been responsible for a portion of that benefit amount to date. But now HR1 is introducing new rules where states may be responsible for a portion of those benefit amounts. And that would mean hundreds of millions of dollars to, in some states, even billions of dollars a year that states would now be responsible for for the SNAP program.