By House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) defended the House GOP’s proposed changes to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on Sunday, arguing that states will better administer food stamp benefits if they have to shoulder more of the costs.
“The states are not properly administering this because they don’t have enough skin in the game,” Johnson told CBS’s Margaret Brennan in an interview on “Face the Nation.”
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the GOP-controlled House narrowly passed early Thursday morning after an overnight session, calls for the federal share of SNAP costs to drop from the current 100 percent level to 95 percent in 2028.
States could be forced to pick up more of the tab after that based on their payment error rates.
“We are not cutting SNAP,” Johnson said. “We’re working in the elements of fraud, waste and abuse.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees the nation’s largest nutrition assistance program, reported last year that nearly 11.7 percent of states’ payments were miscalculated. Alaska, New Jersey and South Carolina reported the most frequent overpayment error rates in 2023, USDA data shows.
According to the USDA, payment errors are most commonly made through unintentional mistakes by the state agency or the recipient household.
But a review last year from the independent Government Accountability Office found that those improper payments cost about $10.5 billion in 2023.
“That’s a number that everyone acknowledges is real, and it may be much higher than that,” Johnson said.