The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the nation’s largest anti-hunger program that helps tens of millions of people — including 142,000 in Utah — afford to keep food on the table. In addition to reducing food insecurity, it also improves health outcomes, supports farmers, food retailers and the overall economy, and makes communities stronger.
Despite SNAP’s many strengths, it has been under attack because some policymakers fail to understand this extraordinarily complex program.
Take SNAP performance metrics. Too many people conflate fraud with SNAP payment errors. Those distinctions matter because bad information leads to bad policy.
Payment errors are not fraud.
Payment errors reflect when a household gets the wrong benefit amount — too high or too low. Error rates are caused by administrative mistakes such as a mistyped phone number or a change in someone’s work hours that doesn’t get updated in their case record, not intentional wrongdoing. The U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates error rates based on a small sample of a state’s cases.
Without immediate Congressional action to reverse the harmful SNAP provisions in the budget reconciliation law (H.R. 1) enacted last year, states with high payment error rates will be required to pay a portion of SNAP benefit costs beginning in fiscal year 2028. Historically, the federal government has fully covered these costs. This fiscal penalty will force states to make tough budgetary tradeoffs like weakening healthcare services and education or opting out of SNAP altogether.
As of now, Utah will not be impacted given the state’s error rate is below six percent. But if its FY 2026 rate turns out to be higher, the state will be faced with brand-new benefit costs that it can’t afford. Already, under H.R. 1, Utah has had to start paying 75% of costs to administer the program; $13 million that has been added to the state budget.
Making states pay for a portion of SNAP benefits and a larger share of administrative costs does not reduce what it takes to run this important nutrition program. These moves simply shift costs from the federal government to the state. States must raise taxes or cut programs to cover the gap, and almost no one’s federal taxes are going down as a result — the SNAP cuts in H.R. 1 offset tax cuts to billionaires and corporations.
If the objective is to reduce SNAP error rates, then Congress must help states bolster administrative capacity and improve processing systems, not penalize states with more financial burden. When states have enough staff to process applications and recertifications, carefully review documents submitted by clients, and answer the phones when participants call with questions, fewer errors are made.
Putting states on the hook for millions of dollars in benefit costs if their error rates go above an arbitrary number incentivizes creating processes with endless hoops for people to jump through, making it much harder for eligible people to access food support. It also leads to denying SNAP applications that should have been accepted. Utah’s CAPER rate, which measures the share of SNAP applications that were denied even though the household was eligible, was 29.95% in FY 2025. Nearly 30% of eligible households were denied benefits. While that’s below the national average, it’s still far too high.
H.R. 1 already is causing enough harm. Since it was enacted, 5 million people nationwide have lost access to SNAP, including more than 27,000 in Utah. The law is literally stripping food away from children, families, older adults, veterans and people with disabilities.
This must be stopped before decades of progress in the fight against hunger are unraveled.
This starts with Congress delaying implementation of the SNAP benefit cost-shift in the Farm Bill or any legislative vehicle and working with states to strengthen program integrity without jeopardizing food assistance for families in Utah or nationwide.
