Just over a year ago, President Trump signed H.R. 1—the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act"—into law. In a new brief, One Year Later, GFI and the Center for Science in the Public Interest examine what has happened since to the nation's food safety net.
One provision hasn’t gotten enough attention. Administering SNAP requires states to determine each household's eligibility and benefits based on their unique circumstances, verifying income, expenses, and other factors. Sometimes states err in their determinations or in updating benefit levels given changing household circumstances. H.R. 1 introduced unprecedented outsized financial penalties for states where that happens too often: starting in late 2027, states with too many payment errors will have to start covering a portion of SNAP's benefits out of their own budgets.
But H.R. 1's own rushed rollout, USDA's delays in providing guidance to states on the new law, and last fall's government shutdown have made those mistakes more likely, not less. States are being set up to fail the very standards they're being penalized for missing—and when they do, the penalty will be real and force painful choices.
Because states are required to balance their budgets every year, if they can't cover the SNAP penalty by cutting services or raising taxes elsewhere, they may consider reducing the number of people receiving food assistance as a means to pay. They could even opt out of SNAP altogether.
Minimizing SNAP payment errors is critical to program integrity. But a program can't have integrity if the people it's meant to serve can't get through the door. The good news is that Congress can still solve this; it just needs to act before the bill comes due next year.