Since Republicans in Congress approved new requirements for SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — last summer, states across the country have seen reductions in the number of residents receiving food stamps.
Arizona is an outlier.
Year-over-year, the Department of Economic Security — the state agency responsible for administering SNAP in Arizona — has removed over half of Arizona’s food stamp recipients.
Former SNAP beneficiaries cut from the program say the state is making it impossible to prove they’re still eligible.
The SNAP changes mainly consist of new work standards, and require applicants to provide more information to prove their eligibility — and to provide that information more frequently.
The Trump administration says those changes were necessary to eliminate waste and fraud.
Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs blames Trump and Republicans in Congress for so many Arizonans losing benefits.
“There have been several federal cuts that have impacted DES directly, and a lot of these benefit programs directly. So, whatever the reason is that a lot of people are losing benefits, it’s squarely on cuts at the federal level,” Hobbs said.
SNAP cuts in Arizona are higher
But according to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research institute, the cuts to SNAP in Arizona are disproportionally higher to those in other states.
Nearly 500,000 Arizonans who received SNAP benefits a year ago are no longer beneficiaries of the food stamps program. That’s a roughly 55% cut. As of March, close to 200,000 of the Arizonans who lost SNAP benefits were children.
The next closest state, Virginia, saw 15% reduction.
Hobbs acknowledged the state’s faced challenges adapting to new federal requirements, but said DES isn’t to blame.
“I can’t speak to why our rate is disproportional to other states, but if you look at kind of the projections that we presented when HR1 was first passed, what we’re seeing is in line with the number of people we thought would lose benefits,” Hobbs said.
But people in line at St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix on a Monday morning in April all said the issues at DES run deeper.
They said it’s harder to apply because DES is now requiring applicants to complete phone interviews to prove eligibility.
But it’s nearly impossible to get someone from DES to answer those calls. And if an applicant can’t complete their interview, their benefits are cut and they have to reapply again.
Adamary Olivas was waiting in line at St. Mary’s with her partner, Esteban Ramos and their children. She said daily calls to DES routinely went unanswered, and by the time she did hear back from the department, the paperwork required to prove eligibility for food stamps had expired.
Olivas said she’s been trapped in this loop since October.
“The first time we did it, I was able to activate it in person, and now I’m not able to activate it in person. We have to call and we call and call and they never answer so that’s the biggest issue,” she said.
Backlog of applicants
Monice Soto was also in line, waiting for food with her family.
“I don’t have a job right now, that’s why I'm applying, and I'm needing it. I have kids and I'm still pending and it's been taking more than 60 days,” Soto said. “We’ve been having a really really hard time trying to buy food,” she said.
Arizonan after Arizonan in line at the food bank say without SNAP, it’s harder to put food on the table.
KJZZ asked DES Director Michael Wisehart whether the agency has knowingly cut eligible applicants from the program.
“It is more challenging to get through the system than it used to be,” Wisehart said. “If we know they’re eligible, we are making them eligible for the program. There are no people — everybody who works at DES, it’s a really hard job, and if you don’t believe it’s a really hard job go to a local office.”
Wisehart said that although Arizona is a notable outlier now, it’s just because other states haven’t caught up to implementing the changes in HR1 as quickly as Arizona has, and claimed the state won’t be an outlier by the time all the states are finished implementing those changes, which went into effect 10 months ago.
Wisehart also said DES is underfunded and understaffed, and they don’t have the capacity to get to all SNAP cases in a timely manner.
That’s created a backlog of applicants waiting on services, he acknowledged.
Republican lawmakers celebrate cuts, Democrats express concern
Rep. David Livingston (R-Peoria) said DES just needs to become more efficient.
“We think they have the staff they need to automate it more and things are going in the right direction there,” he said.
When asked about the vast number of SNAP applicants cut from the program who say they’re eligible and can’t get through the DES system, Livingston said it’s Hobbs’ responsibility.
“The governor owns this. The governor owns the long waits on the phone,” he said. “It’s her agency. If you think it’s bad, tell her that. But it’s not the Republicans’ fault at all.”
Democrats warn the future could be even more challenging for DES. Republican lawmakers are proposing 5% cuts to most state agencies, including the state’s social safety net.
“We’re reforming entitlement programs to get people who are ineligible off of those programs,” state Sen. John Kavanagh told his colleagues last month, speaking in favor of legislation that would cut DES’s budget and implement even more guardrails to SNAP in Arizona.
“When we began doing SNAP food stamp checks eligibility went down, enrollment went down 47% that tells me that that system was rife with people who shouldn't have been on it in the first place,” the Fountain Hills Republican said.
His colleagues share his view. Livingston, one of the state’s budget architects, wants to add new SNAP regulations that go even further than the changes in H.R.1, the federal bill amending SNAP.
What is the error rate?
One reason Republicans say they want to make even stricter changes to SNAP — like requiring applicants to reapply every three months instead of every six months — is the threat of losing federal funding.
H.R.1 requires states to bring their SNAP error rates down below 6% or lose federal funding.
The error rate refers to accuracy of eligibility determinations and includes both overpayments and underpayments. It does not measure fraud, but is often referred to in conjunction with waste, fraud and abuse.
Arizona Food Bank Network Executive Vice President Terri Shoemaker said it’s important to acknowledge a difference in terms, as many users are trying to comply with the application rules.
“Fraud is when a bad actor somewhere sets up skimming at a local shop and steals a bunch of SNAP numbers and robs people of benefits,” she said. “Error rate? Different story. Error rate could be, is that a six or an eight on this form? Or, ‘my income went down. Do I have to report that to DES? And if I do, who do I report it to?’ There are a lot of nuances to the program that can't be couched in a big term like ‘fraud’ because it doesn't get to the heart of the reasons why people need SNAP in the first place.”
As of the end of September 2024, Arizona’s error rate was 8.8%, but the state won’t know its new error rate until the end of June, 2026.
Since DES cut more than half of the users from SNAP, there’s a chance the error rate has gone down.
The error rate must be below 6% by October 1 for the state to be spared from federal cuts. That’s a concern for Hobbs, too. She granted DES $7.5 million in December to streamline the SNAP and unemployment benefit application processes.
GOP lawmakers want to require the state to maintain an error rate of 3%, or would cut funding from DES.
Food banks can’t fill the gap
Since SNAP cuts started going into effect last year, the number of people using Arizona food banks has increased steadily.
Food banks say there’s only so much they can do to feed families who’ve lost SNAP benefits.
“To have worked in hunger relief for so long and see things not get better, but actually get significantly worse is heartbreaking,” Shoemaker said. “I hope that we can work together to find a better path so that people have enough to eat. Because without enough to eat, it's kind of hard to do anything else.”
Shoemaker says for every meal a food bank can provide, SNAP has a history of providing about five, leaving a gap.
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