Grijalva proposes legislation to curb federal funding threats to Arizona's SNAP program

Democratic Arizona Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva is proposing legislation to curb federal funding threats to the state’s food assistance program.

Last year, Republicans in Congress added new requirements to the SNAP application process.

States must lower the amount of overpayments and underpayments — or the error rate — that occurs in the process of administering the program.

Arizona stands to lose out on hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funding unless its error rate goes down. As of the last fiscal year, Arizona’s error rate was 8.8%, but it must go down to 6% or less to ensure the state retains funding.

Grijalva’s proposal is in the form of amendments to an agriculture appropriations bill, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture runs SNAP.

The amendments would require transparency from USDA in how state error rates are calculated and exclude certain administrative errors from those calculations.

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“Those kind of deficiencies, missing applications, overdue recertification - we are going to take those away from the payment error rate because that’s not fraud, and people shouldn’t lose food assistance because of administrative errors,” Grijalva said.

She said her bill won’t just benefit Democrats or Arizonans, but people in every state.

Grijalva said Arizona has been overzealous about cutting people from SNAP in order to bring the error rate down, because the state can’t afford to lose federal funding. She said she doesn’t believe the people who have lost their benefits are fraudsters, although federal changes to SNAP happened in the name of reducing waste, fraud and abuse.

“The state, I believe, overcorrected,” Grijalva said. “I am gravely concerned that 50% of people who used to get SNAP benefits no longer get those benefits.”

Grijalva accused Republicans of prioritizing tax breaks for the wealthy and the cost of overseas war over low-income Americans.

“This provision was never about preventing fraud. It’s a backdoor attempt to slash food assistance by passing crazy astronomical costs onto states which is exactly what’s happening,” she said.