When the federal government pays for 100% of a program and lets states administer it, that shouldn’t include forcing federal taxpayers to pay for unlimited state payment errors.
Republicans put that noncontroversial principle into practice in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act by requiring states to pay for a portion of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits if their payment error rates exceed 6%. This means that state governments and their taxpayers will be on the hook for some or all of the improper payments they send out the door.
Now, they are proposing to delay its implementation from fiscal 2028 to fiscal 2029, which would risk the next Congress passing additional delays or eliminating this important accountability provision altogether.
The implementation delay was included in the Senate Agriculture Committee’s fiscal 2027 farm bill, which passed on a party-line vote: 12 Republicans voting in favor and 11 Democrats, who instead wanted a two-year delay, voting against.
Currently, the federal government pays 100% of SNAP benefits. Beginning in 2028, states with error rates between 6% and 7.99% will pay 5% of SNAP benefits; states with error rates between 8% and 9.99% will pay 10%; and states with error rates of 10% or more will pay 15%. States with SNAP error rates below 6% will continue to pay zero percent of SNAP benefits.
States have already responded to SNAP’s impending skin-in-the-game requirements by taking action to improve the integrity and accuracy of their SNAP payments. For example: shortly after the big, beautiful bill’s passage, the Youngkin administration in Virginia announced a “SNAP error rate initiative” to get the state’s 11.5% error rate below 6%, and Ohio’s efforts to improve payment accuracy resulted in a significant reduction in its error rate — from 9.13% in fiscal 2024 to 6.76% in fiscal 2025.
In 2025, SNAP’s national payment error rate was 10.6%, or $10.1 billion. Rates ranged from a high of 23.2% in Alaska to a low of 2.5% in South Dakota.
Error rates are calculated by examining a sample of active SNAP recipients and verifying things such as household size and income to confirm eligibility and benefit amounts. Since SNAP payment errors only check eligibility and benefit amounts, they don’t include all the fraud that happens after benefits are delivered, such as benefit theft or illegally exchanging benefits for cash.
SNAP payment errors have increased roughly fivefold since 2008, amid enhanced benefit levels, expansions in broad-based categorical eligibility, and weak oversight and accountability.
From the program’s start in 1974 until 2008, an average of 8.3% of the population received SNAP benefits. Since 2008, that’s jumped to 12.8% receiving SNAP benefits, despite a lower average poverty rate. In fact, the United States spent more on SNAP benefits in 2025 ($102 billion), when the unemployment rate averaged 4.3%, than it did in 2011 ($68 billion), when the unemployment rate averaged 9.6%.
Congress must rein in SNAP’s excessive growth. But without any skin in the game, states’ incentive is to maximize federal tax dollars for their state — including spending on improper payments.
Many states don’t like the big, beautiful bill’s new SNAP cost-sharing requirements, and complain that they can’t afford the potential added costs. But states are in far better fiscal shape than the federal government. In 2025, 49 states ended their fiscal years with surpluses while the federal government ran a $1.8 trillion deficit, and total state government debt is less than one-tenth of federal government debt. And the law doesn’t unequivocally impose additional costs on states; it just requires them to ensure accuracy and integrity in SNAP spending or else pay for their own errors.
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Delaying cost-sharing requirements would send a signal to states that they can ease up on SNAP accountability efforts, and perhaps abandon them altogether.
SNAP cost-sharing is a commonsense accountability measure: states that administer the program accurately can avoid additional costs, while states with high payment error rates have a financial incentive to improve. Republicans should embrace cost-sharing instead of allowing a potentially Democrat-controlled Congress to erase it.