Republicans

Washington – When the Government announced on Monday that 10% of the benefits of the supplementary nutritional assistance program were paid by error last year, the Republicans proudly declared that they were aware of the problem.

“This is exactly the reason we need to obtain a great Big Beautiful bill for the president’s desk,” said the main Republicans in committees that supervise SNAP in a joint statement. “Its historical reforms will give the states the skin in the game with the benefits of SNAP and ensure that they have a real incentive to improve supervision and stop inappropriate payments before they occur.”

But something curious happened to the great bill before the Senate approved it on Tuesday. In an apparent effort to win about Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaaska), the disposition by reproducing Snap’s wrong payments, so that states with the highest error rates, such as Alaska, would be exempt for one or two years.

“Did we make some changes in the SNAP provisions that will allow a delay, which will allow greater flexibility for the State? Absolutely,” Murkowski told journalists after the vote, explaining why he voted for a bill he does not like.

Forcing states to share the cost of SNAP benefits would fundamentally alter the program, giving strong incentives to reduce registration. It was the most aggressive cut in the original version of the house of the great Big Beautiful bill; The Senate version would allow states to avoid loading completely maintaining their error rates below 6%.

Bloomberg through Getty Images

But the change made to win about Murkowski would exempt several states and seem to create an incentive for other states to make even more erroneous benefits payments, which potentially adds to the annual cost of the $ 100 billion program.

“You can deliberately increase your error rate and then get a two -year delay,” said Bobby Kogan, a budget expert from the Liberal Center for American Progress, in an interview. “The purpose was to delay the cuts to Alaska and they did it in a way that does not make conceptual sense.”

The Snap Switcheroo was one of the various changes in the last minute that the Republicans did the Republicans before approved their bill on Tuesday within the mere hours of their final text to finish as the Republicans hurry to overcome a self -imposed deadline on July 4. The widest invoice consists of $ 4 billion in tax cuts that are only paid partially with cuts to Snap and Medicaid.

Because the Senate Republicans approved the bill using a special “budget” reconciliation process that does not allow “strange” provisions, such as policies directly addressed to individual states with only incidental budgetary effects, they had to write the Snap Torneut of Alaska so that it did not seem so obvious. Then, the bill would delay repression for any state with an error rate greater than 13.3%. (To be even less obvious, instead of establishing the threshold in 13.3%, the text says that the exemption is applied to states whose error rates exceed 20% when multiplying by 1.5).

According to him SNAP error rate numbers Published by the United States Department of Agriculture this week, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and the Columbia district would gain a delay in the shared cost load if it was based on 2024 error rates.

Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said he told the governor of his state to let him know that Hawaii, with an error rate of 6.8%, could be lost.

“I just had to send text messages to the governor @Drjoshgreen 10 states are exempt from food assistance cuts. They are the ones with the most mistakes to manage the program. And because he did a good job to reduce the error rate by 15 percent, we are not exempt, ”said Schatz on social networks.

A spokesman for Senator John Boozman (R-Ark.), The best Republican in the Senate Agriculture Committee, did not immediately respond to a request for comments.

The Snap Warped Snap Cost Provision will probably be a dispute point among the Republicans of the House of Representatives that are already upset because the Senate changed a series of provisions of the version that the camera approved in May. However, the president of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson (R-La.), Said the Chamber would approve the bill this week and send it to President Donald Trump’s desk.

During a meeting of the Chamber Rules Committee before a probable vote on Wednesday, the Republicans refused to defend the proposal.

“I would have to sit with the senators to discover why they did that,” said the president of the Agriculture Committee of the House of Representatives, Glenn Thompson (R-PA.), Before adding that he knew he had done to win votes from the Senate.

“It’s just an absurd policy,” said representative Chip Roy (R-Texas). “Why would a state penalize a lower error rate and encourage you to have a higher error rate? That I can read the disposition to do nothing more. So we call balls and blows here. That was a ball, and it wasn’t even close.”