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The Trump administration is appealing a judge's ruling that SNAP food benefits must be fully funded this month. But regardless of the outcome in that case, when the shutdown ends, changes are coming behind the scenes to the USDA program. Here's Nick Fountain from NPR's Planet Money.
NICK FOUNTAIN, BYLINE: Nate Singer, director of the Oregon Eligibility Partnership, is the type of bureaucrat's bureaucrat who basically always carries around a pen and a highlighter in case he needs to mark up a document...
NATE SINGER: My kids think that I have my own coloring books that are just really boring coloring books.
FOUNTAIN: ...Even on weekends, even on holidays. Take this Fourth of July. Singer was at a barbecue, and whenever he could get a break from the grill, he was marking up the text of the big budget bill, which President Trump was signing that day and which contained big cuts to a program Singer overseas - food stamps, or SNAP. And what he saw was the bill cuts who qualifies for the program, how much they get, and maybe most importantly for him, who pays for the program. This is a fundamental shift. For the entire history of food stamps, the federal government has paid for all of the benefits that go out. But what Singer saw - highlighter in one hand and greasy spatula in the other - was that this bill shifts that. Now many states are going to have to pay for a portion of food stamp funds. How much? Well, the bill ties that amount to an obscure stat called the payment error rate, which is a measure of how accurately states - which administer food stamp programs - are giving out federal taxpayer dollars.
SINGER: Did we process it right, and did you get the right benefit amount?
FOUNTAIN: The payment error rate captures when states give too much and too little. And pretty soon, the worse their error rate, the more they're going to have to pay. If Oregon stays where they're at, they'll be on the hook for some $250 million a year, which is a problem for Singer in particular because it's his job to get it down.
Are you up for this challenge?
SINGER: Yes. Yes. Yes.
FOUNTAIN: So how is he going to get the error rate down? Well, training for the state workers who sign people up, technological improvements. But those tweaks will only go so far. So Singer's been calling around, asking states with low error rates, how are you doing it? He says a lot of them do something Oregon's been trying to avoid - asking for more documentation, receipts for things like rent or utilities, which, yes, makes things more accurate but also leads to less people signing up, even if they qualify and are hungry. He says changes like that, they are above his pay grade. They're more on the level of this person.
Governor, can you hear me?
TINA KOTEK: I can hear you. How's my sound?
FOUNTAIN: Oregon Governor Tina Kotek says they are not going to make it harder for people to sign up, not now, which means they might have to start paying up. Do they have the money?
KOTEK: There is not $250 million just sitting on a shelf somewhere to backfill this reduction that the federal government says we need to take.
FOUNTAIN: So I think the federal government's, like, moral justification behind tying this error rate to what states have to pay is that states administer this program, and they should care about waste, fraud and abuse. Do you think that's legitimate, trying to tie those two things?
KOTEK: I think we all want to minimize waste, fraud and abuse. The idea that the error rate is such a good signifier of that is faulty.
FOUNTAIN: The White House and USDA did not respond to requests for comment. Bottom line - Kotek says they're going to try to keep people on the program, a program that's never going to be the same.
Nick Fountain, NPR News.
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