As feds allege SNAP fraud, Ohio public employees step up

This piece was originally published by Cleveland.com

For too many Ohioans, sticker shock at the grocery store has become an overwhelming part of daily life.

It’s not anyone’s imagination: Monthly grocery costs across the nation have been steadily rising over the last nine years.

Although wages have generally increased for Ohio workers since the pandemic, they aren’t rising fast enough to keep up with food costs.

Neither is the food assistance that many Ohio families rely on to help keep food on the table when money is tight.

Last summer, members of Congress passed a federal budget that cuts funding for SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and many Americans’ access to SNAP benefits.

Since then, nationwide participation in SNAP has dropped by 4 million. In Ohio, it fell by over 106,000 in the first eight months.

This is just the beginning. Legislators who crafted the federal budget delayed its most harmful restrictions on SNAP and critical social services like Medicaid.

With service cuts staggered over years, it’s harder to digest the many ways this budget makes life more costly.

For Ohioans in some of the state’s most common occupations (including fast food, retail, cashier and home health care), full time, year-round work pays so little that a family of three qualifies for SNAP.

That’s not news for the many working Ohioans who face a triple threat of inadequate pay, rising costs and decreasing access to social services.

But that harsh reality didn’t stop Congress from making it harder for veterans, some seniors, people without homes and others to prove they qualify for ongoing SNAP benefits.

That’s one way Congress cut services to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. Another is by pushing costs onto the states.

Starting in 2027, states will for the first time ever be on the hook for a portion of SNAP benefits, depending on what’s known as their “SNAP error rate.”

To be clear: At a moment when allegations of social service fraud are getting a lot of attention, it needs to be shouted from the rooftops that SNAP error rates do not measure fraud.

They measure mistakes that get made when managing a complex program that helps a lot of people.

Unsurprisingly, SNAP error rates tend to rise whenever changes are made to eligibility requirements — like the ones we’re fielding now — or when benefits are paused, as they were during last year’s government shutdown.

But as is often the case, Ohio’s public employees are stepping up for Ohioans.

Despite all the obstacles the administration created, Ohioreduced our SNAP error rate from 9.1% to 6.8% over the last fiscal year.

This puts us far below the national SNAP error rate and, more importantly, well on our way to being below the 6% threshold in time to avoid these new costs.

Getting our error rate below that 6% mark decreases the risk of even larger SNAP coverage losses.

Every Ohio caseworker, agency staffer and SNAP recipient who’s been working together to decrease mistakes over a tumultuous year deserves thanks!

Most of us can’t afford this budget’s cruelties. The few who can are America’s wealthiest — the ones enjoying tax cuts paid for with deep cuts to programs like SNAP.

For the rest of us, even small wins matter.