Mississippi, as with many states, is under financial pressure to get its so-called “error rate” down on the welfare program that used to be known as food stamps.
Under President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last year, states will have to fork out, starting in October, tens of millions of dollars annually if they miscalculate the benefits for more than 6% of those eligible to participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The higher the error rate, the stiffer the cost-sharing penalty.
The law, though, does not count delaying or denying benefits to an eligible family as an error. That provision could be having the perverse effect of incentivizing the states to wrongly deny benefits, or at least drag their feet on approving them.
If so, that might explain why SNAP enrollment over the past year has dropped much faster than the federal government’s own predictions. According to reporting by Mississippi Today, SNAP enrollment nationwide has fallen by 4.5 million, almost double what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had predicted after Trump’s megabill was enacted. In Mississippi, for the nine months ending in April, enrollment was down 43,000, or 12%.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Mississippi’s error rate has also been declining, falling from 10.69% a year ago to 8.69%. If that number holds, it will drop Mississippi into a lower cost-sharing category, with the state paying for 10% of benefits instead of 15%. That reduction would reduce the state’s penalty by about $40 million.
There may be straightforward reasons for Mississippi’s declining enrollment and improved error rate. The SNAP reforms, for example, include stricter work requirements that may disqualify some previously eligible recipients or kick them off because they don’t complete the paperwork from which they were previously exempt. Also, the Mississippi Department of Human Services, which administers the SNAP program, says it has provided additional training to those workers who determine SNAP eligibility while also emphasizing to recipients to promptly update any changes in income.
Still, as long as wrongful denial of benefits does not count as a strike against a state, it doesn’t take much to imagine an attitude evolving that it’s better to deny benefits than risk making a mistake in calculating them.
Reducing welfare fraud, the stated intention of the SNAP reforms, is a worthy goal. But so is making sure that low-income families, and especially their children, have enough to eat. Medical experts say that skimping on nutrition programs for the poor is counterproductive. It creates costs down the road from physical, cognitive and emotional problems that will be much more expensive to address than trying to ensure that every child has adequate nutrition.
