After the shutdown, SNAP will still be in trouble

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week’s SNAP crisis is just a preview. Tucked inside the giant tax-cut and spending bill signed by President Donald Trump this summer are enormous cuts to SNAP: Who qualifies, how much they get, and who foots the bill for the program. That last part is a huge change.

For the entire history of the food stamp program, the federal government has paid for all the benefits that go out. States pay part of the cost of administering it, but the food stamp money has come entirely from federal taxpayers. This bill shifts part of the costs to states.

How much will states have to pay? It depends. The law ties the amount to a statistic called the Payment Error Rate -- the official measure of accuracy -- whether states are giving recipients either too much, or too little, in food stamp money.

On today’s show, we go to Oregon to meet the bureaucrats on the front lines of getting that error rate down -- and ask Governor Tina Kotek what’s going to happen if they can’t.

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This episode was hosted by Nick Fountain and Jeff Guo. It was produced by James Sneed and Willa Rubin, edited by Marianne McCune and Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Debbie Daughtry and Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.3	Like many of us, Nate Singer spent the 4th of July at a barbecue in jeans and a t-shirt.
0:13.1	It was a decent day. It wasn't too hot. Red, white, and blue, tablecloths.
0:17.5	Nate is a father of four, and he's one of those dads who likes to hang out literally at the
0:22.0	barbecue. Flipping burgers for people. Is that normally your job as the burger flipper? It's a good
0:28.2	thing to do. You just hang around the grill, not so social. It's strange I work in human
0:32.9	services. Yeah, Nate is a big muck-dick-d-muck at the Oregon Department of Human Services.
0:38.9	He runs the division that signs people up for programs like food stamps.
0:43.1	And Nate, he's like a bureaucrat's bureaucrat, the type of person who carries around a pen and a high letter in case he needs to mark up a document.
0:51.4	My kids think that I have my own coloring books that are just really boring coloring books.
0:56.9	This July 4th barbecue was no exception.
0:59.6	Whenever Nate got a break from grilling, he'd pull out some folded up paper from his back pocket.
1:03.9	And he would read the text of President Donald Trump's signature bill, the one big, beautiful bill act.
1:11.6	You know this bill. President Trump signed it on July 4th. And the reason Nate was reading it
1:16.8	and highlighting it was that this bill made big cuts, including to food stamps, which is a
1:22.3	program he oversees. This bill had been changing as it went between the House and the Senate.
1:28.0	It got amended hundreds of times, but now it was final.
1:32.2	And Nate, highlighter in one hand, you know, greasy spatula and the other, was surveying the damage.
1:39.6	Yeah, like, how bad is this for food stamps and the one out of every six Oregonians, 750,000 of them
1:46.9	on the program? And what he sees is that the bill cuts who qualifies for food stamps, how much
1:52.9	they'll get, and maybe most importantly for him, it changes who pays for the food stamp program.
1:59.6	And that part? That is a big deal.
	...

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