The Agriculture Department is making moves to cut down on one of the biggest fraud problems in its food benefits program, years after being instructed by Congress to do so.
The Trump administration announced it is moving to require all Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits cards to include new security features in order to stop skimming and card cloning, which bad actors use to steal benefits from the Americans who need it.
The cards used to deliver SNAP are so old they don’t include basic security tools to stop fraudsters from using devices hidden on point-of-sale terminals to steal card numbers, which can then be used to make a counterfeit card and steal the funds.
The primary victims of this type of fraud are the Americans who are eligible for SNAP benefits, who find out that their cards are empty when they try to use them. The government doesn’t lose any additional money; the money just goes to the wrong person.
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USDA released a preview of a forthcoming proposal to require states to update their cards on Wednesday after Vice President JD Vance, Attorney General Todd Blanche and other administration officials held a press briefing Wednesday morning in a Cincinnati FBI field office to publicize the administration’s anti-fraud efforts.
Although fraud has been a major focus of the White House, the Trump administration hadn’t done much to fix SNAP skimming until now.
Vance and other administration officials described Americans who had experienced this type of benefit theft at the Wednesday briefing. Vance called the theft “despicable,” though he and other administration officials did not directly mention the vulnerability in the cards as a cause of the problem or talk about updating them.
The briefing was largely focused on the administration’s push to increase mandatory minimum sentencings for fraudsters and a fraud enforcement surge that administration officials say has yielded new indictments. DOJ did not respond to requests from The Washington Sun for a full list of legal actions taken as part of the enforcement surge the administration touted Wednesday.
The forthcoming regulatory proposal would give states two years to update their cards with chips and tap-to-pay technology, an effort the USDA says would cost $283 million. Retailers would also have to make updates to be able to accept the new cards.
Deputy Agriculture Secretary Stephen Vaden posted on X that the changes are expected to prevent billions in stolen benefits and pointed to “years of inaction by the previous administration.”
Congress told the USDA to publish such a rule at the end of 2022. Most credit and debit cards have had chips added since the mid-2010s to cut down on skimming.
USDA’s watchdog estimated in January that between fall 2024 and this month, fraudsters would net $555 million in stolen funds, calling the problem an “ongoing nationwide crisis.”
Right now, one of the primary ways the government is trying to stop the problem is by sending the Secret Service to stores to manually check card readers for the skimming devices.
It’s a laborious process. In total, the Secret Service has visited over 8,600 businesses so far and conducted 56,260 inspections, a spokesperson told The Sun.
So far, only 10 states, including California, Maryland, Oklahoma and Alabama, have updated their cards or are working to do so, according to the USDA.
Other states face rising costs to make these updates, because Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill” passed last summer pushed more administrative costs from the federal government onto states — including card updates. States will also be on the hook to pay for a portion of the benefits themselves next year based on their error rates.
A director from the Government Accountability Office recently said the cost-sharing changes will make it more difficult for states to put money toward benefit theft prevention.
Although the law was passed in the name of cutting SNAP fraud, some states say that they’re forced to delay the move to more secure cards as they try to implement the law’s changes to the program. Enrollment in the program has dropped by 13% since its passage.
“The administration cannot claim to fight SNAP fraud while delaying protections against criminals stealing families’ grocery money,” Gina Plata-Nino, the SNAP director at the nonprofit Food Research and Action Center, told The Sun in a statement, noting that USDA lost more than half the technical experts hired to develop this rule following staffing cuts last year.
“Now USDA proposes chip and tap requirements without dedicated new funding, putting immense pressure on states already implementing H.R. 1 and absorbing new administrative and benefit cost shifts,” said Plata-Nino, who previously worked on nutrition and agriculture for the Biden administration’s Domestic Policy Council. “Families need protection, and states need resources — not another unfunded mandate.”
Fifty-six percent of victims of SNAP theft said they skipped or reduced meals, according to a survey of EBT cardholders by Propel, a company that provides a mobile app for people to manage their benefits. Forty-three percent said they borrowed money or went into debt, and 35% struggled to pay their bills after the theft.
For about two years, Congress funded the replacement of benefits after they’d been stolen.
States refunded over $320 million in that time, but then lawmakers let federal reimbursements lapse in late 2024, after Trump tanked a bipartisan government spending stopgap. The reimbursement provision was dropped from the Republicans’ proposal that ultimately became law.
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