Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins recently stated that people on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will need to reapply, reports the New York Post. The U.S. Department of Agriculture oversees SNAP, and the stated reasons for people needing to reapply is to cut out waste, fraud, and abuse.
Data from Republican states shows that there are 186,000 cases of fraud. She says “can you imagine” the amount of fraud that will be found when data from the Democrat-run states are analyzed. This is especially interesting with SNAP supporting almost 42 million Americans and costing the government close to $100 billion.
"These are the things that we're uncovering that, for years, no one has really ever dug into because the feds didn't have the system in place to do it," Rollins told Newsmax. "But we do now."
The Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) has for years called on agencies and legislators to reform SNAP and other programs.
Tim Puglisi, associate fellow at FGA, told AFN that fraud has been a major problem. According to him, about half the states are sharing data with the federal government.
"They audited that food stamp enrollment data and found nearly 200,000 deceased men and women on the food stamp rolls and about half a million people receiving more than one SNAP payment or food stamp payment with a single Social Security Number,” informs Puglisi. “So, I would encourage a push to have all SNAP or food stamp enrollees reapply."
Reform efforts are not new. President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996. The GOP-backed legislation imposed work requirements and time limits on welfare benefits and gave states flexibility in how they administered assistance to low-income families.
Since then, federal and state legislators have used loopholes to waive things to allow more people to enroll. That, says Puglisi, should not have happened for "a program that is very important to seniors, pregnant women, and low-income children who rely on this to have food on the table every day."
