Genius Agriculture Sec. Brooke Rollins Will Eliminate SNAP Fraud By Eliminating SNAP

Even though the end of the government shutdown restored funding — which the Trump administration had illegally paused — for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins still wants to punish poor people for being poor, because after all she’s a Republican. Rollins says that sometime real soon, every last person receiving SNAP must reapply for their benefits, to root out all the fraud she’s certain is in the system but can’t prove.

This is yet another of those stories where a Trump administration official — often Great Leader himself! — blurts some stupid shit on TV and then scrambles to start making the stupid shit an actual national policy. They are not big on planning, which is a hopelessly liberal and evil Big Government way of doing things. Every last thing these fuckers do is equivalent to a panicked “C” student throwing their term paper together without much research at the last minute, only with enough typos to prove it wasn’t written by ChatGPT. (Yes, I know you can tell ChatGPT to toss in random errors to mimic C-student writing, but actual dipshits generally don’t think to do that.)

On Newsmax last week, Rollins rolled out her genius “plan” to make all 42 million SNAP recipients start over again so all the fraud would go away. She’ll just “have everyone reapply for their benefits, make sure that everyone that’s taking a taxpayer-funded benefit through … food stamps, that they literally are vulnerable and they can’t survive without it.”

While SNAP income limits have always been stringent, the program until now has never imposed, to the best of our knowledge, an “at death’s door without it” criterion.

Rollins made a very convincing case, if you’re easily impressed by unsubstantiated claims and numbers that sound big, that the program is simply riddled with fraud. She said that based on information submitted by 29 mostly red states to the administration, “186,000 deceased men and women and children in this country are receiving a check.” She also claimed that the department had turned up half a million cases of people getting SNAP twice under the same name. Wow! What large numbers! You need to throw a lot of large numbers around to make SNAP seem like a big source of fraud, since most recipients only get an average of $6 a day in food assistance.

Even leaving aside whatever brainfart had her saying that anyone at all gets a “check” from SNAP (it’s all EBT cards), Rollins offered no evidence to support the numbers or how they were derived. Presumably they checked the states’ lists of names and Social Security numbers — or maybe just names, since some states only sent those — against Social Security death records. USDA hasn’t followed up with any raw data, shut up. And don’t you go pointing out that even if the 186,000 potential cases of dead people getting SNAP were real (and they assuredly aren’t), that would only be half a percent of the 42 million people in the program.

As we’ve seen again and again in similar wild claims of “voter fraud,” such comparisons of one database against another are prone to all sorts of error, like confusing dead people with living people who have the same (or even similar) names, or finding a whole lot of “James Smiths” or “Maria Garcias” — some even sharing birthdays! — getting SNAP or voting in different states. (Name your child Bean, Lemuel, or Hepsibah to avoid such confusion.)

Closer examination ALWAYS whittles down the total number of potential cases of both voting and benefits fraud, and closer investigation almost always turns up errors, not someone deliberately getting benefits (or voting) in a dead person’s name. Sure, fraud happens. But frauding is extremely rare in both cases, because the systems have lots of verification built into them.

Errors account for the vast majority of “improper” SNAP payments, where someone gets benefits in the wrong amount for a variety of reasons. (Roughly half of overpayments are actually the fault of states’ processing errors, too.) But it sure does get MAGA voters excited to blur the distinction between errors and fraud, because everyone knows poor people are of low moral character, or they wouldn’t be poor.

How’s this for a shocker? For all her claims that SNAP is rife with fraud, Rollins told Newsmax that the Administration has arrested a whopping 120 people and charged them with “committing fraud on the system.” Heck, were it not for the shutdown, maybe that would have been double! Or another 20 or 30 cases, who knows?

Since Rollins promised last week that the entire SNAP program will need to be rebuilt from scratch, there’s been a whole lot of nothing in terms of details on how everyone currently in the program is supposed to “reapply” or how the feds and states would process that. USA Today asked USDA about that a few days ago, and you may be astonished, dear reader, to learn that instead of a plan to make 42 million people go through a new application process, “the agency said it was using ‘standard recertification processes for households’ as part of ‘further regulatory work’ to ensure ‘fraud, waste,’ and ‘abuse’ are controlled.”

As USA Today explains, SNAP participants already must “recertify their information at least every 6 months, depending on the state and their status.” Actually reapplying entirely would be a lot more work, and would be significantly more expensive for states to process, especially following the Big Bullshit Blowjobs for Billionaires Bill, which shifted a higher share of administrative costs to states to “save” federal money.

A completely new application for benefits would mean

completing an online application and submitting pertinent documents such as proof of identity and citizenship, proof of residence, proof of income and household expenses, medical expenses, and the like. Applicants must then complete an eligibility interview, wait for state verification and then wait for a decision from the state, which typically takes about 30 days.

Processing all that for 42 million people would cost states and the feds a shit-ton of money and would be a massive amount of work for a federal workforce that Trump keeps cutting. It would inevitably be such a nightmarish fuck-tussle that tens or hundreds of thousands of people would likely lose their benefits, which Rollins et al. might later decide is a great idea.

For now, though, we can see why, as we suspected, USDA seems happy to just keep having the states do the recertifications they always have, and to call it a win. It’s the Trump administration though, so it’s hard to tell how much stock we should put in the agency’s “yeah, we’re gonna half-ass it” statement.

Wow, that was a grueling research paper process, which consisted of taking somebody’s roommate’s paper that got a B+ and printing it out with a different name and a new first paragraph. Excellent job, Secretary Rollins! Do you want a parade and a statue, or would you be happy with a private jet or something?

And That’s How Donald Trump Solved ‘Healthcare’

[USA Today / Newsmax / Snopes / Politico]

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