Congress Must Act to Ensure Stolen SNAP Benefits Continue to Be Restored to Innocent Families

Each year, thousands of families participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) have their benefits stolen. Even though SNAP benefits are issued on debit-like cards, SNAP participants don’t have the opportunity for financial restitution the same way that debit cardholders do. As a result, households in every state too often lose critical food assistance and face agonizing decisions around buying groceries and paying for other basic needs. Congress should extend the current temporary SNAP benefit replacement policy to ensure that families whose benefits are stolen don’t lose their ability to put food on the table. This extension should be included in the forthcoming short-term appropriations “continuing resolution” since the current temporary provision expires on September 30.

The source of this recent surge in SNAP benefit theft is what’s known as “skimming.” Skimmers exploit a security weakness in SNAP Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards by putting hidden devices on card-swiping machines to illegally capture EBT card information and PINs at checkout. They then use that stolen information to drain an unsuspecting household’s account, often shortly after monthly benefits have been loaded onto the card. For low-income households who have few resources to fall back on, discovering in the checkout line that they have no SNAP benefits left to pay for their groceries is devastating.

Thanks to a two-year provision of the Consolidated Appropriations Act (CAA), over 125,000 households — including families with young kids, people with disabilities, and seniors on fixed incomes — have had at least some of their SNAP benefits restored after they were stolen between October 2022 and December 2023. The provision has led to the replacement of over $60 million in stolen benefits nationwide. It also requires state SNAP agencies to report to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on their plans for processing stolen benefit claims.

An example in Massachusetts shows how important those restored benefits are. A client of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute — a mom of two teenagers — lost all of her SNAP benefits ($766) on March 1, the same day her monthly allotment was deposited into her account; she checked her balance that morning only to find that her account had already been drained. She had no idea what to do or how she would feed her family. Fortunately, she was able to go to a SNAP office that day and file a replacement claim. The agency replaced her benefits quickly, preventing ongoing financial strain due to the theft. State SNAP agencies across the country have been able to provide similar relief to families thanks to the CAA provision.

State SNAP agencies and USDA are required to improve EBT card security and to increase the tools available to protect families’ benefits against skimming. In the coming months, California and Oklahoma will be the first states to switch to chip-enabled EBT cards, which are designed to avoid the need to swipe a card and thus avoid skimming. USDA plans to issue additional regulations on EBT card security later this fall, and members of Congress are exploring whether further statutory protections are needed. However, any security enhancements or other new measures will likely take several years to implement.

In the meantime, victims of skimming face the possibility of losing benefits unless Congress authorizes USDA to replace stolen benefits after September 30, 2024. As members of both parties have urged, Congress should extend the CAA provision to ensure that harmed households retain access to food assistance until more secure EBT card technology is deployed.