Arizona’s Food Stamp Crisis Is Coming for the Rest of the U.S.

I'm Tracy Bennett, I get to pick the word word every day, which is not as easy as it sounds.

The fun fact about me is that I am descended from a witch who was put on trial in Salem. New York Times games are made by people, like the ones you just heard from. Go to nytimes.com/games to start playing today. Hi there, hi my name is Anna and what's in New York Times, we're talking to people about snap and what it's like in Arizona right now. Can I ask you a couple questions in the shade?

Yeah. Okay, it's hot out today. I'm Jason DeParle, I'm a reporter for the New York Times, I cover poverty issues and I'm here with my colleagues Olivia Nat and Anna Foley were outside a food stamp or snap office in Phoenix, Arizona. I just took a look inside the office, there are people sitting on the floors, there are people in wheelchairs, there are people on crutches, there are people wearing worn out looks of long weights that aren't yet over.

“How many times do you think you've been to this office?”

Oh my goodness.

And this month and this year?

This is going to be like my fifth time. Your fifth time trying to get up. Come with these places. It's just like work itself. For New York Times, I'm Natalie Ketroff.

This is the daily. The United States is undergoing one of the biggest changes to its social safety net in recent history. With huge numbers of people dropping out of the government's food assistance program. No where has it been more dramatic than in Arizona. For some reason, another, my food stamps application keeps getting lost.

You know, quite a lot. I don't have any income. I don't know, no food. But I've been homeless in a couple months. How many meals are you eating a day right now?

One. One. Today, my colleague Jason DeParl explains why so many people there are suddenly losing access to this key benefit. And the implications all this could have for the rest of the country.

It's Wednesday, August 5th. Jason, we want to talk to you today about these drastic changes that have been made to the food Sam program known as SNAP. When Trump's big, beautiful bill passed about a year ago, we understood that Republicans were planning to pay for it by making cuts to the government's welfare programs. You have been following that story all the way to Arizona.

So just walk me through why you went there. Arizona's the place in the country that's had the largest reduction in food stamps since the passage of the big beautiful bill. The rolls there have fallen in half. 450,000 people have lost nutrition aid there. That's just a huge number.

Yes, and includes more than 100,000 children as well.

“And why is that? Why is the drop off been so steep?”

The law imposed dramatic changes in the SNAP program. But mostly deferred those changes until after the midterm elections. Arizona was the state that moved most aggressively to make changes. And Jason, just remind us what those changes actually were. And the argument that Republicans made for why they needed to implement them.

Republican saw SNAP as a bloated program. It had more than doubled in size since 2000.

About one in eight Americans get SNAP and its annual costs had exceeded $100 billion.

They thought it needed raining in. They thought it served as a work disincentive. They thought that offering people nutrition aid persuaded some not to work or not to work as much as they could. They were concerned that some people committed fraud to get on it. But those were all longstanding concerns.

What really drove the changes last year in Congress was the need for money to finance President Trump's tax cuts.

“Which I think it's worth remembering largely went to the wealthy.”

The reason they did what they did when they did it was because they wanted money for President Trump's tax cuts. And how do they go about shrinking the program? What do they actually do? The thing that's gotten the most attention and it's probably the easiest to understand is that they expanded work requirements. More people have to work in order to qualify for benefits. It used to be that people 55 in older work exempt.

Now they've expanded that up to age 65.

Got it. But that's not really the main factor in what's driving the case loads of clients in Arizona. The thing that's really driving this is a change in how SNAP is funded. Historically the federal government had paid all the benefits. States paid part of the administrative costs of running a SNAP program.

But all the food stamp money came from the federal government. But now this new law says that if a state makes too many mistakes and we're mostly talking small administrative errors, they'll have to pay up to 15% of the benefits.

And in some states that cost more than a billion dollars a year.

Basically what the federal government is doing if I understand this correctly is telling the states that if they mess up their payments, they're going to end up shouldering part of the cost of this program and it could be a lot of money. Yes, they're basically saying if you can't keep what's known as your error rate down, you'll lose access to a bunch of federal money. So much money that some states may not be able to keep running the program at all.

“I think that's worth stopping to consider for a moment. Can you imagine a state without a food stamp program?”

So in order to avoid a $300 million penalty and potentially losing the program altogether, Arizona officials made dramatic changes to the program and the roles instantly began falling. They fell much farther and much faster than Arizona officials imagined. And what we found in our reporting was that these are people who buy in large remain eligible for aid,

but simply can't get it because they're stuck in webs of rib tape.

Hey, I saw you on the phone earlier. My name's Olivia. I'm here with the New York Times. I'm talking to people about whether or not they're receiving or snap enough. Oh, girl. No. I did everything. Still no help. One of the people caught in that red tape is a woman, my colleague, Olivia, and that and I met outside of a food stamp office in Phoenix. Her name is Alejandra Casillas.

I've been applying since December, right? I did that in January. They had me waiting until February. I can't be calling them all the time because I have a job and kids to take care of. But yeah, I called them on these five times in the morning. She's 28 years old. She's a mother of two, and she's working, but she doesn't make enough to feed her family.

She gave us a version of a story we had heard in other places of notices that were impossible to comply with.

Melinda, you see that? March 30, 20, 26. And it says right here that I have to do the interview by February 28, 2026. So a month after they said this is the deadline, that's when you got the piece of paper. I'm like, when am I supposed to do? Do I look like I can create a time machine and go back in time? Why was it so hard for her to get her benefits, Jason?

Did she explain that?

“Once you apply for snap benefits, you have to have an interview with a special case worker and it has to happen within two weeks of the application.”

But you call in those two weeks and nobody answers. Nobody answers. And tomorrow is the last day that I had to complete my interview, and then they close the cases too. But she couldn't get through on the phone to have the interview. So she left her home, came in, to snap office on her day off, and I told her you can't do the interview here. You have to call.

I can even call it right now too, and they'll drop it. Can we try? Yes. Welcome to the Department of Economic Security. I'm only a system's administration to continue in English, plus one. We listen to her, make the call. Our record show, he needs to complete an interview.

Due to extremely high call volumes, we are not able to accept your call. We apologize for the inconvenience.

“That's how it is all the time that we call.”

That call like others went nowhere. They told her she'd just have to wait for a call back. So now here she is in limbo, unable to get access to food stamps. But what really struck me about her was just how angry and defeated she seemed. She told she'd been going to food banks, that she'd stopped breastfeeding her child, because she feared she lacked injury.

I don't know. I haven't been thinking about going to a grocery store, just put a whole bunch of food, and run out. And then she said something like, really remarkable. She said she'd been having fantasies about stealing food. I will sign up for Instagram, I said driver, and keep the groceries for my kids. I'm at that point.

She wasn't just defiant if she was just saying.

Then I do think it through.

“I'm like, they're pushing me to that point, but my kids need me.”

So I can't be breaking no loss. So I'm like stuck, you know. Here it is. This is the way I'm living right now. She was really desperate, obviously. Yes, and part of what was remarkable about Alejandro's story is that there was nothing remarkable about it.

We heard echoes of that with almost everybody we talked to.

I mean, if one or two people tells you a story like that, you can always think, well, maybe it's an extraordinary circumstance.

But it was the norm, not the exception in Arizona. I have to say Jason, hearing that, and hearing how common it sounds like Alejandro's experience is, it sounds like the system completely broke down in a sense. How did that happen?

“It did completely broke down. It was a perfect storm.”

But a lot of it can be traced back to the decision Arizona made to change the paperwork requirements. It used to be that applicants could just walk in the office and tell a case where how many people lived in the household and who they were. Now applicants had to go to neighbors or friends and get a written declaration of who lived in the household. And if the neighbor or friend failed to sign the letter or failed to put their phone number on the letter, you'd have to start all over again. It used to be if you had pan handling income, you gave the office your best guess of how much you made.

Now they asked applicants with pan handling income to go back and get written documentation of the money people had dropped in the jars. What? They knew that there was no way that people could go get that. They said that to us. When we talked to them, they rolled their eyes and said, yes, this is absurd, but this is what we have to do. And in the end, if they can't get the written documentation, we'll take their word for it. But we have to make them go out and try. And of course, if you make people go out and try, a lot of them just don't come back.

And another thing that made things worse is that Arizona just happened to make a deep-cutting caseworkers at the same time the federal government was passing this bill. So it lost a third of its caseworkers at the very time it was asking people to submit more paperwork. Meaning there were way fewer people working in these offices processing these claims. The staff was just reduced.

More paperwork fewer people to look at it. Yes. Right. And so it's that combination of factors in Arizona that then leads to half a million people suddenly losing their benefits.

Yes, and boy did affect them in profound ways. People were skipping meals. People were having household quarrels over food. They were selling blood plasma to get money to buy food. They were falling behind on the rent. And remember, these are people who buy in large remain eligible for SNAP. That was definitely the case with a woman we met named Dean McDonald.

We'll be right back. I'm Danny Blum, a journalist at the New York Times. I spend a lot of my time reporting on GLP1 medications. People call them weight loss drugs. They are doing so much more in the body and there's a lot of hope pinned on them. I am spending part of truly every single workday making sure that I am up to date on the latest science. I really want to make sure that I am talking to the leading researchers, keeping an eye on child results.

And that I'm talking to people who are on these medications to learn more from them to translate the really messy and murky and shifting science into a way that people can understand. It's really important to have evidence-based answers to some of the questions that people have, especially about something as vital as a medication they're taking.

“That's what you get when you subscribe to the New York Times.”

If you already subscribed, thanks. If you'd like to, go to mmytimes.com/subscribe. Sorry, she's good morning. These are 65 year-old grandmother in Mesa, Arizona. Can't be more than five feet tall. She was wearing a knit beret. And that was Tobias. He's going to work.

Hi, Tobias. Everybody come in. Oh, thank you. That was your grandson? One of them. I can't swear that she hugged me when I walked in, but it felt like she did. I think she did. Well, make yourself at home. I made this for you.

Oh my god. What a spread.

You're biscuits. They're just biscuits.

“And more than biscuits. We were there to talk to her about food stamps and food insecurity.”

And she'd spent the previous day baking biscuits and assembling a fruit platter for us. These are choro donuts. So they were having choro donuts. They were fantastic. I found them in a very good price.

And then I quickly fried them and dunked them in cinnamon sugar. Wow. And then all of this fruit I found for a dollar each yesterday. And I was like, I can't pass it up. So anyway.

The last thing I wanted to do was to impose on her like that. But that's an expression of who she is. She's a very warm, welcoming grandmotherly woman. And what's these story? Would she tell you about her experience with snap?

So we sat around our table and she told us about her life. It'd been a pretty exciting life at one point. It was a roadie locally. I was unloading tracks, pulling cables, hanging lights. They were not kind of stuff like that.

And I started my first job with boys to men for wardrobe.

That's how long ago.

“She was a kind of roadie. She was a wardrobe technician for traveling rock bands.”

The quick changes you see. That's what we do. I told you Jimmy Buffett, Britney Spears, was asked to tour with Marilyn Manson, asked to tour with slipknot. She went on tour with Britney Spears and Jimmy Buffett.

Awesome. The dream of a lifetime. And I was really doing well. I worked really hard to get where I got to. But when she was in her early '40s, her son fell into some trouble.

And that's when my career was over. And she wound up taking care of five grandsons. But I had to make a choice. I didn't want them going to the state. They needed family.

For a while after taking in the grandkids, she worked. She had a job at a racetrack among other things. But eventually, she needed to spend full time taking care of the grandkids. And she turned to snap for help. I felt like it was a way to help us.

“But I never thought I would be on it forever.”

About 15 years ago, she started receiving snap. And has been on it since. Without snap, we would have starved. We would have starved. Or maybe we wouldn't have starved.

We would have not had the proper nutrition for sure. She was receiving about $700 a month in snap aid.

That's about a third of her income.

The rest mostly comes from social security. I can make it happen on 700 a month. With even with them. I was buying four gallons of milk every other day. Four gallons of milk.

I mean, it's stretching. But I learned. If somebody, if I say I'm going big grocery shopping, don't expect to see me for four to six hours. That's what I'm doing.

I'm going to the discount store first. And then I'm going to the bread store. Then I'm going to go to the fruit and veggie store. I'm going to see where the sales are. And I'm going to go there.

And that's what I'm going to do. And then last fall, all of a sudden, the benefits stopped. And why? Why do they stop? What happened? Last fall, these benefits were up for renewal. Once a year, people on snap have to go through this.

Well, I got a notice that I had to re-new, which was nothing new. And it was October of 25. Well, what was going on in October 25? God, we were shut down.

It always been matter of fact for her.

You submit your income or income hadn't changed. You submit your address or address hadn't changed. And I thought great. I got a renew in the middle of all of this. So I did my application.

Like I was supposed to do. And got it turned in. She found her paperwork in October in the middle of the government shutdown. The food stamp program was in disarray nationwide. She didn't get an answer.

And she wasn't particularly worried at that time. Everything seemed good. And I thought, OK, it's going to come in. And it didn't come in. And then the next month, she didn't get an answer again.

What happened when you missed your second payment? How did you feel? Angry, frustrated. And scared. I mean, like how am I going to say, I've got rice and beans.

We've got other things. But there's going to come a point when we don't have butter. We don't have milk. We're out of cheese. The next month, she goes down to the office itself.

And the lady told me, well, you're one of many. There are people that are still waiting from September. And I said, what's going on? What's happening? And she said, well, we had 1,200 workers.

And so they were backed up. And she said, hang in there. They're coming. Thanksgiving comes and goes. Christmas comes and goes at the start of the new year. My benefits and come in January.

And I was like, something's just not OK here. I said, calling, calling, calling. And I couldn't get through. She makes 100 calls in a single month. Still can't get through.

And then, in front of about mid-February,

I finally reach a real person.

The guy says to me, they closed your case. When she finally does in February, they tell her case has been closed. I said, what? I haven't gotten a letter.

I haven't gotten anything on messaging. You know, on the laptop. I haven't gotten anything in the mail. I haven't gotten anything. Why did they close my case?

Why? Why is her case closed? The case worker tells her that she submitted the wrong form. That's not right. That's not possible. And I said, hold on. Let me pull my stuff and look.

And he said, what's what I'm seeing? He was very nice. He wasn't rude. I wasn't rude to him. And I pulled my stuff.

And I said, oh, my gosh. I did pull the wrong gate.

“Do you get some little bit of income from the child welfare system?”

She submitted an income from from 2024. When she should have submitted an income form from 2025.

She'd never done that before.

But this time she made a mistake. I said, okay, I can pull it right now. The right date. And I can get it downloaded in the computer. And get it done.

And he said, well, they closed your case. So I can't re-work it. And I said, don't we? Aren't we supposed to have like 30 days to fix things? To make things right if there's something wrong?

And he said, yes. Before we were, that's how it worked. He said, let me talk to his my supervisor. He came back and he wouldn't let him open. He said he's supervisor would not let him re-open my case

to correct that document. And with the new changes to snap, that mistake was enough to disenroll her from the program. It's worth saying that denying eligible people doesn't actually count as a mistake under the new system.

I was very, very angry. I was very angry. I didn't come in my room for a little bit. But I was like, why are they doing this to people? Why are they hurting people?

You know, I will survive. We take food out of my mouth, I'll figure it out. But I've got children amazing. Children need to be growing healthy. She realizes she has two choices.

She can appeal and try to get that decision overturned. If she does that, she might be able to get all the back benefits from the months of age. She's owed, or she can start all over again and file a new application. In which case, she wouldn't get the back benefits.

The very nice case workers she reached on the phone and tried very hard to be helpful told her that she should appeal. So she did. And how did that go?

“How many times do you think you've called the appeals office?”

Hmm, at least once a day. Have you ever reached a person? No.

She never heard anything back.

It's been five months. She's still waiting. Do I think members of Congress in writing the new laws intended to take snap away from 65 year old grandmothers because of a casual mistake?

No. But the critics said at the time that this kind of bureaucratic gridlock was a foreseeable element of the new rules that they put in place. And in fact, many people warned that these new administrative rules would throw the program into disarray.

Jason, it sounds like this is how the federal changes to snap actually can end up forcing people off the program. Because now states are so incentivized to reduce their errors that they do so perhaps at the cost of actually providing this benefit. Exactly.

If the state had sent D her payment with that incorrect form in its files, it would have counted as an error. So you can see it becomes much more risky for the state to provide benefits than to simply close the case altogether. So the net effect of all this is that it's become much more difficult

for eligible families like D's to get access to the program, even though they're entitled to it. And for the Republicans who advocated for these changes, does a story like D's give them pause?

“Or do they see the system working as they intended?”

Are they actually encouraged, maybe, by the notion that the state is taking this seriously and trying to take more accountability for how it spends taxpayer money? I don't think anybody's in favor of administrative errors.

to save money to keep public support for the program.

The question is what cost?

“For the most part, I think, Republicans have celebrated the case load declines”

without looking too closely at what's behind them. The top Republican in the Arizona State Senate said there's massive case load decline because there was massive fraud. Nationally, the roles are down about four and a half million people or maybe 10% of the people getting snap of lift the roles.

The White House has celebrated this as proof that President Trump's program is working. So has the Secretary of Agriculture or Brook Rollins between them they've argued that the roles are falling because they're rooting out fraud or borrowing undocumented immigrants from accessing the program.

Certainly in a program as large as snap, there's always going to be individual fraud.

But I haven't seen anything that would suggest wide-scale systemic fraud that could explain this kind of case load decline. Certainly, that's not what we saw in Arizona. And I don't think there's evidence of it in other states either. You said that Arizona has been the first to see this kind of impact

because it moved so fast to make these changes to comply with a big beautiful bill.

“Are we expecting to see this dramatic of an effect in other states?”

I think most people would guess that Arizona is an extreme example,

but we don't really know nationwide the rules haven't taken place yet.

If you recall Congress delayed the changes they made till after the midterm elections. So for the most part, we haven't seen the impact of these changes yet. But there are reasons to suspect that other states may respond in similar ways to Arizona. Starting in November, the federal government's going to cut in half the amount of administrative money it gives states to run the program. That could cause states to lay off case workers just as Arizona did.

Some other states have already had caseload declines of 15 to 20%. Some states have very low error rates and don't need to change much. Some states have extremely high error rates and have to make radical changes to avoid big federal penalties. We don't know enough about how they'll respond, how good their computer systems are, how many case workers they have to predict with much confidence how these changes will affect the case load nationwide.

But if you look at Arizona, there's reason to be concerned. Jason, you've been covering poverty for four decades. What are you thinking about this moment about how significant it is? I'm thinking about what an important program snap is. It snap is the closest thing the United States has to a universal income. It serves such a wide variety of people. It serves the working poor, serves children, it serves the elderly, it serves veterans.

And it provides a basic commodity, boom, it was clear from the moment the law passed that this was landmark legislation. But I don't think anybody expected the degree of case load decline that we've seen in Arizona. You know, I thought about a smaller snap program. I've imagined a snap program with more work requirements. I've imagined a snap program with lower benefits. I don't think I've ever imagined a landscape in which a snap program simply didn't exist. And it's just mind-boggling to think that these penalties these costs could be so steep some states might choose to end the program altogether.

That's a real possibility. Will Jason? Thanks for being here. Thank you Natalie. What's life been like since your case was closed?

“It's draining. Because I get up in the morning and I think what are we going to have for dinner?”

What do they have to eat? What do they have to snack on? Do they have breakfast foods? Do they have enough care to eat? Do they have enough baby tomatoes to eat? Do we have enough to make a salad for dinner tonight? When you take a drop of $700 in your budget that you're used to that being the food, you then have to figure out where that food is going to come from. I'm sure these people are taken advantage of it. I'm sure there are.

But I think it's inhumane to take food from people. What do we do in here?

Here's what else you need to know today.

“We're in talks with the Iranians and I think there is a chance we may have a deal today or tomorrow”

to open the street and move towards a more normalized position in this conflict.

On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson and Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that negotiations

“to reopen the street of our moves are making progress.”

Under the framework being considered, ships entering the Persian Gulf would have to travel through a channel controlled by Iran

while outbound ships would travel through a channel near Oman.

Today's episode was produced by Olivia Nat, Anna Foley, and Carlos Prieto, with help from Rikina Vetsky. It was edited by Mark George with help from Patricia Willens and contains music by Pat McCusker, Alicia B. E. tube, Dan Powell, and Marion Luzano. Our theme music is by Wonderley. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the Daily. I'm Natalie Kitrolep. See you tomorrow.

I'm MJ Franklin, and this week on the Book Review podcast, Book Club is back. We are discussing Douglas Stewart's John of John. This is not a spoiler. I promise, but Cal is gay and so is John. Everybody knows each other's business, everybody has an opinion about each other's business,

“and everybody has a secret. Everybody has a secret. Everybody has a secret. Everybody has a secret. Everybody has a secret.”

Everybody's hair is full of secret. Listen to the book review wherever you get your podcasts.