Agriculture focuses on SNAP fraud, while experts worry EBT theft will go unabated
The Trump administration’s Agriculture secretary says that her department is focused on fraud, but this issue, called skimming, is largely absent from her talking points.
Advocates and experts say that the Agriculture Department isn’t doing enough to fix the problem, which could be drastically reduced if the government were only to move SNAP to newer, more secure cards. Nearly 42 million people rely on the program a month, which is administered by states and overseen by USDA.
Fraudsters have been targeting the cards used to deliver it since at least 2021, taking over $320 million from Americans who rely on the program for food — though that’s an undercount, as Agriculture stopped collecting data on the issue last year.
The electronic benefit transfer, or EBT, cards used to deliver SNAP don’t have microchips embedded in them like most credit and debit cards, making them vulnerable to skimming. Criminals use devices installed on point-of-sale terminals to steal the card’s information when it's swiped, enabling those bad actors to create new, cloned cards and take the benefits.
Taking action to switch to more secure cards ultimately falls to states, and in late 2022 Congress asked USDA to force states to do so via rulemaking, as part of a funding bill. Agriculture still hasn’t done so, and only California has moved to chip cards so far.
Funding is a huge hurdle in the effort, and something that Congress and USDA could help with. But it’s expected to become more difficult with the changes to SNAP included in President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” signed into law over the summer, experts say.
“We know what works to protect against skimming and we are not doing it,” Betsy Gwin, senior economic justice attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, told Nextgov/FCW. “The federal government has really abdicated its responsibility, and instead is focusing on false narratives about recipient fraud and other issues, while ignoring a glaring issue over which it does have control and responsibility.”
In the absence of more secure cards, the Secret Service has been going door to door to hunt for these devices in stores that accept SNAP.
Perpetrators or victims?
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has been saying for months that fraud in SNAP is “rampant,” and has been pushing states to hand over sensitive data on claimants in the name of rooting it out.
Earlier this month, she said that the administration will withhold federal funding from states that refuse to hand over the data. While nearly 30 mostly Republican-led states have turned over the data, another twenty-plus have sued over the request, and a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction on the demand in October.
“We have sent Democrat states yet another request for data, and if they fail to comply, they will be provided with formal warning that USDA will pull their administrative funds,” a USDA spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW.
There’s no single measure for the various kinds of SNAP fraud — like individuals defrauding the system, retailers trafficking benefits, skimming and other scams — so the issue can be difficult to quantify.
But experts say that the main source of fraud is from organized crime groups, not individual beneficiaries defrauding the program.
“The indications that we have from long-standing data reporting from states is that intentional fraud by participants is relatively rare,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst focused on food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The most damaging form of fraud in SNAP is fraud where the low-income recipients are the victims, not the perpetrators.”
“The narrative that this program is rife with fraud … is really untrue and harmful, and is really only supporting the federal administration's attempts to defund the program,” said Gwin.
SNAP has a rigorous process for verifying people applying for benefits, which includes an interview with an eligibility worker and back-end quality control checks to measure accuracy, said Bergh. USDA itself calls its setup “one of the most rigorous quality control systems in the federal government.”
States reported $68 million in established fraud claims, or 0.06% of benefits, in fiscal 2023. That category includes eligibility fraud and trafficking, in which SNAP benefits are exchanged for cash, said Bergh. The most recent retailer trafficking estimate, from 2015 to 2017, is 1.6%. This is when a retailer exchanges SNAP for cash instead of food.
The payment error rate for SNAP — a quality control measure of accuracy, not fraud, meant to capture if households getting SNAP are eligible and getting the right amount of benefits — was 10.93% in fiscal 2024. USDA itself says that these errors are “largely unintentional” mistakes that can be on the part of the state agency or SNAP beneficiary.
In fiscal 2021, the last year for which the agency released a more detailed report on that measure, states attempted to collect $54 million in overpayments related to recipient trafficking and recipient application fraud; $85 million in overpayments due to state agency errors; and $352 million in overpayments resulting from recipient errors, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Meanwhile, Propel, a company that provides a mobile app for people to manage their benefits, estimates that criminals have stolen $349 million in the first half of 2025 alone, mostly in food benefits, although cash benefits can also be skimmed.
USDA replaced $320 million in stolen funds between Oct 2022 and Dec. 20, 2024, after which Congress stopped funding federal replacements for skimmed SNAP benefits. That amounts to 0.2% of benefits.
“It's very troubling that we have not seen significant action on a real form of fraud that is very harmful to millions of low-income families,” said Bergh. “Families are losing the benefits that they need to afford groceries, and in most states they have no recourse whatsoever.”
Data demands
A spokesperson for USDA told Nextgov/FCW that Rollins is focused on ending “incessant abuse of SNAP” and “indiscriminate welfare fraud.”
“Rates of fraud were only previously assumed, and President Trump is doing something about it,” they said in a statement. “Part of that work includes ongoing analysis of state data, further regulatory work and improved collaboration with states.”
Rollins said on Fox News in November that she asked states for SNAP data early in her tenure so that the controversial Department of Government Efficiency could review the rolls for undocumented immigrants, tying the issue to the unfounded claim that Democrats are “buying” elections using illegal immigration.
Undocumented immigrants have never been eligible for SNAP. Some lawfully present immigrants are eligible for the program, although the “big, beautiful bill” restricted who qualifies, making some previously eligible people, like refugees, ineligible. There is no evidence of widespread fraud on the part of undocumented immigrants or other immigrants not eligible for SNAP but receiving the benefit, said Bergh.
The data being requested from states includes sensitive information like names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers — which effectively creates a new, centralized target for bad actors, said Bergh, when USDA already has long-standing quality control reviews for the program.
The Trump administration has been pursuing various efforts to access and combine different sets of sensitive government data, which has sparked privacy and surveillance concerns. The government has also been trying to use additional sets of data for immigration enforcement that it didn’t previously, such as IRS data.
At a cabinet meeting earlier this month, Rollins said that the department had found 186,000 deceased people receiving SNAP benefits and 500,000 people receiving benefits in more than one state during its review of the data states have supplied USDA so far, which goes back to 2020.
USDA hasn’t provided additional details on these numbers.
States failing to verify eligibility factors like employment or citizenship is a leading cause of quality control issues in SNAP, according to the Government Accountability Office.
But states already check their rolls against the Social Security Administration’s death files, said Bergh, and USDA has been building out a system to detect duplicate participation. States are also already required to use a Department of Homeland Security system to check participants’ immigration status.
Rollins has also sparked confusion by saying that all SNAP recipients would have to reapply for benefits, even though the program already requires regular recertifications, something the agency has since largely walked back. Rollins is asking Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to re-certify participants in certain parts of the state in the aftermath of a fraud crisis unfolding in Minnesota programs, although the SNAP program in the state hasn’t been implicated in that at this point.
The big lift of EBT modernization
Although Rollins has talked a lot about fraud in the media in recent months, the same isn’t true for skimming.
She mentioned “thousands and thousands of illegal use of the EBT card” on Fox News in November, but it’s not clear if she was talking about skimming specifically. More recently, one of Rollins’ senior advisors told the Associated Press that, “we know there are instances of fraud committed by our friends and neighbors, but also transnational crime rings.”
A USDA spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW that the department is working on preventing EBT theft with grants to states, mobile payment pilots, encouraging states to allow individuals to lock their EBT cards and automatically block out-of-state and online SNAP transactions and by implementing chip cards, although they didn’t provide additional details. As Nextgov/FCW has previously reported, the grant funding is not expected to meet the scale of the funding states need to move to chip cards.
Experts and advocates say that the department needs to do more for card modernization.
“I don't think they’re doing enough” to address skimming and other vectors being used by transnational crime rings, said Haywood Talcove, the CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ government group, although he largely supports the administration’s efforts to gather data to look for fraud.
The biggest problems with SNAP fraud aren’t due to individual benefit recipients; they’re with organization groups, he said. They defraud the program not only by skimming, but also using identity theft, cloned devices used to run fake EBT transactions at scale and algorithmic tools used to predict the numbers on EBT cards, he said.
The USDA spokesperson did say that the department is disabling illegal retail point-of-sale devices — something the USDA deputy secretary has posted on X about, saying that the agency has blocked over 450 counterfeit retailer EBT terminals — and replacing retailer authorization numbers that were identified as compromised.
But the changes made in Republicans’ tax and spending law will in fact make it more difficult for states to move to chip-enabled cards, said Rebecca Piazza, former chief of staff of USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, which delivers SNAP, and current executive director of safety net strategy at Code for America, a civic tech nonprofit.
States will have to implement new policy changes, like work requirements, and deal with increased costs to run the program, leaving little left over to pay for card upgrades.
As of May, USDA has also lost over half of the technical experts it hired to write the regulations to move states to chip cards, according to GAO. The Trump administration has pursued various avenues to shrink the size of the federal workforce.
“We know the biggest source of fraud, which is EBT benefit theft,” said Piazza. “And there’s a tool that’s available to stop this.”
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