USDA head says 'everyone' on SNAP will now have to reapply
Mood
heated
Sentiment
negative
Category
politics
Key topics
USDA
SNAP
welfare policy
poverty
The USDA head announced that all SNAP recipients will have to reapply, sparking outrage and concerns about the impact on vulnerable populations and the potential for bureaucratic obstructionism.
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>“Can you imagine when we get our hands on the blue state data what we’re going to find?”
What morally bankrupt, divisive leadership.
They get two lists of people (list of votes/program enrollees and one of "dead" people, etc) that were not designed/cleaned for this, and do a very loose match and then declare just based on that it must be fraud.
Are there some that are fraud, probably, a bit of that is just the cost of dealing with the public. Private companies get it just as much.
But I'll bet almost all of it is either bad matching, poor record keeping, or honest mistakes.
So they're making everyone reapply because their disbursement headcount is off by less than 1% (180k vs 41M). It's hard not look at stuff like this and not see gross oppression.
0: https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-federal-gover...
1: https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/a-closer-look-...
We're on the downward slope now, but it will take awhile.
The future requires investments in education, infrastructure, healthcare, and energy generation (in particular, cheap energy), and we're simply not doing it. Being lonely sucks, and the US govt has alienated long standing allies. Economically they doesn't bode well.
For example, the 40 billion dollar bailout of the Argentine economy.
Or even better we could give some more money to Argentina.
Ahem.
[0] https://www.cbpp.org/blog/snap-food-assistance-is-a-sound-in...
There are much bigger wastes of money. Tax cuts for billionaires for example. Even SNAP itself is effectively welfare for billionaires - it means they don't have to pay a fair wage.
May I recommend leaving out the snark in the future - it gives the impression that you are a heartless person who wants others to suffer. Your life is short - go outside and touch the grass, it'll do you some good.
It seems the biggest fraud and waste here is in the administration.
If (assuming correct) it is 1.5%, then it is 1.5%
Which is a tiny percentage. That's how percentages work. Adding that it is a large number out of a huge number doesn't change anything, it is still 1.5% which means not much at all.
>“Can you imagine when we get our hands on the blue state data what we’re going to find?” she asked during a Thursday appearance on Newsmax’s “Rob Schmitt Tonight.”
Forcing all SNAP recipients to reapply over such a small discrepancy (> 1% of the 1.5%) is cruel and spiteful. And the comment by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins quoted above is disrespectful and unprofessional at best. But none of this is a surprise, given this administration's past history.
[1] https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-spends-more-o...
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.*
> Bobba [DOGE engineer] had sorted people with a Social Security number by age and found more than 12 million over 120 years old still listed in the agency’s data. Bobba said he knew these people weren’t actually receiving benefits and tried to tell Musk so, to no avail, according to SSA officials. Dudek [SSA employee] watched in horror as Trump then shared the same statistics with both houses of Congress and a national television audience, claiming the numbers proved “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.”
[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-doge-social-securi...
Right? Why is anyone taking this as a good faith number, let alone a fact, given who said it and where it was said?
It’s quite clearly made up nonsense.
If it suits a certain narrative and suspicion, then anecdata is perfectly acceptable and even preferred by some people.
Sometimes I wish we could go back to just living in Dunbar -sized groups.
If a hunter came back to the tribe and people start gathering around to eat and the hunter said "A few of you in the past have taken too much meat for themselves without doing their fair share.. I suspect. Nobody is gonna eat until we figure this out."
You know what would have happened? The village would have taken that hunter and thrown them off the cliff onto the rocks, because that motherfucker was a problem and a danger to the rest of the tribe.
In the tribal societies I'm familiar with, hunter isn't a position of honor or something, it's just a job. The hunter is a tool, like the basket weaver or the primitive doctor.
The part about "their kill" is not familiar to me in the tribal way because that's the tribe's kill. The tribes food. The elder(s) would decide to ration, not the hunter.
That aside, screw the analogy. If you have 40,000,000 people on food rations and decide to withhold said food rations because you think some of them are misappropriated, that's some very stupid thinking. Only an idiot thinks like that. The only other person that thinks like that is a sociopath, one that wishes harm on said group. Either way, they're clearly a danger as a decision maker.
Agreed, of course, but realize that for the current administration the cruelty is the whole point.
I think cruelty is the method not the point. The point is to demonstrate power and get more of it.
A reasonable thing to do - in principle. In practice that many people applying at once is going to cause all kinds of problems and delays for people. No big deal to inconvenience fraudsters, but delaying for people legitimately in need isn't good. Forced reapplication 5 percent at a time would be better. Or maybe thats what they're doing?
If we're going to work out corruption, let's take everything the billionaires have and actually fix some of our systems.
41M is more than population of Poland, Canada, or Ukraine
For the current administration, maximizing cruelty is the whole point and goal.
The cruelty is the point; inflict trauma so the opinion of the government and the traumatized individual only worsens.
It makes the "do we need this? Seems like nobody likes it and I bet my company could do it cheaper and better..." conversations a lot easier
For a good number it might be that they don't successfully reapply due to living on a knife edge that lacks the slack to jump through yet another hoop.
The experience here in Australia is that raising welfare barriers hurts those that need welfare the most, the actual fraudsters have the resources to beat the system.
He relies on SNAP and SSI disability.
These extra steps can cause him weeks of stress, physical and mental. These extra steps cost him money he does not have. The stress can set him back physically for weeks.
Reapplying, waiting on hold for half a day, going down to offices, etc are not easy for some folks. People fall through the cracks and die.
This is called forced attrition. It's pretty common in the business world when companies don't want to fire people. Make it too difficult to bother, so folks stop bothering. Unfortunately this is a literal lifeline for millions of people, so it's more like make it too difficult to bother, so folks start dying.
On more than one occasion I've been the primary decision maker for a technology choice that was going to be worth tens of thousands of dollars or more per year.
For reasons that aren't relevant here, didn't have a ton of time to do the evaluation... extreme prejudice was exercised against anything that didn't have a 'download now and get started button'.
Even if I wanted to jump on a sales call, I didn't have 2 and 1/2 days to wait for you to get back to me.
Maybe a sales funnel is the right tool for certain industries but when your primary user is technical, don't make them jump on a phone call. Get out of their way and make sure the documentation is good. If they like what they see and they have questions, they will chase you down. That is when you should do the pitch call...
Even my ADHD often made me incapable of doing basic things for stuff I cared about. I can't imagine the struggle for people with more severe live conditions. Same goes for you, apparently.
1) 42 million people underfed in the richest nation in the world is worrisome
2) killing one person is headlines, killing millions is statistics. Today, replace killing with starving
3) people reached at the state to need SNAP because of other incidents (health issues, loss of job, bankruptcy) which are much more expensive to prevented
4) saying to millions just to reapply seems more like social bulling to bring cheels to the masses than an effective fraud measure
UBI would probably be a whole lot cheaper than micromanaging what people can and can't buy while not treating the most desperate people with unkind, perpetual suspicion.
The truth is this is yet another rug pull surprise to screw over poor people. Not just health insurance subsidy revocations or Medicaid cuts, because some people just aren't satisfied with trillions or all the power.
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