Georgia Senate considers SNAP oversight bill critics say could hurt families

In the early morning hours of March 7, a bill passed its chamber of the Georgia General Assembly helping it survive a critical deadline. 

House Bill 947, which aims to reduce error rates in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), passed in a last minute vote 95-66.

Isabel Otero, Georgia Policy Director for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), said they are advocating for the bill to be amended in the Senate.

“On the House side, very, very late into the evening, past midnight, they did call HB 947, which is a bill that creates new requirements for SNAP recipients, for data matching and other things that, again, are redundant policies meant to potentially root out fraud in a way that is actually just going to cause more bureaucratic nonsense and potentially kick off of SNAP a lot of eligible families,” she said.

When Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or HR 1, earlier last year, it shifted a lot of the administrative costs of SNAP to state governments. HB 947 was proposed in Georgia to reduce error rates because states now have to pay more depending on their error rate.

“The problem is that error rates do not equal fraud,” she said. “It is often times just administrative errors. It is somebody types something in wrong, something hasn’t been updated quickly enough.”

Daniel Kanso, the vice president of public policy at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, said that HB 947 replicates processes that the federal government already does, such as asset tests.

“Basically, when you add on these layers, you make it likelier that they’re going to be errors, and so if the state’s error rate is above 13%, the state will be in the highest cost sharing cohort, which in Georgia could mean about half a billion dollars a year that the state would have to pay in cost sharing,” he said.

Reducing the error rate could reduce the state’s cost sharing to just under $200 million, he said.

HB 947 goes above and beyond what the federal law requires to verify information requiring more work for administrators and more bureaucracy for people in need to navigate, Otero said.

“In an attempt to lower error rates, because they are equating it so clearly with fraud, they’re saying, ‘We need to then just put all these new checks and balances into the system in order to prevent it.’ And unfortunately, it’s just going to backfire,” Otero said.

The Division of Family & Children Services (DFCS) in the Georgia Department of Human Services (DHS) administers SNAP benefits, and DFCS has faced a more than $85 million deficit this year, which was luckily backfilled by lawmakers. DHS as a whole has an annual budget of $1.2 billion.

“You can imagine adding half a billion dollars onto that potentially could cause real financial problems for the state that could even jeopardize the SNAP program altogether,” Kanso. 

In the 2027 proposed budget, the state has allocated $46 million to cover administrative costs that the federal government is no longer going to cover and $11 million to hire about 320 case managers through DFCS, Kanso said.

Part of SPLC’s proposal regarding HB 947 is to appoint a study committee on the issue to figure out what would be a viable solution to reduce error rates before instituting legislation, Otero said.

Applying for SNAP benefits is already filled with checks and administrative processes that are difficult to navigate.

“If you’ve never done this before, it’s actually not that easy for you to figure it out, and adding more things that will slow this process down for people is only going to make it worse,” Otero said. “We’re going to leave Georgians hungry.”