The looming federal changes to the SNAP program could strip food benefits from an estimated 147,000 Arizonans.
This week, House Republicans advanced a slate of bills that could deepen the impact.
Newly emboldened by the federal changes that passed last year under H.R.1, or Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” Republican lawmakers passed four bills through the House Health & Human Services Committee on Monday that would tighten the rules for receiving food stamps.
There’s a clear incentive for the crackdown: Under H.R.1, states have to start paying for SNAP benefits based on their error rate, or the percentage of benefits they administer incorrectly. Until now, the federal government covered the full cost of those benefits, regardless of a state's error rate.
Arizona’s current SNAP error rate is 8.8%. If it stays above 6%, the state will be forced to start paying for some of the food benefits in 2027 — an expense Arizona has never had to cover before.
Republicans are pushing changes they say will bring Arizona’s error rate under 6%, largely by making government workers verify more information, more often. But those new steps could also make it harder for eligible families to stay enrolled.
More than 620,000 residents received SNAP to buy groceries in December alone, and about 40% of them were children.
The Department of Economic Security, which administers Arizona’s SNAP program, is already struggling with application backlogs. Last summer, the agency laid off staff in response to federal funding cuts, and now has 36% fewer employees for application processing.
Layering on new state-level rules means more chances for eligible families to lose benefits in the bureaucratic tangle.
While Arizona policymakers won’t know whether the state will be on the hook for SNAP benefits until updated error rates are released later this year, one cost is already locked in: The state is expected to spend an additional $33 million to administer the program.
Under H.R.1, Arizona has to start covering 75% of the cost of administering SNAP starting in October, an increase from the previous 50-50 split with the federal government.
In other words, states are being told to root out waste or pay more for SNAP benefits, but are being given fewer dollars to do the rooting.
To comply with the new federal rules, lawmakers want to heap new tasks onto the plates of overstretched DES workers. And that, in turn, will almost certainly take food off the plates of SNAP recipients.
Here's a sample of what they're serving up.
Bill: HB2797 – SNAP; TANF; public welfare; verification
Sponsor: Republican Rep. Michael Carbone
Carbone’s proposal creates a system to routinely monitor SNAP recipients to make sure they didn’t go to prison, win the lottery or die.
That would disqualify them from receiving food stamps.
Right now, DES reviews recipients’ eligibility when they sign up or renew benefits, but the bill would require DES to cross-check data more frequently with the state corrections, health and revenue departments to catch changes that would make people ineligible.
DES would also have to run monthly checks for recipients whose EBT cards show only out-of-state purchases for more than 90 days in a row, then verify whether they still live in Arizona. If DES determines they don’t, the agency would not only terminate benefits, but would be required to refer the case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for prosecution.
Plus, DES would have to publish quarterly reports on its fraud investigations.
Bill: HB2206 - SNAP; error rate; forensic audit
Sponsor: Republican Rep. Nick Kupper
To avoid having to pay for SNAP benefits, states have to get their SNAP payment error rates down to at least 6%.
But Kupper says the bar is too high — his bill would require DES to reduce the error rate down to 3% by 2030.
If DES doesn’t meet the goal, the agency would be required to pay half of any resulting federal penalties.
The federal government calculates error rates by checking a random sample of cases to see whether households were eligible — and whether they received the correct benefit amount. Arizona’s error rate is 8.8%, so about that share of SNAP dollars that the feds observed were paid out incorrectly, either too much or too little.
Kupper named his bill after DES employees’ likely reaction to being told to cut the error rate goal in half.
More often than not, those mistakes are the result of overworked and underpaid employees, and not lazy people cheating the system to get a government handout.
DES’ Division of Benefits and Medical Eligibility, which is responsible for determining SNAP eligibility, had 728 vacancies as of September 2025, per the agency’s latest Auditor General’s report.
Kupper acknowledged the need for more DES staff to reach his 3% error rate goal during Monday’s committee meeting, but said staffing should be a part of budget discussions.
Bill: HB2442 - SNAP; mandatory employment and training
Sponsor: Republican Rep. Chris Lopez
The new federal SNAP rules make more people’s food benefits dependent on them proving they have a job, or are trying to get one. In most cases, SNAP users can keep their benefits as long as they work 80 hours a month or enroll in an employment and training program.
While parents whose youngest child is under 18 were previously exempt from those work requirements, H.R.1 lowers that threshold to only exempt parents of children under the age of 14.
Lopez’s bill suggests that Arizona go further by making work training mandatory for parents with children ages six and older.
Bill: HB2448 - SNAP; work requirement waivers; exemptions
Sponsor: Republican Rep. Chris Lopez
There’s a limited exception to the new SNAP work rules: If the federal government decides an area doesn’t have enough jobs for people to meet the requirement, DES can ask for a waiver so recipients there aren’t held to it. (The parameters for getting that waiver also changed under H.R.1).
Lopez’s HB2448 would prohibit DES from applying for that waiver.
Pick a lane!: Gina Swoboda, the former AZGOP chair and Donald Trump’s co-endorsed candidate in Congressional District 1, filed a statement of interest to run for secretary of state yesterday, setting up a showdown between her and Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin, who had hoped to have a clear path to challenge Democrat Adrian Fontes in November. Presuming Swoboda is actually switching course, that would also open up the field in the competitive CD1, where David Schweikert is retiring to run for governor and 11 Republicans have already filed statements of interest, including Trump co-endorsee Thomas "Jay” Feely, and state House Freedom Caucus leader Joseph Chaplik.
You can co-endorse the Arizona Agenda and support local journalism in this weird election year by clicking this button.
Director battle incoming: AHCCCS Director Virginia “Ginny” Rountree resigned on Monday, per a news release from the governor’s office. Rountree was in charge of healthcare for 1.8 million Arizonans. She said she had to step down due to personal health concerns and her last day will be February 13. Her resignation tees up another political battle between Gov. Katie Hobbs and the director nominations committee controlled by Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman.
Affordable housing…for the rich: Lots of homes are being built in the Phoenix area, but they’re not exactly helping solve the housing shortage, the New Times’ Zach Buchanan reports. The swanky apartments and spacious houses are far too expensive for the average family, which a recent study shows is leading to families either deciding to spend all their money on housing or cramming themselves into tiny apartments that were designed for just one or two people.
“A lot of (luxury housing units) end up sitting empty because the landlords would rather rent for an extremely high price than lower it to an actual market-clearing price,” Liz Hipple, the managing director of policy and research for the Georgetown Center
Let’s eat grandma!: Insurance providers have been denying claims for firefighters with certain forms of cancer because lawmakers forgot a comma in the law that forces them to cover it, ABC15’s Anne Ryman reports. The law says they must cover “adenocarcinoma or mesothelioma of the respiratory tract,” which insurance companies interpreted as only forcing them to cover adenocarcinoma of the respiratory tract — not any kind of adenocarcinoma. Now, lawmakers are rewriting the law to list all the forms of cancer that insurance companies must cover in bullet point format instead.
An idea we can get behind: Republican Rep. Michael Way introduced legislation to cut off pay for lawmakers and the governor if they don’t pass a budget by April 30. (That’s two months before they’re actually required to adopt a state spending plan.) Way is pitching the idea as working in tandem with another resolution from Republican Rep. Justin Wilmeth, who wants to end the legislative session every year on April 30 — then have lawmakers return for a special session afterwards if lawmakers still haven’t approved a budget by then. Both ideas would need to pass both chambers of the Legislature and win voter approval in November to take effect.
In other, other news
Members of Congress can once again show up unannounced to inspect ICE detention facilities after a federal judge temporarily blocked a Trump administration rule saying they had to give seven days’ notice (Alisa Reznick / KJZZ). Overdose deaths in Maricopa County were up in 2025, bucking a national trend of lower overdoses, and tied at least in part to an increase in the availability of carfentanil, a synthetic opioid that the DEA says is 100 times as dangerous as fentanyl (George Headley / New Times). And Gov. Katie Hobbs came back from her summit with other Colorado River Basin governors with not much news but a new talking point about why the Upper Basin states need to take on more cuts — Arizona needs water to manufacture microchips and help the U.S. win the AI race against China (Howie Fischer / Capitol Media Services).
You know your conspiracy is weird when even Republican U.S. Rep. Abe Hamadeh is debunking it.
Yesterday, conspiracy spreader Laura Loomer spread the conspiracy that “Qatar is trying to build a 6,000 acre Sharia compound in Arizona called Qatar City.”
There’s no actual evidence that Qatar is involved in buying up the land in question, but that hasn’t stopped Arizona lawmakers from declaring that it’s an attempt to install Sharia Law in Arizona and moving to outlaw Sharia Law.
Republicans have dragged Gov. Katie Hobbs into the mess, digging up a photo of her meeting with the Qatari consul general in 2023.
Then Loomer turned her sights on Hamadeh, noting that he was recently in Qatar.
Hamadeh, who continues to assert that he is the rightful Arizona attorney general after his failed 2022 run for the office, had to politely explain that the whole conspiracy is bullshit — and that “the land in question has recently been purchased by TSMC and a separate America First real estate investor.”