Amber Anders has called Arizona’s Department of Economic Security dozens of times since October.
The single mother of five moved from Oregon and needed to transfer her food benefits. After a two-hour phone interview, pages of paperwork and four months of waiting, she finally got a decision in the state’s online portal.
Denied.
She didn’t file the right documents.
“I’ve lost weight since we moved here, because I feed my kids before I even eat,” Anders said.
In Arizona, her experience is becoming increasingly common.
Since President Donald Trump signed H.R. 1 — the “One Big Beautiful Bill” — in July, about 424,000 Arizonans have lost access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps.
That’s nearly half the people who relied on the program, and more than 181,000 of those cut off are children.
But those alarming figures don’t include cases like Anders’, where applicants never made it onto Arizona’s SNAP rolls in the first place.
And while most states shrank their SNAP rolls as the new law expanded work requirements and pushed states to tighten eligibility or face steep financial penalties, Arizona is in a category of its own.
The state’s SNAP caseload has fallen by nearly 47%, by far the steepest drop in the country. The next-largest decline, in Florida, is less than 16%, per the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
After the news broke that Arizona had cut its SNAP rolls nearly in half, Gov. Katie Hobbs blamed the new federal requirements.
“This is devastating,” Hobbs said during a radio interview. “This is politicians in Washington prioritizing tax cuts for billionaires over people who need food and don’t have a way to put it on their table.”
But the scale of Arizona’s drop suggests something more than just federal policy changes at work: It points to a system where eligible people may be losing benefits — not because they no longer qualify, but because they can’t get through the new system that the Department of Economic Security (DES), which runs the state’s SNAP program, has set up.
SNAP applicants are getting caught in a bureaucratic tangle of stricter rules, heavier paperwork and an agency stretched too thin to respond, per advocates like MJ Simpson, a staff attorney at the William E. Morris Institute for Justice.
“There are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people who are eligible for SNAP who are not getting the benefit,” Simpson said. “Arizona is over-correcting on H.R. 1 to the detriment of Arizonans.”
The error rate incentive
After new federal SNAP rules took effect last year, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research institute, warned that 147,000 Arizonans could lose their food benefits from the new, stricter work requirements.
They were off by hundreds of thousands.
“It was like a canary in the coal mine,” Ed Bolen, the CBPP’s director of SNAP State Strategies, said when he saw how far off Arizona was in the state-by-state data analysis released earlier this month. “Arizona, in some cases, was maybe unnecessarily out in front of implementing some of these changes.”
The changes have increased the workload for DES employees who review paperwork and interview applicants to determine eligibility, even as the workforce handling those tasks has shrunk. After COVID-era federal funding expired last year, DES lost nearly 500 workers.
But according to Simpson, who has talked directly with DES officials and those being denied benefits, there’s more to the story.
In her work with the Morris Institute, a nonprofit legal center that brings class-action litigation on behalf of low-income Arizonans, Simpson said she has watched DES go beyond the changes required under H.R. 1 and adopt a far more aggressive approach.
DES quickly implemented many of the work requirement changes in H.R. 1 after it passed, which subjected a larger group of people to stricter burdens of proof that they’re working.
But those changes wouldn’t have shown up in the data until November, when people in that group could first be cut off after three months of noncompliance. Arizona’s SNAP rolls started decreasing before then.
SNAP enrollment fell in every Arizona county after the federal changes took effect — with Maricopa County driving the drop. There were 243,500 fewer recipients there this February than a year ago. SOURCE: DES monthly statistical bulletins January 2025-February 2026.
Beyond the new work requirements, Arizona’s aggressive attempt to comply with a separate federal rule may be driving SNAP rolls down: H.R. 1 requires states to bring their payment error rates below 6% or begin paying for benefits themselves — something they’ve never had to do before.
Arizona’s error rate is at 8.8% — lower than the national average of 10.9%, but still above the 6% cutoff. If it doesn’t go down, the state would be on the hook for up to $208 million a year, according to legislative budget analysts.
And Arizona doesn’t have the money to spare.
Hobbs made lowering the error rate a top priority in her budget proposal this year, and proposed $16.6 million for additional staff and technology to achieve it. Republicans at the Legislature, meanwhile, proposed a host of plans to make it much harder for people to receive SNAP benefits, and Hobbs vetoed them.
Before lawmakers and the governor settle on a budget this year, DES had already begun trying to drive down its error rate through new administrative policies.
“Washington Republicans took food out of the mouths of 400,000 Arizonans, including 180,000 children with their reckless and partisan Washington budget,” the Governor’s Office told us in a prepared statement. ”The chaos and confusion forced on states by the reckless legislation has increased bureaucracy and red tape on states across the country, and forced DES to take difficult steps to reduce the state’s Payment Error Rate.”
Hobbs’ spokesman, Christian Slater, pointed out that, when she was a kid, Hobbs’ family sometimes relied on food stamps to get by, and said she’s committed to “minimizing the harm” of Trump’s policies.
Proving that you’re poor
In September, DES stopped taking applicants at their word for things like their household size, utility costs and healthcare spending, per a bulletin it sent to staff.
Simpson cited a case of a woman living alone who had to find a way to prove she lived alone as part of her SNAP application.
“So now she’s got to go to, potentially, strangers and let them know that she’s on food benefits, and then have that person write a statement saying (she) lives alone,” Simpson said. “And that person has to include their name, their address and their phone number.”
Anders, who was denied benefits in February after applying in October, ran into a similar issue. To prove her household size, she had a friend write a letter confirming that she and her five children live in her home.
A previous DES supervisor had told her that it would be sufficient. But her application was denied anyway after another employee determined the letter wasn’t enough.
“They want every little thing from you here, and even when you provide that information, they still deny you,” Anders said. “They asked me everything — it took me two hours to do an interview.”
Anders said she spent hours in her local DES office’s waiting room to check on her application, and many more hours trying to get through by phone. Dozens of accounts from SNAP applicants across Reddit, Facebook groups and DES Google reviews describe the same problem: They can’t get through.
Some of the comments from DES applicants across Google reviews, Facebook groups and Reddit threads.
Many people reliant on SNAP benefits say they’ve gone to local offices to complete required interviews, only to be turned away and told interviews are handled by phone.
The online portal recipients use to upload documents isn’t much better, Simpson said. She’s heard from people who struggle to log in and upload required paperwork.
“They’re left in this sort of no man’s land, thinking they uploaded their documents, but the documents weren’t uploaded,” she said. “They get a deficiency letter that they needed to add more documentation. They’re confused. They try and call, and we know how that ends.”
And a whole new host of people need to use that portal now.
H.R. 1 expands who has to meet stricter work requirements under a category known as Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents, or ABAWD. They are generally limited to three months of benefits within a three-year period unless they qualify for an exemption or show they’re doing at least 80 hours a month of work, volunteering or job training.
The new rules widened that category and pulled in thousands of people who were not previously subject to stricter work requirements. They include veterans, homeless individuals and seniors up to age 63.
“You have a 63-year-old who’s trying to upload documentation for the first time, and that may not be very easy for them,” Simpson said.
From the Arizona Department of Economic Security’s Feb. 10 blog post.
Even as the caseload shrinks, DES isn’t processing a lot of SNAP applications on time.
Unless an applicant qualifies for emergency benefits, the agency is supposed to make a decision within 30 days. But recent data shows it’s falling short: DES completed 86% of cases on time in January and just 80% in February.
The caseload dropped by 139,000 people during that same period.
Because DES policy allows benefits to be denied or cut off if required interviews aren’t completed in time, that drop may reflect more than just eligibility losses — it may also include people who couldn’t reach the agency to complete required interviews.
And it doesn’t capture those who were eligible for SNAP but never managed to get through the system to enroll in the first place.
The data also doesn’t yet reflect the thousands of legally present Arizonans — including refugees and people seeking asylum — who are expected to lose eligibility under H.R. 1. DES only began implementing those changes in March, so the impact won’t show up in the data until later this month.
Shifting goal posts
The way Arizona has rolled out stricter verification requirements has been marked by shifting goalposts. DES has put new rules in place, then rescinded them, leaving staff and applicants struggling to keep up.
In February, DES said it would tighten its eligibility rules for some applicants who qualify for SNAP because they already receive other social services. The state dropped the cutoff for the group from 185% of the federal poverty level to 130% — for a family of four, that’s about $61,050 a year down to $42,900.
The agency rescinded the policy in March.
DES also reversed course on another policy affecting applicants with extremely low incomes, who can qualify for same-day SNAP interviews. In late January, the agency announced it would rescind that option “to help with office workflow.” Instead, it set a seven-day deadline for emergency interviews.
DES rescinded the policy a few days later.
Frequent policy changes, along with the extra time required to process each case under stricter documentation rules, have made it much harder for people to renew their SNAP benefits — and even harder to get on the program at all.
“It very much shifts burdens on individuals,” Bolen from CBPP said. “I think that’s one of the themes of a lot of states’ responses to H.R. 1 — is to basically make it harder to prove you’re eligible for a certain amount of benefits.”
Still squeezing
As Arizona’s SNAP system has become harder to navigate, food banks are picking up the slack.
While the new SNAP rules were meant to weed out people who don’t need assistance, in practice, they appear to be pushing eligible people off benefits and toward food banks instead.
As the number of people receiving SNAP benefits has plummeted, food banks are seeing increased need. Source: Arizona Food Bank Network (SNAP caseload data from DES, and the food bank demand from five members: Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, Desert Mission, St. Mary’s, United and Yuma Community).
But food banks aren’t a viable replacement for monthly SNAP benefits. They don’t have the infrastructure to replace the loss of a massive federal program, and estimates show that for every meal a food bank provides, SNAP delivers nearly five.
Still, Republicans at Arizona’s Capitol are pushing to make SNAP access even harder.
This year, the Department of Economic Security is required to ask state lawmakers for permission to continue to exist. It’s a routine process every agency goes through about once a decade.
But Republicans at the Capitol are holding the renewal bill hostage, using it as an opportunity to make even more severe cuts to the department.
GOP lawmakers have added provisions to the DES continuation bill to further tighten the rules around SNAP: requiring the agency to hit a 3% error rate, half the federal 6% threshold already driving down enrollment, and banning it from using the few remaining work requirement waivers in areas with less than 10% unemployment.
It’s awaiting a vote in the Senate. If the bill passes, Hobbs will likely veto it.
Then, if lawmakers don’t come up with a different continuation plan, the department can’t keep operating.
But beyond killing bad bills, one of the few levers the governor still controls in Arizona’s Republican-dominated political landscape is how state agencies operate.
Simpson said the Morris Institute has alerted the Governor’s Office about the DES issues, and several recipients reported reaching out to the office for help with their SNAP claims.
In December, Hobbs’ office gave DES $7.5 million in one-time funding to increase staffing.
In the meantime, Simpson is anxiously awaiting DES’s next monthly SNAP report for March.
She expects thousands more people to be cut from the program.
We reached out to DES for comment on Tuesday morning and got several assurances that we’d get a response. As of Thursday evening, we haven’t heard back.