Bulwark Takes - Murkowski’s Absurd Plan Could Leave Millions Hungry

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

Congress is quietly overhauling SNAP, the food assistance program that helps millions. A sneaky formula, crafted to win Lisa Murkowski’s vote, could shift massive costs to states and cut benefits for millions, all while rewarding high error rates.

Hey guys, Sam Stein managing editor of the Bullwork. I'm joined by fan favorite YouTube pinup model and HuffPost reporter Arthur Delaney. You know him from prior Bullwork YouTubes addressing policy issues that are happening in Capitol Hill. That's what we're going to talk about today. We're talking about the big beautiful bill, but specifically a provision in it to go after SNAP, which is food benefits for poor people. So Arthur, let's talk a little bit. Let's just kind of set the stage before we get into the ridiculous thing that happened yesterday. But just tell people who might not know, what is SNAP? SNAP is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

It's the federal government's big flagship food security program. It basically eradicated starvation in the United States after it was ramped up in the 20th century. That was a good thing, right? Starvation is bad. Yes. Okay.

So eradicating it is good. Yeah. Just confirming. Yeah. 20 million households get SNAP benefits, which are a few hundred dollars a month, depending on how many people are in the household. So it's a big, important, and very responsive program. So you lose your job or something, you get on a plane, maybe, but you can definitely get SNAP.

Okay. And who pays for it? The federal government entirely pays the cost of benefits while states administer, you know, check eligibility and sign people up. How much does it cost? It's about a hundred billion dollars annually. So it's a big program. And its cost has gone up a lot. Important for people to know that it was expanded a little bit under Barack Obama and a lot under Joe Biden. They, you know, Congress ramped it up in response to the pandemic. And then Joe Biden essentially made those expansions permanent.

Big pool of money going to needy people. Naturally, it's ripe to get rated for this Republican bill, which they needed to finance tax cuts for. So what did the house do in their version? And what did the Senate do in its version? So Republicans have always wanted to kill snap basically, but they can't ever do it because Everyone likes it and they're not usually working in budget reconciliation But this time they are and they have these, you know, four trillion dollars in tax cuts So snap went along with medicaid in the pool of things they wanted to raid to help offset the cost of the taxes.

So there are a bunch of provisions in there, but the big one was to make states have to pay a share of the costs of SNAP benefits. Right. That's big money. A hundred billion dollars across the country. So any state's going to have potentially hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars that it would be on the hook for under this proposal. It would give states a strong incentive to trim enrollment, which would in turn reduce federal spending on SNAP by a large amount.

And the House proposal would have every state do this automatically and the Senate proposal would only do it for states that have high error rates, which is high rates of improperly overpaying SNAP. The Senate proposal is the one that has won out. All right. So the Senate proposal is not as blunt as the House one, which means less people would suffer for lack of food. And they created an incentive structure,, you know, if you believe in

cutting SNAP, this incentive structure probably makes some sense, right? It's you're not administering the program effectively. If you aren't, then you're going to lose some federal funding for it. You're going to have to cover it yourself. Therefore, administer it more effectively. It's an incentive to get the states to do better. So if you're for these reforms, this probably makes some sense.

Yeah, and Republicans have a point that states really have done whatever they can to sign people up because that, the money comes into your state, goes to your grocery stores, improves your tax base. It's totally good for states. So they have a maximized enrollment to the extent policy. Right, because they don't foot the bill and the feds foot the

bill. And so it's not the only thing you have to pay for if you're the state is the paperwork and the time to administer the program. All right. But this is what happened, which brings us to why we have you on this program. They needed to win Lisa Murkowski's vote for this bill. And in order to win her vote, they needed to essentially carve out snap cuts for Alaska to make sure that the state wasn't screwed.

Or at least that was her request. What did she get them to do? So you can't say exactly. So she wasn't going to vote for this if they didn't make it nicer Alaska it so happens has the very highest snap error rate. It was like 24% in 2024 Wow, so But the problem is you're using budget reconciliation where there are rules against putting in pure policy That only has incidental

Budgetary effects so you can't say you can't single out a state and be like, this is for Alaska only. Exactly. So they said, well, this shall apply. There will be an exemption that delays implementation of this for any state that has an error rate in excess of 20% after you multiply the state error rate in 2025 or 26 by 1.5 So they they put in this whole formula to make it look even more obscure from what was their obvious intention and the parliamentarian said Okay, you've jumped through enough hoops here that will keep this in They've they finished this up like a minute before the Senate voted on and they passed it and now and now the house is gonna Vote on it. And it's really wacky.

Let's explain why it's wacky. Because I just want people to understand this. You are now being rewarded if your state has a higher error rate above that threshold of 20% or what is it? 13% times 1.5, whatever. 20% is the same. They couldn't just say 13%. Okay. That would be too silly.

They had to make it a little math formula. Okay. But yeah, if your state has a high error rate, not even as high as Alaska's, but if it's high, then you don't have to pay any- The feds will still cover it all. So the worst performing administrative states will get a full

Fed share of the snap cuts and in the Senate bill if your error rates under six percent or so You also will get the feds to cover the cost of snap But if you're in that middle the six to the twenty give or take You're screwed That's right the feds and how much would you have to how much would you have to shoulder if you're a state That's a good defense. And how much would you have to, how much would you have to shoulder if you're a state in the middle? It depends on the state, but it's like billions of years. So there's a big donut hole in the middle of medium performing states who will just either have to say, you know what, we got to get our shit in order and

make sure that there's less errors or we should just absolutely go in the opposite direction and make this error written so that we don't lose money. Right. And so you could do that by paying snap benefits to people who are ineligible or just overpaying them. So just, just add money to people's snap benefits and boom, you are in the top tier of error states and therefore exempt who determines who determines the error rates uh well it's it's uh the food and nutrition service

over at the usda okay so the feds at least have some say it's not like the states are determining their own error rate yeah and presumably the Trump administration would look for perhaps extra-legal ways to dissuade states from gaming this in the obvious way that Congress has let them and Probably would wind up in court because they're not fixing it and they're why are they not why are they not fixing it? They're well, they're not fixing it as of the time of this recording when they're about to vote Yeah, we should be clear. This is recording at 120 ish on Wednesday. They just want to pass the bill. They don't really care what's in this bill. Do they think they could just go, do they think they could fix this

in like subsequent legislation? No, because why would Democrats let them fix this state that advantage, that's advantageous for democratic states? Like immediately a bunch of big blue states are off the hook. Like what? Including like New York and New Jersey States that are very populous. It's gonna Reduce the savings of this proposal which was like 41 billion dollars by quite a lot and you're not going to be doing this in reconciliation

Unless I guess they do in a future Reconciliation bill which they have said they do have they have a couple they might have one or two more options on that but um But that it came over from the Senate and House Republicans were immediately just like lol What yeah, what was the reaction in the house when they saw this thing? We got immediate reaction because the House Rules Committee met and the House Agriculture Chair was there as a witness She's like well you have to ask the senators why they did that. We know why they did it. And a minute later, he's like, well, I'm in politics. I know why they did it.

And ship Roy, who kind of hates the bill, he's one of the right wingers. He said, this is just an absurd policy. Oh, you know, let's call balls and strikes. That's a ball. Yeah. If they were to change it in the House and send it back to the Senate, and they're not going to, but let's say they did, would Murkowski,

do you think Murkowski would rescind her vote? Well, they'd have to change it in a way that it doesn't do what it does. So yeah, I mean, you'd lose Murkowski if you lost this provision. Because to tighten it so that it only benefited Murkowski It wouldn't be but they didn't sign it They tighten it on Murkowski's behalf, but it's not only benefiting Murkowski by the way that they wrote it It's gonna benefit as you noted other states bigger states. That's what they had to do

Yeah, because of the rules so what it was for Murkowski and with these carry-on It's just a it really shows you the slap-dash Ad hoc nature of the legislative process for this bill like it's really rushed for no reason and as a result It's very sloppy. This is just the thing that bubbled up after the text came out yesterday. I don't know if anyone had seen it before then, but I'm sure other stuff like this is going to pop out of this 900 page bill in the next few days. Yeah, they call that an industry prance, the nut graph. This illustrates the profoundly disjointed nature in which this bill was produced and it underscores

just how little the lawmakers understood about the bill they passed. Yeah. You're making it sound corny, but yes. Well, okay, fine. Screw you, Arthur. Last time you're on this YouTube channel. No, I didn't mean to escalate that. Thank you very much for doing this.

It's really interesting reporting. Uh, you know, it's now honestly snap does not always get top billing. It's an incredibly important federal and state minister program. There's profound changes that are about to happen here. I guess I would just ask one last question. Like let's say this does go through and even with these weird carve outs in these donor holes, like what are we looking at in terms of people who could go hungry?

these weird carve outs in these donor holes? Like, what are we looking at in terms of people who could go hungry? This would reduce enrollment by several million. It's it has over there overlapping provisions that I think for some people get lower benefits, but millions of people would have fewer benefits. It's I think it's best to think of it as really rolling back the gains from the Obama and Biden errors, or at least trying to. And we'll just have to see how it shakes out. I feel like the Trump administration

is going to allow a lot of governors to experiment, like with banning soda. So its snap is changing a lot right now. No, it's really difficult to watch time, but critically important reporting from you and others. Thank you. I really, really do appreciate you coming on here and explaining this. We'll get you back on the feed.

Thank you guys for watching. I appreciate that as well. Subscribe to the feed and we'll talk to you soon.