SNAP Faces the ‘Worst of All Worlds’
Posted by Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity on February 17, 2026
As SNAP recipients face the impact of funding cuts and new work requirement guidelines passed by Congress and supported by the Trump administration, an added worry is outdated EBT card technology that is fueling benefit theft. The Agriculture Department was charged by Congress three years ago to issue new anti-theft regulations, but those regulations have now been pushed back to the end of September. In the meantime, Congress has also ended federal replacement benefits for families who have their SNAP funds stolen. Spotlight spoke with Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, about the program’s multiple challenges. “Right now at SNAP we have kind of the worst of all worlds, Bergh said. “We have scammers who are exploiting outdated EBT card technology to steal SNAP benefits from low-income families. People are in the checkout line with a cart full of groceries and then discovering that their SNAP benefits are gone and that they can’t pay for those groceries. We also had Congress end federal replacement benefits about a year ago, meaning that families can no longer get SNAP benefits that are stolen, replaced in nearly all states.”
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