LFC report appears to back Trump Administration on rooting out SNAP fraud/errors

The Legislative Finance Committee recently issued a report with the extremely dull name of “Stacking of Income Supports.” These are well done reports highlighting New Mexico’s over-dependency on welfare programs and the lack of positive outcomes associated with the explosion of spending on programs like Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps).

Both of these programs are at the heart of current controversies including prospective litigation by New Mexico against the Trump Administration’s efforts to root out fraud in the SNAP program. Here are the LFC’s recent findings:

• While New Mexico has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, the state also has one of the largest benefits packages, which theoretically allows many family types to meet their needs.
• New Mexico’s labor force participation rate has been persistently low and has not meaningfully changed despite cash assistance and other workforce development efforts.
• The state has tried to minimize the effect of “benefit cliffs” to incentivize increasing earnings by expanding program eligibility, but this may come at the expense of those at lower incomes
• New Mexico needs to change program administration to address SNAP error rates and monitor food program outcomes.

In the absence of state action (which MAY be in the offing thanks to Republican efforts during the recent special session) it is incumbent on the federal government to root out fraud in the SNAP program which is 100% federally funded. It would seem that an honest judge would recognize the federal interest in ensuring that tax dollars are actually directed to the purposes desired.

From a purely policy perspective while the LFC report dances around the issue a bit the report clearly makes the connection between New Mexico extremely high welfare dependency and its extremely low workforce participation rate. At the Rio Grande Foundation we recommend reducing the generosity of those benefits while also pushing long-overdue reforms of its failing education system.

You can see an image of one of the pages of the report here and click on the image for the full LFC report: