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Dear Friend –
Should bureaucrats get away with taking lunch money from hungry families?
Let me know what you think:
Bureaucrats Stole My Lunch Money!
As a farm girl from Iowa, I’m proud our great state feeds America. We are blessed with an abundant bounty, and hardworking Iowans labor year-round to bring delicious and nutritious meals from their farms to your table.
But with Bidenomics increasing the cost of everything, from producing to transporting food, too many are struggling to afford the rising price of groceries. Fortunately, one thing Democrats and Republicans in Washington do still agree on is no child should ever go to bed on an empty stomach. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, plays a vital role in ensuring that does not happen.
But with tens of thousands of families across the country waiting in a bureaucratic backlog to be approved for the aid, some of the administrators of the program are jumping the line to snap up the SNAP dollars, either as a meal ticket to beef up state budgets or a self-serve buffet of benefits for themselves!
A New York social services supervisor masterminded a criminal scheme in which she converted SNAP cards into cash by purchasing—and then reselling—mass quantities of Red Bull.
Another employee responsible for determining SNAP eligibility collected kickbacks issuing ineligible benefits, boasting, “I’ve been rocking this for years.”
An employee of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services stole the identities of homeless people to register SNAP cards he then used for his own personal shopping sprees.
A Mississippi food stamp fraud investigator extorted convenience stores in exchange for not pursuing criminal charges against them for defrauding the SNAP program.
These inside jobs aren’t limited to just a few rotten apples. Seven states cooked the books, intentionally manipulating the amount of erroneous SNAP payments they were making, to obtain $60 million set aside to reward states for protecting food stamps from being misspent.
A U.S. Department of Justice attorney involved in the cases lamented he was “deeply troubled that these actions involved state agencies and a program designed to provide vulnerable and needy residents with essential food and nutrition services.”
Bureaucratic blunders are also driving up the cost of the program.
Nearly $1 billion of ineligible SNAP benefits are given out every month, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s own estimates. Tens of thousands of recipients enrolled in the program do not even qualify for the assistance and double dippers are getting second helpings of food stamps from multiple states. The true cost of these overpayments is unknown because errors totaling $54 or less are excluded from the total!
Folks, you don’t get to make errors like this when you are calculating your taxes, so they shouldn’t be tolerated by those spending your taxes!
Instead of giving billions in benefits to those who don’t qualify or doubling payments for others already being served, let’s set a place at the table for the families who do qualify but are going without while they wait in line.
For being out to lunch, I am giving my September 2023 Squeal Award to the bureaucrats dispersing billions of dollars of bogus benefits, either to themselves or others who do not qualify.
I am also introducing the SNAP Back Inaccurate SNAP Payments Act requiring all errors—regardless of the amount—to be counted and directing state governments to stop giving out ineligible benefits or eat some of the costs.
Squeal Award: The Bureaucrats Stealing Lunch Money from Hungry Families
For more updates on what's happening in Washington, D.C. and Iowa, be sure to 'Like' my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter and Instagram @SenJoniErnst, and subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Thank you!
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