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Senate Democrats are calling out the "hypocrisy" in a new GOP proposal to delay SNAP cuts for select states as Republicans push to pass Trump's "big beautiful bill."
The Senate is currently voting on Trump's sprawling domestic policy bill, which proposes major cuts to food assistance and Medicaid to offset the costs for tax cuts and other GOP priorities, including border security and deportation.
Republicans have pushed for additional work requirements for SNAP eligibility to root out alleged waste, fraud, and abuse of federal dollars. GOP leaders have also included a major change in the package that would require some states to cover a share of SNAP benefit costs, which are currently funded by the federal government.
However, as Trump's July 4 deadline to sign the bill approaches, Republicans are now proposing special carveouts for Alaska and Hawaii amid internal pushback to the proposal, per Newsweek.
Under the bill, states with a payment error rate above 6 percent are set to cover a share of the cost of SNAP benefits beginning in fiscal year 2028. Republicans previously said the move is meant to encourage states to get their payment error down.
Now, Republicans are trying to add a "waiver authority" section that would allow for noncontiguous states, or Alaska and Hawaii, to have the payment error requirement waived if they're found to be "actively implementing a corrective action plan" to reduce it. The proposal would delay SNAP cuts for these states for a least a year despite their high error rates.
The move comes after Alaska's Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who is holding out her support for the final package, expressed concern over her state being able to cover a share of the cost of SNAP benefits.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), the top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, questioned why only two states should receive “special treatment."
“On the SNAP side, as you know, they’ve shifted $64 billion to the states, of which 44 have balanced budget amendments,” Klobuchar argued on Monday (June 30). “And we tried to stop that, because the states aren’t going to be able to do this.”
“Two states, they threw in Hawaii, two states get this special treatment, and no one else, and so I just figure, if they get that treatment, maybe every other state should, you know, maybe we should be doing that for Wisconsin,” she told The Hill. “Maybe we should be doing that for Iowa.”
Klobuchar also deemed the proposal to offer delays to SNAP cuts the "most absurd example of the hypocrisy of the Republican bill" and a way for Republicans to "bury their help for Alaska."
"If they keep it high for another year, they get another [year] of delay. Insanity reigns. Rewarding errors," Klobuchar tweeted.
"So the states that waste the MOST money get no cuts," Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, also posted on X in response to the proposal. "Up is down."
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