The SNAP Theft Reimbursement Program Paid Out $322.5 Million. Then Congress Let It Die.

A debit card skimmed at a gas station is covered by federal law.▸ An EBT card skimmed at the same pump is not — except for 811 days, between October 1, 2022 and December 20, 2024, when Congress opened a temporary exception. In that window, USDA reimbursed $322.5 million to nearly 679,000 households for 1.9 million fraudulent transactions on stolen SNAP benefits. Then the exception expired, and the ordinary rule — no federal money replaces a stolen EBT balance — came back into force. It has been the rule for more than eighteen months since.

The exception existed because EBT cards, unlike commercial debit cards, are excluded from the unauthorized-transaction protections Congress wrote into Regulation E for electronic fund transfers.▸ Under SNAP's permanent law, a criminal who clones a household's card number and drains its balance leaves that household with nothing to reclaim it — the loss is the recipient's, not the bank's or the government's. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023 (P.L. 117-328, Division HH, Sec. 501) carved out a temporary fix: states could replace benefits stolen between October 1, 2022 and a cutoff Congress kept pushing back, capped at the lesser of the amount stolen or two months' allotment, and no more than twice per federal fiscal year per household. The last extension, via continuing resolution, moved the cutoff to December 20, 2024. The American Relief Act, 2025 did not move it again.

Divide the two numbers and the exception's shape comes into focus: an average of roughly $475 replaced per household over 27 months, capped by statute so no single claim could balloon — real money, deliberately bounded, and then deliberately allowed to run out.▸ Since December 21, 2024, the Government Accountability Office reported in September 2025, households whose benefits are stolen "are not eligible for replacement using federal funds." Nothing about the theft stopped on that date. Only the reimbursement did.

The GAO's September 2025 report wasn't only about the money that stopped flowing backward to victims — it was about the money nobody spent flowing forward to stop the theft in the first place.▸ Most SNAP cards still swipe on a magnetic stripe, the same technology commercial card networks phased out over a decade ago because it's trivial to clone. As of May 2025, only California had finished issuing chip-enabled, tap-to-pay SNAP cards; six other states — Maryland, New Jersey, Alabama, Oklahoma, Illinois, and Massachusetts — had chip-card or mobile-payment pilots underway.

Upgrading is not free, but it isn't exotic either: GAO put the cost to a large retailer of upgrading its own terminals to accept chip cards at up to roughly $750,000 per network — a known, budgetable expense for the payment industry that already absorbed it for commercial cards.▸ GAO's headline recommendation to USDA was not to spend billions; it was to "comprehensively assess" which states were doing what, so the department could target help to the 40-plus other jurisdictions still running the same unchipped card technology commercial networks retired more than a decade ago, on a benefit program actively being skimmed. As of the report's publication, USDA had not responded to that recommendation.

The gap has not gone uncontested in Congress — it's gone unresolved.▸ S. 1540 / H.R. 3117, the Fairness for Victims of SNAP Skimming Act of 2025, would make full replacement permanent and drop the two-month cap. H.R. 3887, introduced June 10, 2025, was referred to the House Agriculture Committee and has not moved since. The newest, H.R. 9359, the Ending Stolen SNAP Benefits Act of 2026, was introduced by Rep. Grace Meng and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick on June 18, 2026 — three weeks before this article — and was referred to the same committee. None of the three has had a committee vote.

With Washington's authority dead, the choice of what to do about it fell to state governments, which could fund replacement themselves.▸ Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas confirmed they would not; Arkansas's Department of Human Services described the lapsed federal program itself as "temporary relief," and both Tennessee and Mississippi instead pointed households toward preventive steps — changing PINs after every transaction, freezing cards when not in use — rather than reimbursement for losses already incurred. Prevention advice does not return money that is already gone.

Dollar and household figures describe the federal replacement program as it operated from October 1, 2022 through December 20, 2024, per GAO and USDA-sourced reporting; theft occurring after that date is not comprehensively tracked in the same dataset, since no federal claims process now exists to generate it. Legislative status reflects each bill's public record as of this writing and is subject to change.