On Monday, Just the News posted an article about how Americans who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits are using them.

The article reports:

Food stamps were first issued in 1939 as an assistance program to prevent starvation during the Great Depression.  But 86 years later, thousands of liquor stores and smoke shops have become approved retailers, increasing the possibility of fraud, new research shows. 

The longest ever government shutdown, which ended after 43 days of deadlock, thrust the federal food stamp program into the national spotlight as millions of recipients went without benefits. But, it also laid bare many abuses in the system.   

Even before the shutdown, the Trump administration planned to crack down on fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program and ensure any government assistance is used for healthy and nutritional foods, not junk. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act made specific changes to qualifying for the program, as well as a redefined list of products for which SNAP cannot be used.

The article notes how some of the assistance is being currently used:

An analysis of SNAP retailer data by the Foundation for Government Accountability published on Monday found that more than 5,000 liquor and smoke shops were approved retailers under the program, meaning they can accept food stamps, according to research findings shared exclusively with Just the News.  

Breaking down the data, more than 4,000 stores promoted alcohol in their title and another 1,000 did so for tobacco. The foundation told Just the News the real numbers could be even higher, considering researchers only counted stores that referenced those products in their titles.

Food stamps cannot be used for purchases of either alcohol or tobacco. However, the FGA says the prevalence of stores that sell these products raises concerns about the potential for different kinds of SNAP fraud. These stores “become hotbeds of fraud” where benefit cards are bought and sold in exchange for alcohol or tobacco products, Senior Data Analyst at FGA Kristi Stahr told Just the News. 

The article notes:

Just a handful of examples illustrate the problem. In 2018, one North Carolina grocery store was caught accepting SNAP benefits for non-food products in a $200,000 fraud scheme. The following year, a Virginia grocery store owner was sentenced to 20 years for trafficking more than $1.5 million in SNAP benefits. In 2020 in California, a man was convicted for selling SNAP benefits in exchange for cash, which resulted in a hefty fine and prison time.

According to the report from FGA, more than 70% of all food stamp traffickers are convenience stores like the liquor and smoke shops found in the database and about half of all liquor and smoke shops identified by the group were approved as retailers during the Biden administration. 

I am beginning to think that the task assigned to Hercules of cleaning the Augean stables, which had not been cleaned in over thirty years and housed over 3,000 immortal cattle, was nothing compared to the task of cleaning out the corruption in the federal government and its programs.