NOW They Tell Us...

How Federal Dollars Distort State Budgets

Yesterday, the House Oversight Committee held a DOGE Subcommittee hearing on fighting waste, fraud, and abuse in SNAP (aka the food stamp program). In the prepared testimony, the Democrat witness from the Food Research and Action Center made a very interesting comment about a provision in last year’s budget reconciliation bill that requires states with high improper payment rates to pay a portion of SNAP benefit costs for the first time:

Unlike previous years, the cost of SNAP food benefits will now directly compete against education, public safety, transportation, public health, and other state priorities.

When it comes to Medicaid, some of us conservatives have been making this argument for, I don’t know, DECADES. Yours truly made that argument way back in 2012, when Medicaid surpassed K-12 education to become the largest spending category in state budgets. Even the Executive Director of the National Governors Association noted that same year how other “spending priorities…will again face competition for state budget dollars” due to skyrocketing spending on Medicaid.

From that day to this, leftist interest groups who want more state spending on issues like education or public health won’t dare point out how the federal Medicaid match encourages states to over-spend on Medicaid—so as to claim “free” federal matching dollars—and in so doing crowds out their own priorities. Yet the welfare-industrial complex will turn around and make this exact same argument at the first sign of Washington scaling back its 100% funding of food stamp benefits.

Here’s a better idea: Why not get the federal government out of the business of picking winners and losers by paying states for certain welfare programs, and instead let all the states decide for themselves which health, education, and other programs they wish to offer…?