Is the Systemic Corruption In The EBT Program About to SNAP?

Dems got one thing right with the shutdown. Everyone knows how corrupt and wasteful the Federal food stamp program is and that has opene dup an opportunity to fix it with braod public support.

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Welcome to Subscriber Saturday on Substack. My name is Steve MacDonald. I am your, I guess, your host, right? But you knew that because here you are on my Substack. So today we’re going to take advantage of an opportunity presented to us by the Democrat Party and their ridiculously awful shutdown, which has ended. And now we’ve got, ⁓ I don’t know, debris in the wake of a collision with stupid and the Democrat Party, which is a common collision. And ⁓ one of the benefits that we’ve discovered is a benefit.

It’s called SNAP. And there are lots of things about SNAP that are (just) wrong. And thanks to the Democrat Party, and the fact that SNAP benefits were expiring at the beginning of November, we’ve learned all kinds of things about how awful, corrupt, and abused this program is.

I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about that today.

We’ll talk about a few examples of fraud, and then we’ll talk about a few more examples of fraud. And then we’re gonna talk about what the Trump administration is doing to address it.

To begin, in May of 2025, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York charged six individuals with a sprawling fraud and bribery scheme that generated over $66 million in unauthorized transactions under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

According to the indictment, these are the details that we have at hand. So,

Starting in 2019, Michael Kehoe orchestrated a network that supplied approximately 160 unauthorized EBT terminals to stores across the New York area to illegally process more than $30 million in EBT transactions.

Working with his co-defendants, he submitted approximately 200 fraudulent USDA applications, misappropriating USDA license numbers, and in some cases, doctoring application documents to obtain EBT terminals for unauthorized stores, including smoke shops and other unauthorized and ineligible businesses.

Critical to the scheme, was Arlasa Davis, longtime USDA employee who worked within the very division of the USDA responsible for identifying snap fraud. Davis abused her privilege to access to federal systems to sell hundreds of EBT license numbers, enabling over 36 million in fraudulent snap redemptions at unauthorized stores.

Davis photographed handwritten lists of license numbers intended for qualifying stores with her personal cell phone and funneled them to an intermediary who sold them to co-conspirators.

Newsweek, June 2025, headline, Snap Benefit Theft Explodes Across US.

Anyone not surprised?

Fraudulent Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits transactions increased by a staggering 55 % between the final quarter of fiscal year 24 and the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service.

They have a nice graph that I’m going to share in the printed version behind the paywall, but.

You just watch, it’s like everything else at the end of the Biden administration, just the fraud just sort of goes like this, just climbs.

Snap benefits are administered to recipients through electronic benefit transfer cards, EBT, which are loaded with money every month to use in participating retailers like regular debit or credit cards, they are subject to scams such as cloning, phishing or skimming.

Between the final quarter of fiscal year 2024 and the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, the total number of fraudulent snap transactions jumped from 440,553 to 691,604, an increase of 247,051 or 55%. It marks the largest rise in fraudulent claims across a single time period since the USDA began publishing these records.

Keep in mind that this is all deliberate. Obviously, we know that they were giving SNAP benefits to illegal aliens, which is against federal law, and they were ignoring fraud because it favored the Democrat Party. It favored their voting base. It favored the base. They wanted to replace the one they couldn’t build naturally because their entire agenda sucks. ⁓ It’s expensive and it’s doomed to collapse. That’s the thing. You can give these benefits away and make all these people dependent, but ultimately,

As you approach the peak of socialism and central planning and control, you run out of money, and those people are the ones who get hurt. You trap them down there, you drive them down there through economic policy, and then you leave them stranded, which is why the Democrat Party sucks and why we need to do what we can to deter their efforts by keeping them out of power. ⁓ as long as this fraud exists, and it will. It’ll just keep getting worse. People will be finding new ways, but don’t worry.

Stick with us on the other side of the paywall. We have a solution, and I think it’s the only solution and maybe one of the best ones I’ve ever heard of, and I think they need to apply it not just to SNAP but across the entire welfare state.

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