As the United States of America marks its 250th anniversary this year, the relationship between the states and the federal government is approaching a breaking point.

Led by a bellicose president, the executive branch has moved to dominate states, resulting in more than a year of escalating confrontations between the two levels of government.

President Donald Trump has worked quickly: In the first year of his second term, he surged thousands of immigration enforcement agents into a resistant Minneapolis and other cities, with fatal results. He seized control of the National Guard in some states against the will of governors.

His administration is trying to force states to turn over sensitive data on millions of voters ahead of the midterms. And it is blocking states from receiving, and distributing to their residents, billions of federal dollars for child care, public health, housing and a host of other congressionally approved programs.

Political parties have swung in and out of power in Washington for centuries, and recent administrations have increasingly clashed with states run by the other party. This time is different, dozens of sources in and around government told Stateline.

Trump and a coterie of loyal aides have set out to remake the nation in the president’s image. Along the way, retribution and raw power have become the administration’s primary tools to bend recalcitrant states to its will. Grants are pulled, armed force deployed, disaster aid withheld.

The states have repeatedly gone to court, asking the federal judiciary to rein in the executive branch. They have also started testing the bounds of their own authority, such as moving to restrict the actions of federal immigration enforcement agents.

The past year has led to a period of sustained state and federal conflict without parallel in modern U.S. history. The consequences for Americans over time will prove enormous, shaping the very nature of our government.

“This kind of battle between the federal government and the states, we’ve just never seen that before and it makes no sense,” said former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who was elected as a Republican but later helped co-found the centrist Forward Party.

Tensions between the states and the central government are as old as the nation itself. Alexander Hamilton famously favored a strong central government, while James Madison offered the Bill of Rights — including what became the 10th Amendment, which reserves for the states and the people those powers not delegated to the federal government.

But current strains are testing the bedrock principles of federalism, the uniquely American system created by the framers of the Constitution of power sharing between Washington, D.C., and the states.

Ahead of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding on July 4, Stateline is exploring how the Trump era is transforming the relationship between the states and the federal government. This article is the first in an occasional series, The 50 vs. The One, that will examine the current fraught moment and what evolving — and often deteriorating — state-federal ties mean for the country, now and in the future.

In interviews and public remarks, current and former elected officials at all levels of government, as well as experts on American government, have described the country as approaching a pivot point. Trump’s second term could mark a defining moment for American federalism, one that will be studied in history books alongside Reconstruction, the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement.

The United States will either continue to adhere to the principles of federalism, they say, or it will take a significant step toward a more powerful central government that sidelines the states.

“We are in a period of challenged federalism,” said Lisa Parshall, a federalism researcher and political science professor at Daemen University near Buffalo, New York. “The fact that we’re here talking about federalism tells you something about the current state of American politics.”

Dramatic changes in a year

Fears of diminishing state authority have animated state officials over the past year. Republican lawmakers in Utah have invested in federalism education and expanded a group to assess state-federal boundaries, for instance.

In July, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, both Democrats, publicly abandoned the nonpartisan National Governors Association, in part because they said the organization was not doing enough to protect states’ rights.

States are “laboratories of democracy,” Kelly said during an interview in February, using a classic civics textbook description. States have traditionally operated with relative freedom to pursue their own agendas and solutions to the challenges they face. In turn, states learn from one another.

“That’s been the beauty of it,” Kelly said. “If that’s to go away, if the federal government were — and they are, at this point — undermining states’ authority and responsibility, I think you end up slowing down the entire country.”

In the same way the three branches of government — the legislative, the executive and the judicial — provide checks and balances on one another, federalism imposes a state check on federal power. The U.S. Constitution, which went into effect in 1789, ensured states would command broad power over local commerce, policing, elections and other matters within their borders.

But Trump has at times raised doubt about whether he will always follow the Constitution and has claimed that he can ignore some of its requirements.

Last spring, Trump replied “I don’t know” when asked whether he needed to uphold the U.S. Constitution in the context of due process for immigrants. In 2022, he said massive election fraud allows parts of the Constitution to be terminated. And after his 2020 election defeat, he urged then-Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the results, even though the vice president has no constitutional authority to do so.

In February, Trump asserted that “states are just an agent of the federal government” as he called to “nationalize” elections. Under the Constitution, the responsibility of running elections belongs to the states.

Trump’s critics fault the Republican-controlled Congress for failing to challenge his sweeping assertions of executive power. His administration’s efforts to withhold from states billions in dollars appropriated by Congress, for instance, have spurred relatively little outrage among GOP lawmakers.

“What I think we’re seeing now is a whole different system of crushing state and local government,” said U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Missouri Democrat who has been in Congress since 2005. “And bowing down to a new system where we are almost living in a one-person government.”

In response to questions from Stateline, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement: “The Trump Administration faithfully upholds our Constitution and the immortalized American principles of federalism, the rule of law, and the separation of powers.”

Trump and his allies have cast the president as a heroic figure capable of smashing through the machinery of government to achieve results on behalf of his voters and at the expense of his enemies. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution,” he said in 2023.

He has at times taken steps that his supporters argue empower states, including effectively gutting the U.S. Department of Education, which Republicans have long accused of federal overreach. His appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court during his first term helped cement a conservative majority that in 2022 returned the issue of abortion access to the states.

In a statement, the Republican Governors Association told Stateline the current administration trusts governors to run their own states.

“By cutting government bureaucracy and unnecessary red-tape, President Trump is empowering governors to make decisions that best serve their individual states,” wrote Kollin Crompton, an RGA spokesperson.

Scrambled identities

The U.S. Constitution has been gradually amended in ways that have limited state power, most importantly through amendments that abolished slavery, required states to treat their citizens equally under the law, and prohibited states from denying suffrage on the basis of race and sex.

The federal government has also expanded its reach through legislation. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s imposed new economic regulations and created a federal social welfare apparatus that touches nearly every American.

Over time, Democrats broadly came to be seen as the party more comfortable with an active federal government and Republicans as the party seeking a more restrained Washington.

But the Trump era has scrambled those identities.

Trump has shown less respect for traditional conservative ideology, such as limited government and a general deference to the authority of states. Instead, he has taken a maximalist approach to executive power.

His actions have placed Democratic state officials in a position of advancing limits on the federal government, whether through lawsuits or legislation. And they have put Republican supporters of the president at odds with decades of conservative rhetoric.

“I do think that progressives are seeing that federalism — there’s a reason it’s in our constitutional order and it isn’t just something that’s left for conservatives,” said Sean Beienburg, an associate professor at Arizona State University who researches federalism and constitutional law.

In Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, Trump deployed federalized National Guard troops onto city streets before courts held him back and he withdrew. For a time, active-duty Marines also patrolled Los Angeles, an extraordinary use of the military for domestic purposes.

Oregon Democratic Attorney General Dan Rayfield, who challenged the deployment of the National Guard in his state, said the fight underscores why lawsuits matter in checking Trump’s power.

“People should be shocked that Oregon has filed 55 lawsuits,” Rayfield said in an interview earlier this year. “Their mind should be blown. But their mind should be equally blown at how often we’re winning these cases.”

The Trump administration has won seven court decisions — and lost 58 — so far, according to a New York Times litigation tracker.

Democratic state lawmakers have also searched for ways to restrict federal immigration agents. In California, Democratic Assemblymember Alex Lee has proposed prohibiting state tax breaks for Immigration and Customs Enforcement contractors — a move that could carry national implications because of the size of the state’s economy.

“We also, now, are reasserting what the role of the states and the federal government are,” Lee said.

But among Republicans, Trump has successfully maintained his grip. Many conservative state leaders have supported the president’s most controversial moves, even those criticized as federal overreach.

During President Joe Biden’s term, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott was a staunch proponent of state autonomy and repeatedly challenged the federal government on regulatory issues and its deployment of a state’s National Guard. But Abbott has supported Trump’s expansion of federal powers, going so far as to authorize the deployment of the Texas National Guard to aid immigration enforcement in Illinois and Oregon.

Republican U.S. Sen. Jim Justice, the previous governor of West Virginia, said federalism remains “alive and well” under Trump. He said he was worried about the nation’s trajectory before coming to Washington in 2025.

“We’ve had to change things,” he said. “There’s new things that are going on that no question they’re disrupting folks on the other side of the aisle.”

Still, other Republicans have pushed back on the administration’s escalating hostility toward liberal states.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt sharply criticized the deployment of the National Guard, saying “Oklahomans would lose their mind” if a Democratic-controlled state sent troops to his state during Biden’s presidency. He has warned that the expanding power and spending of the federal government is dangerous no matter which party controls Washington.

“When we have this powerful of a federal government, it should be frightening for everyone,” Stitt said during a February event at The Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington, D.C.

‘States created the Constitution’

As the reach of the federal government ballooned over generations, Democratic and Republican presidents have used federal funding to wield more influence over state and local governments.

Federal dollars account for an increasingly large percentage of state revenues, rising from 22% in 1989 to 36% in 2023, according to Pew, which analyzed census and federal economic data. States received more than $1 trillion in federal grants that year.

Over the years, that largesse has encouraged states to pursue policy agendas favored by the current party in power at the federal level.

But Trump has weaponized federal funds in unprecedented ways, experts say. Bypassing Congress and despite numerous court losses, the White House has held up funding for higher education, transit, housing and infrastructure — particularly for states that displease him.

The administration’s attempts to terminate funding for the $16 billion Gateway rail tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey remain entangled in a lawsuit. New Jersey Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill said the White House has caused millions in cost overruns and delays, in what she characterized as the most urgent and consequential infrastructure project in the country.

In February, Politico reported Trump told congressional leaders he would release funding for the project in exchange for renaming Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia and Penn Station in New York City in his honor.

Parshall, of Daemen University, noted that more state leaders of both parties are pushing to reassert state-federal boundaries — whether in the areas of agriculture or the future of artificial intelligence.

“Federalism scholars are seeing this as a potentially pivotal moment in federal-state relationships,” she said.

Last August, elected leaders gathered at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Boston, where in 1773 colonists hurled chests of tea into the Boston Harbor in protest of Great Britain’s King George III. At the conference, lawmakers grumbled about a federal government increasingly sidelining states. That organization, representing more than 7,000 state and territory legislators, has consistently urged the Trump administration to respect states’ inherent authority.

In December, a bipartisan group of more than 40 lawmakers from 30 states gathered to discuss federalism issues, unanimously approving a declaration on the importance of states’ ability to legislate independently. That document noted that the Constitution did not create the states, “but rather the states created the Constitution, ratifying a framework in which we would both govern collectively and independently.”

New Hampshire state House Speaker Sherman Packard, a Republican, said state-federal tensions have been mounting for decades. He noted that the major tax and spending law the president signed last summer — often called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — both cut federal funding to states and saddled them with new costs and administrative work. But it’s just the latest example of what he views as a federal government overstepping its bounds.

“And it’s getting more and more prolific that they’re taking on and doing things that most of us feel is inappropriate,” Packard said. “If we don’t fix this, we’re going to lose state sovereignty altogether. And that’s just not the way it was set up.”

Reporter David Lightman contributed to this story. Stateline reporters Jonathan Shorman and Kevin Hardy can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org and khardy@stateline.org.

Cities and states are filing lawsuits and scrambling for alternative sources of money as the Trump administration seeks to shut off the federal funding spigot for biking and walking trails.

Since the early 1990s, there has been fairly consistent — and largely bipartisan — federal support for bicycle and pedestrian projects. Federal funding for such projects reached new heights during the Biden administration, as major spending measures in 2021 and 2022 included billions in new money for them.

But in his efforts to eliminate what he perceives as diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — and to roll back anything associated with his predecessor — President Donald Trump has targeted hundreds of millions in federal grants for biking and pedestrian projects. And further cuts could be coming.

The broad tax and spending measure Trump signed last summer rescinded $2.4 billion from the Biden administration’s Neighborhood Access and Equity Program, money included in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to address long-standing safety issues stemming from past infrastructure projects, including interstate highways that split minority communities.

Of that total, at least $750 million was specifically earmarked for trails, walking paths and bike lane projects, according to data on grant recipients collected by Rails to Trails Conservancy, a nonprofit that advocates for trails and the construction of multiuse paths in abandoned railroad corridors.

Mark Treskon, a principal research associate at the nonprofit Urban Institute, said the administration seems to view bike and pedestrian trails as “a policy thing that people on the left like,” and is cutting funding as a “knee-jerk reaction” to former President Joe Biden’s policy priorities.

But Nate Sizemore, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Transportation, said the Trump administration is simply “getting back to basics” by “building the essential infrastructure needed to safely move people and commerce.”

“As grant programs become available for applicants, we will ensure that every taxpayer dollar is reinvested into rebuilding the roads and bridges our economy demands. … This decision reflects a significant shift away from the previous administration’s costly social and climate initiatives that deprioritized the needs of American drivers and increased congestion risks,” Sizemore wrote in an email.

Already reeling from the $750 million in cuts included in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, cities and states that are counting on federal money for biking and pedestrian projects are worried about further cuts when Congress reauthorizes a broad transportation funding law that expires on Sept. 30. Biden’s 2021 infrastructure measure boosted the amount of money available for bike and pedestrian projects under that law.

“Everything is on the table, and there’s lots of risks to not only some of these grants that have been given under the last transportation bill … but it also implicates programs that are like the bread and butter of building trails, walking and biking infrastructure that have been around for many decades,” said Kevin Mills, vice president of policy at Rails to Trails Conservancy.

“We’ve heard warning signs from the administration, from leaders in Congress and from the heads of state transportation departments that they are looking to focus more on cars and less on active transportation, and sometimes less on transit as well.”

Seeking alternatives

In the aftermath of last year’s cuts and uncertainty over the future of federal funding, some states and cities have seen their projects completely stall, while others have found ways to move forward while decreasing their reliance on federal support.

In Connecticut, Rick Dunne, the executive director of the Naugatuck Valley Council of Governments, the federal metropolitan planning organization in that area of Connecticut, said the Trump administration pulled $5.7 million in funding to build around 9 miles on a 42-mile trail project known as the Naugatuck River Greenway Trail last September.

“It would have leveraged a whole bunch of state money and local dollars to build these sections,” Dunne said, noting that the council was hoping to use the federal funds to get matching dollars locally. “It would have advanced all of the activities on the trail and built major sections using other state, federal and local funding for construction.”

Dunne said Connecticut is limited in how it raises transportation funds because it doesn’t have counties.

“It’s either paid for by those small local towns, 10,000 to 20,000 people, or it’s paid for by the state,” Dunne said. “But once we lose the federal funding, then we start losing some of the state funding and local funding that would have matched it.”

Dunne said the council has not received any further communication from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, Terry Brunner, director of the city’s Metropolitan Redevelopment Agency, said the Trump administration last September pulled an $11.5 million grant to build part of a 7.5-mile pedestrian and bike lane around the city’s downtown.

The city decided to sue the administration in November to get those funds back, and the case is still wrapped up in court.

“We’re hoping we get a positive outcome on the lawsuit,” Brunner said. “We’ve also got a backup plan to ask for another federal funding source, or try to get funding from the state of New Mexico to the city of Albuquerque to complete the section, because we were about 90% done with the design of this trail.”

Brunner said Albuquerque has one of the highest pedestrian and cyclist death rates in the country, so getting people off the streets onto a safe trail is a priority for the city.

“I don’t think they’re going to stop us, but they’ll delay us,” he said, noting that the city is lucky because the state is offering funding and that the city budget may have some flexibility.

“Historically, we’ve always had a good partnership in Albuquerque with the federal government, and this is taking away a little bit of that shine and making us feel as if the federal government just really doesn’t care about Albuquerque.”

Projects in Republican-led states

The Trump administration also rescinded a $147 million grant for Jacksonville, Florida, to complete the 30-mile urban Emerald Trail.

Kay Ehas, CEO of Groundwork Jacksonville, the city’s nonprofit partner in building the Emerald Trail and restoring Hogans and McCoys creeks, says the group is continuing to work with the city “to identify funding to replace the federal grant that was rescinded last year.”

“We are enlisting the support of corporate and private donors to fund design, which keeps the project moving while we seek government dollars for construction,” Ehas told Stateline.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, the Atlanta Regional Commission is continuing to plan and develop Flint River Gateway Trails, said Josh Phillipson, principal program specialist at ARC. The 31-mile network of bike and pedestrian paths would connect communities along the Flint River in the southern portion of the metro Atlanta area. The commission tapped into the area’s annual allocation of federal transportation funding to cover the cost of the $1.5 million master planning effort, which includes a 20% local match from ARC, despite losing a $65 million federal grant.

“We are not doing anything on the construction because we don’t have those dollars at this point,” Phillipson said. “We’re stepping back a little bit more into our traditional role of doing the long-range planning, but we’re going to be sticking with this project, committed for the next few years.”

Mills, of Rails to Trails Conservancy, lamented the loss of the Neighborhood Access and Equity grants, which would have helped areas “where historic transportation investments had split communities in two,” cutting off residents from economic opportunities and their neighbors.

In Atlanta, for example, Phillipson said the trails project was meant to “bridge over core infrastructure decisions of the last century that were overwhelmingly impacting more diverse communities,” making it “difficult now to walk or ride a bike between two adjacent communities.”

Treskon, of the Urban Institute, said cities and states will be hard-pressed to replace all the federal money they lost.

“It’s a pretty big hit across the board for the places that had built that into their financial plans,” he said.

Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.

State officials across the country are looking to crack down on fraud and mistakes in the nation’s largest food assistance program, spurred by looming federal rules that will force states with high error rates to pay more.

But the Republican proposals mostly focus on more frequently verifying the eligibility of individual households that participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), rather than on broader administrative shortcomings that allow most of the waste and fraud to occur.

Policies such as verifying recipients’ eligibility each month — which can involve cross-checking multiple databases or collecting extra documentation — might increase state agencies’ workloads without lowering error rates. This is especially likely if states don’t boost funding to handle the extra paperwork, investigate fraud or resolve recipient and agency errors.

Eliza Kinsey, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine who focuses on hunger, said staffing shortages, outdated technology and changes to eligibility rules that require oversight are making it harder for state agencies to avoid overpaying or underpaying recipients — the errors that will cost states money under the new federal rules.

“The fact that we’re seeing error rates that are higher really makes sense, given the context of what’s going on in SNAP right now,” Kinsey said.

SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, is a federal-state program that provides recipients with a debit card that can be used to purchase food at grocery stores and other retailers. SNAP errors and fraud often get conflated, but they’re largely separate issues: Errors are unintentional mistakes by SNAP agencies or recipients, while fraud is intentional theft.

SNAP errors occur when the state overpays or underpays SNAP recipients. They’re caused either by unintentional recipient mistakes — forgetting to report a change in how many people live in the household, for example — or by an agency processing error, such as incorrectly calculating a household’s expenses.

States have encountered instances of individual recipient fraud, though they can go uninvestigated when resources are scarce. Large sums, in the millions, have been stolen by sophisticated crime rings that electronically “skim” money from the debit cards that SNAP recipients use to purchase food.

State SNAP error rates include recipient fraud, recipient errors, and state agency errors.

Alabama earned local and national media attention last year when initial U.S. Department of Agriculture data from early 2025 showed it leading the nation in stolen SNAP benefit claims, ahead of much more populous California and New York.

“There’s a lot of talk about SNAP fraud, and a lot of it is misrepresented,” Nancy Buckner, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Human Resources, which administers Alabama’s SNAP program, told state lawmakers at a January budget hearing. “The biggest SNAP fraud in this country are those people that are doing it electronically.”

In recent years, her department noticed SNAP purchases being made in states nowhere near Alabama, she said, including New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Maine.

“It was obvious to us we don’t have that many Alabama clients shopping in those other states,” she said. This month, Alabama became the second state, behind California, to issue SNAP debit cards to recipients with the kind of microchips that are standard on commercial debit cards. Chipped cards are harder to steal from than those with magnetic strips only.

In the middle of it all, states are staring down massive cuts in federal funding. President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act puts states on the hook for more administrative costs and forces states to pay a higher share of benefits, in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars, if they have higher error rates.

“The federal government is telling states, you have to pay more in administrative costs, and you have to bring your error rates down simultaneously,” said Kinsey. “It feels like those two changes are in opposition with each other.”

Error prone

Last month, Alabama state lawmakers grilled Buckner, demanding to know her plan for lowering the state’s error rate.

Under Trump’s new law, Alabama’s SNAP administrative costs will rise by $39 million. Meanwhile, the state’s error rate, which Buckner expects to be about 9%, is below the national average, but high enough to allow the feds to force the state to cover 10% of its SNAP benefits starting in fiscal 2028.

All told, Alabama could be on the hook for an additional $200 million or more per year by 2028.

“Is there anything that can be done to prevent running into that $200 million wall?” Alabama state Sen. Greg Albritton, a Republican, asked Buckner during a budget hearing in January. “Right now I think that the train’s got the light on, heading straight for us.”

Buckner said she hoped for some extra wiggle room from the feds, but provided few details on how the department could lower Alabama’s error rate enough to avoid financial penalties.

Currently, the federal government pays for SNAP benefits and splits administration costs 50/50 with states. But starting in October, under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, all states will be on the hook for 75% of their own administrative costs. And the new law allows the feds to penalize states for their SNAP errors, requiring them to pay from 5%-15% of their SNAP benefit costs if their error rates are over 6%.

The only states under the 6% threshold, per the most recent data available from USDA, which oversees the program, were Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Republicans say these new rules will reduce the federal government’s investment in SNAP while giving states some “skin in the game” when it comes to being responsible with federal money.

“One of the problems is the federal programs don’t mandate the prevention, detection and prosecution of fraud,” said Dawn Royal, with the United Council on Welfare Fraud, a national membership group focused on fraud in public assistance programs. “And so states are unwilling to spend state money in order to protect federal money.”

In Alabama, the USDA replaced nearly $16 million in stolen benefits from fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2025, according to federal data.

The Alabama Senate is currently considering a bill that would require state agencies to conduct monthly checks of other state databases to make sure SNAP enrollees remain eligible.

Buckner told state lawmakers that increasing eligibility checks for SNAP benefits would “shoot that error rate up, way up.” The state’s Legislative Fiscal Office estimated the additional work for both Medicaid and SNAP under the pending bill could cost $16.7 million per year.

“Monthly reporting is not the answer to that, at all,” she said.

But other states are looking at similar measures.

Lawmakers in states including Idaho, Kansas and Wyoming have introduced bills to require their state SNAP administrators to check eligibility of SNAP recipients more frequently. Missouri, Oklahoma and Utah bills would require verification of citizenship or legal immigration status before approving applicants for SNAP benefits. A Wisconsin bill would require the state’s Democratic governor to bow to a White House demand to turn over state data on SNAP recipients.

And in Arizona, GOP lawmakers wanted to go even further than the new federal requirements. Last week Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a package of Republican bills that would have required the state agency administering SNAP to get its error rate below 3% by 2030 or face financial penalties, and cut an additional 10% from its budget if the state failed to take corrective action.

States target fraud

SNAP fraud has made state and national headlines in recent years, but there’s not a broad consensus on the scale of the problem nor how to address it.

Some SNAP fraud is perpetrated by recipients who lie in order to get SNAP benefits for which they’re not eligible. But there’s also organized electronic SNAP theft, which involves thieves taking control of EBT accounts through electronic methods such as card skimming or cloning, bot attacks and phishing scams. Skimming is a form of theft where devices are illegally installed inside sales terminals at a store and capture card data. That data is then used to make unauthorized purchases or steal from the victim’s account.

In December, a longtime USDA employee was sentenced to two years in prison for her role in what the U.S. Department of Justice called a “sprawling fraud and bribery scheme” that generated more than $66 million in unauthorized SNAP transactions. The same month, two Romanian nationals were indicted for their role in allegedly stealing more than $160,000 in benefits in Oregon and elsewhere. In 2025, California reported more than $100 million in stolen funds from California SNAP recipients’ EBT cards.

States reported replacing more than $360 million in stolen benefits from fiscal 2023-2025, according to federal data. Experts and state officials differ on whether recipients or organized crime rings are the biggest threats to SNAP. But since the federal government stopped reimbursing stolen SNAP benefits at the end of 2024, more states are looking at ways to address fraud.

States including Arkansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Virginia are joining Alabama and California in rolling out chip cards to make it harder for skimmers to steal SNAP benefits.

“SNAP fraud is rampant,” said Royal, of the United Council on Welfare Fraud. “If anybody tells you that there’s not SNAP fraud out there, they’re trying to pull the wool over your eyes. It exists in all 50 states. It is definitely a plague on the taxpayers.”

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.