During the public hearing for Senate Bill 61, Alabama Department of Human Resources Commissioner Nancy Buckner told senators that the bill would dramatically increase the costs of administering SNAP and could require DHR to hire hundreds more employees.
Introduced by Senator Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, SB61 would dramatically change SNAP and Medicaid eligibility requirements.
The majority of the bill by length is a list of requirements for the Department of Human Resources and Alabama Medicaid Agency to request and utilize data from ten different state and federal agencies to cross-verify eligibility for Medicaid and SNAP benefits.
The bill would also prevent DHR from giving applicants categorical eligibility for SNAP based on their participation in other programs for low-income Alabamians and decrease the period that someone can receive SNAP benefits without recertifying their eligibility.
As one of two individuals who signed up to speak on the bill, Alabama Arise Senior Policy Analyst Carol Gundlach told members of the Senate Finance and Taxation General Fund Committee that the bill would “drive up the error rate in the SNAP program, which of course is going to cost us a lot of money come next year if we can’t get that error rate down.”
The federal budget signed into law by President Trump last year will require states with a payment error rate above a certain threshold to cover a share of SNAP benefit payments. If the law had been in effect during the 2024 fiscal year, Alabama would have been responsible for paying approximately $173 million.
“It [drives up the error rate] by doing two things,” she explained. “It eliminates something called broadbased categorical eligibility, which is a big, old mouthful, but what it really means is a simplified, streamlined application process for the SNAP program so that we do not have case workers trying to figure out the value of that old car up on blocks in your backyard. Those are very error prone determinations, and they are labor intensive determinations. So we’re looking at both errors and excess labor.”
Gundlach additionally noted that shortening the certification period—the time until a recipient has to file paperwork showing they are still eligible—would lead to more “churn,” or people being improperly removed from SNAP, reapplying and then receiving benefits again after a period of having to go without needed payments.
“The bottom line is that people are gonna go without food and without healthcare because they are going to get denied and then have to reapply,” she told APR during a Tuesday interview. “And so there’ll be a 30 day or whatever wait till they can get food or healthcare again.”
When asked for any additional thoughts on the pending SNAP legislation, Gundlach said she would tell everyone that “the people in Washington and the people in Montgomery work for you, and if you’ve got concerns about this, you should tell your legislators and you should tell your members of Congress that you’ve got concerns.”
“We could have fixed this [matching funds] problem,” she told APR. “Congress voted it down.”
After Gundlach deferred to Buckner on a question about the payment error rate in Alabama during the committee meeting, the senators on the committee quickly began directing their questions directly to the commissioner, despite Buckner’s expressed desire to not speak on the bill before she is able to talk to Orr.
“How much inconvenience would it be to you all and other departments, because what it requires is basically a cross-reference with all of the departments to try to determine if there are duplications, where there are, and what have you?” asked Senator Linda Coleman-Madison, D-Birmingham. “Is that information exchange going to be an additional cost to do that? Do you all have the capabilities of doing that right now?”
“No, ma’am, we don’t,” Buckner responded. “And yes, ma’am, it will cost a lot of money.”
She then noted that express lane eligibility is actually a government efficiency measure, saying sharing information with Medicaid so the agency isn’t forced to “reverify and rework everything” is actually “very cost effective.”
In response to a follow-up question, Buckner described the dilemma: “We’ve got ‘Big Beautiful’ coming, that’s $35 to 40 million in admin costs, and to do this, I’m going to try to crunch the numbers but what my staff has given me is that it’ll take 800 more people in the SNAP program.”
After the second member of the public spoke against the bill but before the committee voted on whether to favorably recommend SB61, Senator Clyde Chambliss, R-Prattville, also said he has “some concerns with this language” in the bill.
“I think we need to do the cross checks and the different things that we can do,” he said. “However, some of the things in here like the categorical eligibility… There are times where we know that a person is never, ever going to get better except for a miracle. Why do we want to put them through the ringer over and over and over and over again—and staff over and over and over again—when we know that the answer is indefinitely the same?”
Despite Buckner’s descriptions of the bill’s probable effects and Chambliss’ reservations, the Senate Finance and Taxation General Fund Committee voted 8 to 4 to give the bill a favorable report.
Orr did not respond to APR’s request for comment.
