Before the hearing ended in theater, Lisa Beaudoin had been urging lawmakers to withhold their support from a proposal to restrict SNAP recipients’ ability to buy certain unhealthy foods with their benefits.
House Bill 1773, she said, represents a “troubling shift from support to surveillance” of New Hampshire residents who receive federal food assistance. Further, she levied a pointed accusation that a Florida-based nonprofit, the Foundation for Government Accountability, has made attempts to “weaken the use of SNAP by harm through a thousand small cuts.”
As Beaudoin, the executive director of the New Hampshire Council of Churches, brought her testimony to a close, Republican Rep. Matt Drew readied for a stand-off.
From under the table, he produced a sloshing bottle of soda and set it on top of a stack of documents: “What nutritional value is in that product?”
Their exchange exemplified the friction surrounding parallel efforts in the Senate and House of Representatives to limit the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. One would see New Hampshire follow the mold of more than a dozen states who have submitted Healthy Choice waivers blacklisting items like candy and sweetened beverages; the other proposes a slew of data-sharing agreements across state departments, the periodic review of out-of-state EBT transactions and the repeal of what’s called broad-based categorical eligibility.
Currently, New Hampshire households are eligible to receive SNAP benefits if they have an income less than or equal to 200% of the federal poverty level. Without categorical eligibility, the state would defer to the lower federal threshold — 130% of the poverty line — to certify recipients.
The Department of Health and Human Services estimated that repealing categorical eligibility would cause anywhere between 20,000 and 25,000 New Hampshire households to lose SNAP eligibility, according to House Bill 1797’s fiscal note.
In the opposite chamber, Sen. Victoria Sullivan pitched members of the Health and Human Services committee on Senate Bill 615, which combines both initiatives, in mid-January.
“SNAP is a supplemental nutrition assistance program designed to provide nutrition to American families in need. In its current form, we are not delivering nutrition but delivering illness and disease,” said Sullivan, a Republican representing Manchester.
Sugar-sweetened beverages comprise 9.3% of SNAP benefits, making them the number-one product purchased with government assistance, Sullivan told the committee, referencing a study authored by researchers at Harvard and Tufts universities and data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP at the federal level.
The same study reports that SNAP recipients are more likely than low-income people who aren’t enrolled in the program to be obese: The health condition was prevalent among 40% of SNAP recipients in 2015, as opposed to 32% of low-income non-participants.
“No one is suggesting poor people can’t choose what they want to eat, but we’re saying let’s not use government benefits to pay for foods that are demonstrably going to undermine public health,” Sullivan told the committee, quoting Boston Children’s Hospital nutrition advocate Dr. David Ludwig, who the study also cites.
She described other measures proposed in the bill — among them a series of data-sharing agreements to identify households with $3,000 or more in lottery or gambling winnings and households exclusively making out-of-state purchases over a 60-day period — as attempts to limit the state’s error rate.
A state’s error rate measures the accuracy of its eligibility and benefit determinations, in essence, how much it overpays or underpays SNAP benefits. Under President Donald Trump’s budget reconciliation law, passed by Congress last year, states with error rates above 6% will have to pay a portion of the cost of benefits, ranging from 5% to 15% depending on particular error rates.
With an error rate of 7.57% in 2024, New Hampshire would be on the hook for a minimum of $8 million in benefits.
In Raymond Burke’s view, however, Sullivan’s bill wouldn’t fundamentally address the state’s error rate. Quite the opposite: Burke, an attorney with New Hampshire Legal Assistance, said categorical eligibility streamlines the eligibility process for DHHS and removing it could exacerbate the risk of clerical mistakes that lead to under- and over-payment.
Implementing the Healthy Choices waiver could present challenges for grocers, too. Kevin Daigle, president and CEO of the New Hampshire Grocers Association, explained the subjectivity of the word “healthy” to legislators in January and again on Tuesday. The waiver does not establish a comprehensive list of disqualified items, and some outlying items defy the widely-accepted definitions of categories like “candy” and “sugar-sweetened beverages.”
“M&M’s, Snickers, and Twix. Which one of those three is not a candy? Twix. It’s made with flour,” Daigle said. “So, depended upon the definition of what candy is, everybody’s rational brain is going to say Twix is a candy bar. It’s not.”
Further, according to Daigle, the compliance costs associated with coding certain groceries as either “eligible” or “ineligible” could prompt some independent retailers to “just simply stop accepting SNAP.”
Whatever the challenges with implementation within DHHS and at retail grocers, food insecurity advocates opposing the three bills on moral and ethical grounds have galvanized their supporters to flood the zone.
As of Wednesday, online testimony suggested a strong rebuke of all three bills: The 330 submissions opposing HB 1797, the data sharing and categorical eligibility bill, far eclipsed the nine supportive submissions. Similarly, 345 people opposed HB 1773, which would have the state submit a Healthy Choice waiver. Only 15 registered their support.
The hearing report for SB 615 indicates that, by the date of the hearing, lawmakers had received 226 signatures in opposition to the bill and 22 in support.
Christine Arsnow, a board certified pediatrician at Concord Pediatrics, laid out her reservations.
“I do agree with the author of the bill that whole foods should be prioritized for kids. However, restricting access to food for low-income children is not the way to do this,” Arsnow said. “Anything that makes it harder for low-income kids to have access to food is a bad idea.”