The part of SNAP we can actually fix

The realistic place to start is not a bill. The 2025 law cut about $187 billion from federal nutrition spending over 10 years, by the Congressional Budget Office's estimate. Analysts call it the largest cut in the program's history. If the record above holds, part of what was cut will eventually come back. It will come back through Washington, years from now, and only after the damage has been counted. Betting on a quick reversal in Congress would be a poor plan.

There is a second reason to set the legislative road aside. As of mid-2026 the same party holds the North Carolina General Assembly, both chambers of Congress, and the White House. That governing majority is the one that enacted the 2025 cut. The cut itself can only be undone in Washington, where a near-term reversal would mean that majority voting down its own law. A rescue from the General Assembly would mean the same majority spending state money to blunt a law its own party passed. Neither is a claim about which party is right. It is the arithmetic of who currently holds the votes, and it means the legislative road is the blocked one for now.

That leaves the things that do not need a new law. The useful question is narrower and closer to home: while that federal pattern plays out over years, what can actually move here, and who moves it?

For most of SNAP's history the deal was steady: Washington paid for the food and split the cost of running the program. In North Carolina, one of 10 states where counties run SNAP, the counties carried the bulk of the state-and-local share. The 2025 law changed both parts of that deal. The federal government paid half of the administrative cost through September 2026; from October 2026 it pays a quarter, except for job-training costs, where its share does not change. The cut pushes about $69 million more a year onto North Carolina's counties, and roughly $16 million onto the state. For Buncombe the adopted county budget puts it at about $1.7 million from October 2026 through June 2027. After that, by the state's estimate, it runs about $2.8 million a year. The county budget it comes out of is broken down in our Buncombe County budget brief.

Then, starting in October 2027, the same law makes the state pay a share of the benefits themselves if the error rate stays too high. That share is called the benefit cost-share, and it works as an error-rate penalty. The error rate counts benefits paid in error: too much, too little, or to a household that did not qualify. USDA says it is not a fraud rate and that these errors are largely unintentional. North Carolina's 2026 budget passed that share down to the counties: if the state owes an error-rate penalty, the state covers it by withholding the money from county sales-tax revenue. That sales tax is shared with cities, towns and special districts such as fire districts. Part of the withholding falls on them as well. The county was already paying to run SNAP; from October 2026 it pays more, and from October 2027 it is on the hook for a share of the error-rate bill too.

Those two rising bills work differently. The county pays most of what it costs to run SNAP, and its budget controls that spending directly. The error-rate penalty is set by a statewide score instead, and nothing one county does moves that score much. Either way, real county money is now on the table, which makes the county budget the first place to look.

Fund the caseworkers. County caseworkers enter the data that becomes the state's error score. A well-run Department of Social Services is squarely in the county's interest: it keeps eligible families from being dropped over a missed form, and it holds down the churn and backlogs that waste the administrative dollars the county now largely pays. The new error-rate penalty is a different matter, and for Buncombe mostly a shared one. What Buncombe owes on that penalty depends more on the size of its sales-tax base than on how well its own office runs. Part of the bill is a flat charge against every county's sales tax. The rest falls on counties with errors counted against them, and even that share is weighted by sales-tax base as well as by errors. For a high-sales-tax county like Buncombe, the bill lands hard either way. Fund the office for what a well-run one does, not to save money on the penalty (the mechanics are in Who Pays for SNAP Now). Underfunding the office is a false economy. It comes down to one line item and one vote, and the county commission controls that vote.

Back the paperwork help. The near-term harm is paperwork, so support the groups that fight it directly. MANNA FoodBank's food helpline walks neighbors through applications and renewals. Pisgah Legal Services takes on wrongful denials and appeals. Both run on donations and volunteers. A gift to either needs no vote and nobody's permission, which makes it the easiest of these to actually do this year.

Widen the market match. The Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, or ASAP, runs Double SNAP at participating farmers markets, where it matches SNAP benefits dollar for dollar. The extra benefits can go toward fruits, vegetables, bread, meat, eggs, and dairy products sold at those markets. Funding comes from outside SNAP. Buncombe County awarded the program $250,000 of its federal COVID recovery money in July 2022. The shopper's dollar buys twice as much and the farmer keeps the whole amount. A local foundation or a single large donor could widen the match this season without touching the SNAP statute at all.

Ask about food at the clinic. Not everyone who qualifies for SNAP signs up. Nationally, about 88 percent of eligible people were enrolled in 2022, the highest share on record. Among eligible seniors, only about half were enrolled. A health system that asks about food at intake and refers patients to paperwork help reaches eligible people no form ever finds.

Doctors can write prescriptions for fruits and vegetables. Some patients get meals designed around a medical condition. Medicaid, hospitals, and insurers pay for both, and none of it touches SNAP. Food is also becoming a second, better-funded line of care. MAHEC and Dogwood Health Trust already do this work locally. North Carolina's Healthy Opportunities Pilots showed the Medicaid version can pay for food, but the state paused that program in July 2025 for lack of funding. The 2026 state budget puts $9 million in state money toward restarting it, along with federal matching funds. The state says the restarted services will go to a subset of Medicaid members who meet specific eligibility requirements. As of mid-July 2026, though, the pilot was still suspended and the state had not set a restart date. As long as it stays on hold, a clinic working with area farmers is the better place to start a smaller produce-prescription program.

There is also an economic reason to close the enrollment gap. The benefit dollars are almost entirely federal, so every eligible resident who enrolls brings outside money into local grocery stores. In a weak economy, USDA estimates that each SNAP dollar generates about $1.50 in economic activity. That money lands with local businesses, not the county treasury, so it is economic development for the community. It comes on top of the help the benefit gives the household that enrolls.

Get the error rate under 6 percent the right way. North Carolina's error rate is 7.36 percent, down from 10.21 percent. That is its rate for the federal year that ran from October 2024 through September 2025. Under the benefit cost-share that starts in October 2027, that rate puts North Carolina in the lowest tier that pays anything: 5 percent of benefit costs. At that tier, the General Assembly's fiscal staff puts the bill at about $150 million. Under 6 percent, that bill is zero.

The rate is an annual score, not a number the state can flip in a quarter. The rate to watch is the one for the federal year that ran from October 2025 through September 2026. For the first bill the state can choose that rate in place of its rate for October 2024 through September 2025. The 2026 state budget tells NCDHHS to choose that rate if it means a smaller bill. For the bill that starts in October 2028, the same rate applies outright. That federal year closed on September 30, 2026, so work the state starts now first shows up in the rate for October 2026 through September 2027. That rate sets the share the state owes for the year that starts in October 2029.

More than half of payment errors trace to income changes. USDA's own simplification options cut the number of reports where those errors happen: simpler reporting, longer certification for stable households, and the streamlined path for seniors and people with disabilities. None of them changes who qualifies. As of October 2023, North Carolina already used simpler reporting and 24-month certification periods. The state can work toward the target by fixing paperwork. It should back this up by publishing churn and wrongful-denial counts next to the error rate. Those counts show whether the score fell because the paperwork improved or because families got dropped.

Cut the renewal paperwork. SNAP does not allow automatic renewal the way Medicaid does. But a state can make fuller use of what SNAP already allows. One option is the Elderly Simplified Application Project, a federal demonstration program a state has to ask USDA for. It is for households where every member is an older adult and no one has income from work. Some projects also include adults with disabilities who have no income from work. For those households it can waive the renewal interview and extend certification to 36 months. That keeps seniors and people with disabilities from being dropped over a form. As of October 2023, North Carolina had no such project. It does run a different demonstration program for people 65 and older who receive Supplemental Security Income. They must buy and prepare their food separately from other people in the home. They are certified for 36 months, with no interview unless they ask for one. Cutting renewal paperwork is the administrative side of the enrollment story in Who Loses SNAP Now. North Carolina's enrollment has already fallen from about 1.47 million in March 2025 to about 1.24 million in September 2026. Across the state, about 90,000 adults are projected to lose SNAP under the expanded work rules.

Open restaurants to people without a kitchen. A state can elect the Restaurant Meals Program, letting homeless, elderly, and disabled recipients buy hot meals at participating restaurants. Choosing it takes no change in eligibility law. The state still has to recruit restaurants and set up the payments, and each restaurant must be authorized by the USDA. These recipients often have no way to cook what SNAP buys. The homeless among them are the people described in Who We Call Homeless.

Get the card working where people are. The state can do what California, Oklahoma, and Alabama have already started: add a chip to every EBT card. A chip blunts the magnetic-stripe skimming that drains benefits by the hundreds of millions. Those states acted without waiting for a new federal law, working through their card vendors and the USDA. The national chip standard has been set since 2024. What is missing is the money and the store card readers to finish the switch everywhere.

Online SNAP purchasing already runs statewide. Only the USDA can authorize a retailer. But the state can recruit rural grocers, walk them through that federal step, and use non-SNAP money to cover the delivery fees that keep online ordering out of reach in the mountains.

Count the hungry. Washington ended its annual hunger report the same season it cut the aid. A state agency or a university can publish that count instead. Every restoration in the record above followed the harm being counted, so keeping count is one of the most useful things the state can do on its own.

The federal fixes are real, and they belong on a longer horizon. There are three. Restore the national hunger count Washington discontinued. Fund the chip-card switch so every state can finish it. And win back the work-rule exemptions the next time the farm bill is open. A farm bill is moving through Congress now. But on the record above, a restoration of what was just cut tends to come years later, not in the same cycle that made the cut. None of it is within a Buncombe reader's near-term reach. It is worth tracking, but not worth building the plan around.