Your bank card has a chip in it. Since the 2010s, that chip has made it much harder for crooks to copy your card at a gas pump or an ATM.
The card a family uses to buy groceries with food stamps doesn't have one. SNAP cards — called EBT cards — still run on 1960s-style magnetic stripes that skimmers can easily read, ProPublica reports. Organized crime rings have noticed.
In 2025, $470 million was stolen electronically from SNAP recipients, according to data from Propel, a company whose app SNAP households use to check their balances. More than 990,000 households had benefits stolen. ProPublica had to use a private company's numbers because the federal government has stopped tracking this crime.
The victims are mostly working families and retirees. Most found out at the checkout line, when their card was declined.
The fix costs less than the theft
Putting chips in EBT cards nationwide would cost somewhere around $215 million, multiple Hill staffers told ProPublica they had been told. (The Congressional Budget Office hasn't formally scored it.) Theft of SNAP and other benefits costs more than $600 million a year.
The Secret Service, which investigates these crimes, has been telling Congress the same thing, briefing after briefing. "One of the biggest ways we're going to fight this is to just get chips in the cards," said Michael Peck, who leads the agency's work against benefit theft.
Glenn Thompson agreed — and blocked it anyway
Glenn Thompson, the Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the House Agriculture Committee, runs the committee that writes SNAP law in the House. At a hearing in March, he said chip technology is "very effective."
Then, ProPublica reports, he shut down a bipartisan proposal to upgrade EBT cards with chips, citing unspecified budget concerns.
His committee's statement: Thompson "is supportive of finding a fiscally responsible path forward." An aide said there was "an appetite" for the fix among Republicans, but Democrats weren't willing to "find the budgetary offsets."
Democrats are the minority in the House; Thompson runs the committee. And the farm bill his committee wrote has already passed the House — with no money for chip cards. ProPublica reports that congressional leadership has continually blocked chip-card funding "despite universal support for the measure among Democrats and significant support among the Republican rank and file."
This isn't the first time Thompson has let SNAP families down. Two months after he promised "absolutely no reductions" to food assistance, he personally released the committee text that cut it — part of Trump's budget bill. In Pennsylvania alone, 220,000 people have lost food stamps in a year, and the state traces nearly half of that to that law.
Victims used to get their money back. Not anymore.
From late 2022, the federal government replaced stolen SNAP benefits, the same way your bank has to refund you if your debit card is hacked. 753,929 households got their money back.
In December 2024, a bipartisan spending deal would have kept those refunds going through 2028. It was on the brink of becoming law. Then Elon Musk attacked the bill more than 100 times on X, pushing to "defund everything," and Trump sank the deal, ProPublica reports.
Since then, victims get nothing back. A Florida mom of a 3-year-old and a 5-month-old lost $516 in July. A retiree in Pittsburgh lost $298.
And the Trump administration has gone further, according to ProPublica:
- It has stripped money for fighting EBT theft from the Agriculture Department's budget requests to Congress.
- It has cut at least 650 staff from the agency that runs SNAP.
Bipartisan bills from Sen. John Fetterman and others to bring back the refunds haven't moved.
Blaming the victims instead
While all this goes on, the administration's message is that SNAP families are the crooks.
Vice President JD Vance, named "Fraud Czar" this spring, said: "There are people who have Lamborghinis who currently receive SNAP benefits." Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins regularly says recipients are driving Bentleys and Ferraris.
The government's own numbers say otherwise. Confirmed fraud by SNAP recipients is about $64 million a year — 0.08% of benefits, according to the Agriculture Department's most recent state reports. The theft from SNAP families is more than seven times that.
The facts, in short
Criminals stole $470 million electronically from SNAP families in 2025 — theft that chips in food-stamp cards could largely prevent, and far more than the roughly $215 million it would cost to put chips in every card. House Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson called chip cards "very effective," then shut down a bipartisan proposal to fund them, and his farm bill passed the House with no money for the fix. Victims have had no way to get stolen benefits back since Trump sank the December 2024 deal that would have extended refunds through 2028.
