NC lawmakers wrestle with unfunded mandates, US cuts 

NORTH CAROLINA GENERAL ASSEMBLY

North Carolina lawmakers are navigating rising service costs and the possibility of losing federal funding for SNAP if counties fail to miss new federal requirements.

North Carolina could face hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs — or risk losing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program entirely — if counties fail to meet new federal requirements, state lawmakers were warned last week during a Joint Legislative Oversight Committee hearing in Raleigh. 

The new requirements were included in the federal budget One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law by President Donald Trump in July. The law restructured SNAP — once commonly known as food stamps — by cutting federal funding and expanding work requirements. Some of those changes include: 

• The upper age limit for those who need to meet work requirements was raised from age 54 to 64 for the first time for able-bodied adults without dependents. This means older adults — who often struggle to find jobs — will need to find employment or volunteer to qualify.

• Exemption for parents or other family members with a dependent younger than 18 will be changed to apply to families with a child younger than 14 years. 

• Exemptions were also removed for homeless people, veterans and young adults who were in foster care when they turned age 18.  

The new law also shifts more administrative and financial responsibility to states and, in a place like North Carolina, where social services are delivered by the state’s 100 counties, shifts the burden to already strapped county governments. 

In all, the law reduces national SNAP funding by an estimated $186 billion over 10 years while requiring states to cover a larger share of program costs. The bill also penalizes states financially if they exceed federal payment error thresholds.

The changes place North Carolina on a tight timeline, with the first major deadline arriving Oct. 1, when the state’s share of SNAP administrative costs rises from 50% to 75%. 
That 25% loss in federal administration dollars will mean county governments will have to come up with about $67 million, and the state will need to find $16 million, Robby Hall, director of the Brunswick County Department of Social Services, told lawmakers.

In Brunswick County, with a population of 175,000, Hall approximates the changes will cost about $429,000 in the upcoming fiscal year and $629,000 in the following year.

While those numbers may sound modest in isolation, Hall said they come alongside the expanded work requirements that will significantly increase administrative workload for county social services workers, who will have to monitor beneficiaries’ work effort.

“Many of our counties are having difficulty in recruiting staff, retaining staff. We have to do constant trainings due to policy changes,” Hall said. “We need more quality control in what we do, but that is not a primary position that we see in a lot of our departments because we have timeliness requirements where we have to get the benefits out.” 

“You’ve got small counties who can’t hire anybody because their budget’s not big enough, they’re too far for people to want to drive,” said committee co-chair Rep. Larry Potts (R-Lexington). “These deadlines that are coming down … will starve you out if you keep missing the deadline.”

New error rate requirements

Beginning in fiscal year 2028, states will also be required to pay a share of SNAP benefit costs tied to its payment error rate. States that erroneously pay out benefits totalling more than 10% of total cost or higher could be responsible for 15% of benefit payouts. 

Hall warned that counties are already caught between meeting timeliness requirements and ensuring accuracy.

Hall added that Brunswick County’s error rate over the past few years generally has been under 6% but that in that time 17 positions had been added, with the county looking to add more. 

“Some of these levers, like increased staffing to drive down a workload, are very hard to do in a bill that did not add new resources,” Mike Leighs, deputy secretary for the state Department of Health and Human Services, told lawmakers. “Some of those tools you might use to get the error rate down won’t be available, or will be harder for counties, because they would have to come up with such additional amounts of money.”

Despite concerns over rising administrative costs, some lawmakers said in the long run, the new restrictions could be beneficial and have the effect of eventually reducing county workloads.

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