The Trump administration this week announced an overhaul of the nation’s food stamp payment system, aimed at modernizing benefit cards to protect families from electronic theft. The move comes a week after ProPublica published an investigation showing how $470 million in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits were stolen from recipients last year alone, in large part because these cards are technologically outdated.

ProPublica’s story highlighted victims’ experiences and examined repeated failures by Congress and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to upgrade Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, cards nationally. ProPublica’s reporting was shared around the department, according to two USDA officials.

The new proposed rule, officially issued by the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Administration on Friday, has been in the works since 2023 — but it was continually delayed until now. Reasons included understaffing at the USDA, especially in the wake of the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts last year, and a backlog of other regulations that the White House budget office had prioritized. White House and USDA officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the sudden shift.

The rule will mandate that all 50 states transition from EBT cards with just a magnetic stripe on the back — which are easy for criminals to skim data from — to ones with digital microchips, which credit and debit cards have had for more than a decade, and tap-to-pay technology. Other changes include creating new federal “SNAP EBT Operating Standards” to be revised on an ongoing basis, so that the feds and states together can do a better job of keeping up with best practices in the credit card industry and the changing tactics of fraudsters.

A handful of states have already transitioned to chip cards on their own, including California, where the theft of SNAP and other public benefits was reduced by 83% in two years after the technology was adopted. But more than 40 states haven’t added chips, and hundreds of thousands of lower-income Americans continue to show up at grocery store checkout lines only to find that their food assistance for the month has been drained by thieves. NPR and other news outlets have also recently reported on this crisis.

Members of the public, including state SNAP administrators and grocery store owners who may have logistical questions about how to overhaul their EBT systems, now have 60 days to submit comments on the new USDA regulation; these will be reviewed by agency officials before the rule is formally enacted. After that, states will have two years to switch to chip cards, although their ability to meet that deadline will depend on several factors. For one, many are budget-strapped right now, due in large part to the fact that President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed states’ funding for administering their SNAP programs — dollars that they could have used to upgrade their EBT systems and print and mail out the new cards. 

Multiple current and former FNA officials, as well as state program administrators, told ProPublica that they are worried the agency is mandating expensive changes for states but that Congress so far has shown little sign it will provide federal funding for the chip card transition. As ProPublica reported last week, the Senate’s version of this year’s Farm Bill includes money for this purpose, but the House version does not; Democrats and Republicans remain at loggerheads about overall SNAP spending, and it is unclear what will happen. The estimated total federal and state cost of the changes is $283 million, as compared with the more than $600 million in SNAP and other benefits that are stolen from existing cards every year.

Still, the mandate that all states implement chip EBT cards “is a big deal for low-income households,” said Justin King, a longtime safety net advocate who is now the policy director for Propel, a company that helps SNAP recipients access their benefit information. He added that he was “legit surprised” by the administration’s decision.

“Theft rings don’t care about state lines. You’re just squeezing a balloon if you update one state at a time,” King said of the prospect of individual states continuing to gradually adopt chip cards without a federal requirement. “A national standard means there’s nowhere left to go” for the criminals, he said. 

For the moment, at least, there are signs that the Trump administration’s posture toward this issue has shifted more broadly. On Wednesday, while barnstorming in Ohio for Republican candidates, Vice President JD Vance (whose roles include serving as the administration’s “fraud czar”) called a press conference and made a point of emphasizing that low-income families are often the victims of SNAP fraud. 

This was at odds with how Vance has portrayed the problem in the past. “There are people who have Lamborghinis who currently receive SNAP benefits,” he has previously said, in a typical comment. For ProPublica’s previous article, research reporter Gabriel Sandoval reviewed dozens of speeches, social media posts and press accounts of statements made by Vance and other Trump officials, and found that they have consistently portrayed SNAP recipients as the perpetrators of fraud. 

Vance also took a startlingly different tone this week toward the food stamp program itself. In his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which first propelled him to fame, he wrote that SNAP recipients in Kentucky and Ohio “live off of government largesse”; he said that people in that part of the country are largely “hardworking, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work.” 

But this week from the stage in southern Ohio, he said, “Step back for a minute and realize that the [SNAP] program is one of the most important social service programs that we have in the United States of America.” He went on at length: Food stamps ensure that “all of our fellow citizens, particularly children, are able to have a full belly at the end of every single night, that regardless of whether they can pay for a meal, we don’t let American children and American families go hungry. That is one of the most important and sacred things that our tax dollars go to.”

The White House and Vance’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his rhetorical about-face.

Vance then had Attorney General Todd Blanche and other top officials give more details on multiple recent SNAP theft prosecutions. These included several ongoing EBT card skimming cases in Oregon in which criminal groups had allegedly pilfered the SNAP account numbers and PINs of legitimate beneficiaries and then used that data to buy bulk quantities of goods like energy drinks and baby formula — which the scammers resold for over $3 million. This is exactly the type of case that ProPublica reported on last week.

“The simple reality is that it is actually a very tough thing to go through a [grocery store checkout] line with kids,” Vance said. “To present that card, to expect to be able to take that food home to your family, to be able to cook it and provide a meal for your kids, and to be told that because of the theft of a fraudster, that you are being rejected. And there are hundreds of thousands of families all across our country, all across the state of Ohio who have had that experience.”