Arizona has had a stunning drop in participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) since the start of the year… about a 41% decline. For context, the next closest state (Florida) had a much smaller drop of roughly 12%, while the national average decline is about 8%. The fact that eligibility in Arizona fell off a cliff while there was a much more modest decline in all the other states means something is administratively wrong at ADES. Something big and important.
Arizona’s huge drop can’t solely be blamed on the new HR1 work requirements. If that were it then we’d see the same thing across the country. There’s also no way the drop in eligibility is because of a sudden surge in prosperity. Tens of thousands of Arizonans suddenly didn’t earn their way out of needing food assistance in a matter of months. That leaves administrative and operational malfunction at ADES as the more plausible explanation. But what?
It might be mostly because of the lack of staff. ADES made huge staffing cuts last summer firing more than 500 people including dozens of eligibility specialists. You can’t fire a big chunk of your eligibility staff and expect the system to function right especially when you consider the big workload increase caused by the new work requirement reporting HR1 caused.
Arizona Department of Economic Security is laying off 5% of its workforce because of federal cuts
Also, Arizona relies heavily on the Health-e-Arizona Plus eligibility portal, which has a long-standing reputation for locking people out often because it can’t verify identity through automated systems. When that happens, eligible people can’t complete renewals or submit required documentation. They fall off the rolls… not because they’re ineligible, but because they can’t turn in their proof of meeting eligibility requirements.
What happened to SNAP in AZ this year is a warning sign for what could be coming next year in Medicaid if we’re not careful. In January 2027, new Medicaid work requirements are scheduled to take effect, affecting roughly 350,000 people enrolled in AHCCCS. Those requirements will depend on the same kinds of eligibility systems and administrative processes currently failing SNAP participants. It’s also reliant on Health-e-Arizona Plus as the reporting mechanism.
If Arizona can’t reliably process SNAP eligibility today, there’s a risk these problems will spill over into Medicaid, at an even larger scale, especially if part of the reason is the clunky Health-e-Arizona computer system.
State leaders need to take a hard look at what happened at ADES to cause this enormous drop in SNAP eligibility. If part of it is the Health-e-Arizona Plus system, they need to fix it NOW, so we don’t have a repeat in Medicaid early next year. If it’s mostly because they canned so many eligibility specialists, AHCCCS needs to learn the lesson and get more eligibility staff on board (and trained) before January. A key to that will be for the governor to refuse to sign a budget that doesn’t include the eligibility staffing needed to effectively manage these critical safety net problems (at both agencies).
Here’s the bottom line take-away. Somehow, someway ADES has messed up their SNAP eligibility system and because of that people are going huingry. Time to admit to the shortcoming and fix it. Now.
