Is a Solution to New York’s Food Stamp Theft Finally on the Horizon?

The state has been a skimming hotbed, with at least $51 million worth of food benefits stolen since 2023. While the state replaces stolen cash assistance, SNAP skimming victims have not been eligible for refunds since a congressional reimbursement program ended in December 2024. Anti-hunger advocates have for years urged the state to upgrade the cards to protect households against theft and prevent the state from having to repay stolen benefits.

“It’s such a huge step up in momentum from where we were last year,” said Alison Roberts, attorney at Legal Services New York, which is suing the state for failing to adopt chip technology and leaving recipients vulnerable to fraud. But, she added, “we’re all aware the transition is not going to happen overnight.”

Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas, who has long pushed the state to adopt more secure cards, said she was “thrilled” to finally see the governor commit to the change. “It’s in our best interest to make the transition happen sooner rather than later,” she said.

Neither Hochul’s State of the State book nor her executive budget proposal included a timeline for the transition, however — or a dedicated pot of money for the upgrade. In a budget hearing earlier this month, the head of the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, which oversees SNAP, told legislators the earliest New Yorkers could see new cards would be February 2027.

“We will move as quickly as we can,” said Commissioner Barbara Guinn, calling chip cards a “high priority” for her agency over the next 12 to 18 months. 

That timeframe could face snags under President Donald Trump’s administration, which has sought to withhold a variety of federal dollars from New York. The transition requires the state to coordinate with the US Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP nationally and has been hit by wide-scale layoffs and consolidation.

“This is not modern, leading edge technology. … It’s not rocket science,” said Liu, who insisted the state should at least have an “aspirational” deadline.

Several other states are farther along than New York when it comes to upgrading benefit cards. California became the first state to issue chip-enabled cards last April, but the process was riddled with technical snags and delays. Oklahoma and New Jersey are planning to debut the new cards later this year, but state officials declined to specify rollout dates when asked by New York Focus.

Early results from California indicate the transition has been effective. Reports of skimming in California have dropped by 83 percent since November 2025. That figure could improve as more retailers upgrade their payment systems in the coming months. In an email, California social services officials said that over half of all card transactions in December 2025 utilized chips.

The cost of the transition in New York remains unclear. At last year’s budget hearing, Guinn estimated the switch could cost the state $20 million, with the federal government providing $20 million in matching funds, and said the state could not afford the expense.

That price tag is likely to go up. Starting in October, Washington will reduce its share of SNAP administrative costs, which help pay for upgrades like chip cards, from 50 percent to 25 percent. The policy shift is among several changes under the megabill signed last summer, which is expected to result in hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers losing their SNAP benefits unless the state takes action.

Emails obtained by New York Focus show the state has been considering chip cards for years, but has been slow to act. Guinn’s staff has been in close communication with California officials about chip cards since 2022, with some messages indicating the state had previously considered opening contractual bids for chip cards as far back as September 2024. State officials have so far declined to answer New York Focus’s questions about the delay or release public records on the matter. 

In an email to New York Focus, OTDA spokesperson Darren O’Sullivan declined to say whether the state had secured federal approval or funding for the transition. “As federally funded nutrition programs like SNAP are under attack in Washington, Governor Hochul has been laser-focused on protecting the dollars that New Yorkers depend on and ensuring they can access resources necessary to uplift them and their families,” O’Sullivan wrote.

Ed Josephson, a supervising attorney at the Legal Aid Society, said the federal government has little incentive to address skimming when it isn’t forced to replace stolen SNAP funds. Congress failed to extend a limited reimbursement program for SNAP skimming victims that ended in December 2024. (The USDA still replaces benefits from cards that are physically stolen.) A handful of states, including California, have opted to reimburse victims using their own state funding. Advocates have been calling on New York to do the same.

“We would love for New York to do something similar,” said Roberts, pointing to current bills circulating in the state Senate and Assembly that call for a compensation fund. Neither of the bills was mentioned in Hochul’s budget plans last month, and Guinn declined to take a position on the issue when asked during the budget hearing.

González-Rojas, who sponsors the Assembly bill, said she was disappointed to see SNAP reimbursement missing from the governor’s budget plan, but is hopeful that state legislators will take up the matter in their budget proposals that will be released next month. “We really want to make our families whole,” said González-Rojas, who is also sponsoring SNAP for All, a bill that would provide state-funded nutrition benefits for immigrant New Yorkers no longer eligible for federal SNAP under Trump administration policies. 

Refunds could be a godsend for skimming victims like S.O., a 29-year-old single mother in the Bronx whose SNAP theft occurred before Congress set up its reimbursement program. 

“I was like, ‘Oh god, we’re going to starve,’” she said after noticing several hundred dollars of her benefits had been used in Texas in early 2022. “I’ve never even been to Texas.”

S.O. is a plaintiff in an ongoing federal class action lawsuit filed by the Legal Aid Society against the USDA for not refunding skimmed benefits. (S.O., whom the lawsuit refers to by her initials, resides in a domestic violence shelter with her 5-year-old son and asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons.)

“I had to make things stretch a whole lot, and there were days I would just feed my son and not myself,” she said of the weeks following the theft. She’s spent the four years since then living in a state of “paranoia,” keeping her card digitally locked between grocery trips using an app on her phone and avoiding local bodegas out of fear of a repeat theft. She never received a refund for the stolen funds. 

November’s government shutdown, which led to an unprecedented nationwide delay in SNAP benefits, has only worsened her anxiety around the program’s reliability. She now tries to save at least $80 on her card at the end of every month in case benefits arrive late again.