Half a million people collect double food stamps. Another 200,000 are dead. Shouldn’t we be doing more to ensure the truly hungry are fed first?

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Photo above - grilled cheese was the 2nd most popular public school cafeteria lunch where I briefly worked. If you guessed pizza was number one, give yourself a gold star. Not shown - anything resembling broccoli, carrots, peas, green beans, or cauliflower.

When I read the headline “government benefits fraud uncovered”, I automatically assumed this was another rehash of Social Security checks still being mailed to dead people. Good news – the social security administration assures us that number is now at absolute zero (stop laughing). Today’s link is about food stamps (SNAP). Apparently 200,000 dead people have completely pivoted from social security fraud to food stamps. Another 500,000 starvin' Marvins collect food stamps under multiple (stolen?) identities.

This is according to a study completed when Elon Musk was still running the Department of Government Efficiency. But the claims are undercut by SNAP administrators admitting that only 100 fraudsters have been arrested.

I have no idea of there are really 500,000 to 700,000 bogus food stamp recipients. I have no idea if there are actually zero dead Social Security fraudsters. But only 100 arrests after 2 years does suggest either (1) government incompetence; (2) bribery, or (3) disinformation. The link contains zero info on taxpayer dollars allegedly lost to SNAP fraud. It seems like this is the sort of press release someone would save in their hip pocket for a day when they wanted to get the Iran war off the front page, no?

FDA secretary Brooke Rollins claims to have kicked 3.3 million people off food stamps. But this seems unlikely too. The chart in the link below (from the FDA itself) shows that recipients grew by 1 million in 2025 (currently 42 million). People getting benefits nearly tripled since the year 2000.

I don’t want to see TV reports on starving children. I’m very much okay with free public-school cafeteria lunches for all. (I'm not so much okay with Pizza and grilled cheese weekly.) I’m okay with taking a look at how many citizens are going hungry because there are 14 million undocumented migrants in America who arrived with no money or skills and immediately qualified for food assistance.

This whole situation still seems like a target rich environment. DOGE hasn’t fixed anything, and whatever else America has tried simply made the food stamp problem 3 times worse between 2000 and 2025.