For more than half a century, food assistance benefits for poor Americans have been entirely funded by the federal government. The sweeping Republican policy bill that is nearing conclusion would shift some of that cost onto states, with a twist: States with a track record of making more errors in administering benefits would pay a larger share of their cost.

At least, that was the logic Monday. By making error-prone states pay more, Republicans said they wanted to nudge states to be better stewards of federal money — to have “skin in the game,” as congressional leaders put it.

But the version of the bill passed by the Senate on Tuesday does something notably different: It carves out exemptions for the states with the highest error rates, giving them more time to comply with the new rules and seemingly undermining Republicans’ original intent.

Why? The state with the nation’s highest error rate is Alaska, which overpaid about 23 percent of food stamp recipients last year. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who cast the pivotal vote to pass the bill in the Senate, pushed to soften the new requirement in her state. But because of the arcane rules governing the process Republicans are using to pass the bill, they couldn’t simply write an exception for Alaska into the law. Instead, they wrote one for states where the error rate “multiplied by 1.5 is equal to or above 20 percent.” (In other words, states with an error rate higher than 13.33 percent.)

The places that exceeded that threshold in 2024 data also included Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and the District of Columbia. In short: States with the lowest error rates will pay nothing. And states with higher error rates will generally pay more, unless they have the highest rates, in which case they will also pay nothing for an extra year or two.

“It’s just an absurd policy,” Chip Roy, a conservative House member from Texas, said Tuesday.

Meanwhile, because Hawaii “did good work in reducing the error rate by 15 percent, we are not exempt,” Senator Brian Schatz said on X.