


Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) said no one in the government is fighting against getting Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds “to folks that need it.”
SNAP benefits have been on the cutting room floor as the Department of Government Efficiency is evaluating government agencies for wasteful spending. Lankford already met with volunteer DOGE head Elon Musk early this year and advised him on how to operate.
“You’re not going to get [the budget] balanced in a single year, but we can make a huge jump on this,” Lankford said on Fox Business’s Mornings with Maria Bartiromo Wednesday. “But areas of what’s called improper payments whether that be in Medicaid, Medicare, where there’s over $100 billion in improper payments where literally they can’t track it. There’s about $10 billion in improper payments on SNAP. People don’t have an argument with food stamps and SNAP benefits getting it to folks that need it. They do have a problem with 10 billion is going out, and they don’t know if they’re getting to someone that qualifies or not.”
Lankford applauded the “tremendous turn in spending” in the first month of President Donald Trump’s second term. Trump put a pause on federal grant funding that did not include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or SNAP. Still, he indicated these programs could use a renewed look.
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“It doesn’t mean reducing benefits, but it does mean going after improper payments and fraud areas,” Lankford said. “It does mean saying, ‘If we’ve got inefficiency, if we have too many employees in one area, why don’t we have that? If we have the wrong people in the wrong place, let’s move them to the right place to make sure we can make all this work.'”
Cuts such as those are supported by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who said her “duty to the taxpayer” superseded her commitment to oppose cuts.