In Bladen County, North Carolina, an agricultural community in the state’s southeast known for its blueberry, tobacco, and hog farms, more than 6,000 people—one in five of the county’s 30,000 residents—rely on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). To retain their food benefits, Bladen County must now come up with an additional $397,000 annually—money that could otherwise be put toward the staffing and infrastructure improvements that its school district requested, but which the county did not fund. Already this year, Bladen had to draw over $1 million in capital reserves to balance its budget. More than one in five Bladen residents, the same proportion that receive SNAP benefits, live below the poverty line.
Historically, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its partners in SNAP implementation—states and counties, which do the day-to-day work of processing applications, checking households’ eligibility, and recertifying families and individuals for the program—have split administrative costs 50–50. But on October 1, another of the numerous time bombs that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) strategically placed across America’s federal government detonated: States and counties are now on the hook for 75 percent of the cost to administer what is still, ostensibly, a federal program.
In New York’s rural northeast Washington County, where more than one in ten residents are enrolled in SNAP, even a double-digit property tax levy increase was not enough to cover the county’s new cost-share—up $574,558 annually—without keeping unfilled Department of Social Services positions vacant. That leaves the additional paperwork created by the OBBBA’s expanded eligibility requirements in fewer hands.
This change is but a small piece of the OBBBA’s broader shift of federal financial responsibilities for government services to the state and local level, where budgets are already buckling under concurrent weights: mounting pension liabilities as Baby Boomers retire, increased health care costs for employees, and inflation. The National Association of Counties (NACO) now estimates that the OBBBA’s cost shifts could lay an additional $1 trillion on states and counties by 2035. Along with hundreds of billions in lost services and benefits, and trillions added to the national debt, that was the price of the 2025 law’s tax cuts, the vast majority of which benefitted the richest Americans.
By the simple law of ledgers, state and local governments running SNAP must either cut spending or raise additional revenues. “State-level tax policy is unlike the federal government; they can’t run up trillions of dollars in debt,” Aidan Davis, state policy director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, told me. “Every year, states have to balance their budgets.”
To do so, some are getting creative: This year, the State of Washington’s legislature approved its first-ever income tax (which only affects individuals making more than $1 million annually); Maine, Rhode Island, and Hawaii raised rates on their resident millionaires; and Utah and Illinois enacted taxes on the targeted advertising industry.
But the situation is trickier for local governments. While states choose whether to participate in SNAP, ten—California, Colorado, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin—administer the program through counties. And in nine of those ten, county governments are either partially or fully liable for SNAP’s non-federal administrative share.
Counties, compared to states, have more limited ways to raise revenue: States control what, and at what rates, counties can tax. And notably, those taxes that counties can levy—property taxes and, depending on the state, others such as sales, consumption, or excise taxes—are regressive, meaning they disproportionately take from middle- and low-income households (unlike income taxes, which ask higher earners to pay more, and which the OBBBA cut). At the same time, counties provide a host of government services that touch residents’ daily lives, from law enforcement to infrastructure to public health, and most of their spending goes to activities mandated by their states. SNAP falls into the state-mandated camp; even counties that can’t afford to pay more for the program must find a way to do just that.
The National Association of Counties estimates that SNAP’s 25 percent non-federal cost-share increase will amount to $850 million in annual expenses for counties. Necessarily, they will pass that cost on to residents through higher taxes.
For a year now, SNAP recipients (or former recipients) have lived with the OBBBA’s impacts: Additional work requirements, which took effect when Republicans in Congress passed the bill on July 4, 2025, have led over five million people in groups previously exempt, including veterans, homeless individuals, and former foster youth, to lose benefits. These Americans have been feeling the bill’s pain. Now, as counties ask their residents to pay more so the rich can pay less, others will, too.
The federal government’s abdication of financial responsibility for its own program is playing out differently in each county-administered state. Some, including Colorado, Wisconsin, and New Jersey, have allocated state funding to offset a portion of counties’ added SNAP costs; others, like New York and North Carolina, have not.
Minnesota provides a middle-ground example. In May, state lawmakers approved a $10,728,000 one-time sum to aid counties with new SNAP costs—not nearly enough to cover the additional $35 million in annual administrative expenses that counties must budget for. So, this fall, to fund congressional Republicans’ reverse-Robinhood reconciliation bill, Minnesota counties are setting property tax levies at rates not seen since the 2008 financial crisis.
In rural Meeker County in west central Minnesota, commissioners approved a 7.84 percent preliminary levy increase last month, on top of a 9.16 percent increase last year (both far higher than Meeker’s 20-year average of around 3 percent annually, and both attributed to state and federal cost shifts). “You’re looking at 17 percent in the last two years,” Meeker County Commissioner Steve Schmitt told me. “We’re all going to feel that.”
Just south of the Twin Cities, in Scott County, Minnesota, commissioners approved a preliminary levy increase above 8 percent for 2027—even after millions of dollars in cuts to parks, trails, transportation infrastructure, libraries, and public health. “I get worried, especially in some of our smaller, more rural counties and our core urban counties, that we are actually taxing people into services,” said Scott County Commissioner Barb Weckman Brekke. “If you’re a senior citizen on a fixed income and your property taxes continue to go up by such a large percent every year, you’re more likely to be eligible for SNAP.”
Even more concerning to SNAP implementers than this year’s added administrative expenses are the changes coming next year: Per the OBBBA, on October 1, 2027, those states with “payment error rates” over 6 percent will be liable to fund up to 15 percent of their recipients’ benefits costs—which the federal government has paid in full since the program’s inception.
Technically, a “payment error” refers to a situation in which a household received too much or too little in benefits. But as any staffer running the program will tell you, an “error” can be triggered by any number of things besides incorrect math on their part: maybe a recipient’s income changes week-to-week, and a pay stub didn’t come in time to make an accordant benefits change; or perhaps a landlord’s phone number was missing from the applicant’s paperwork—that too could trigger an “error.”
In 2025, only nine states had a payment error rate under the 6 percent threshold. Reaching that target in a year will be especially difficult given the changes the OBBBA wrote into SNAP, the time required to train staff on those changes, and the outdated systems many states and counties use to check applicants’ eligibility.
Until he was elected as a commissioner, Schmitt told me he hadn’t seen an old-school, DOS text-only, “green screen” computer program—like the one Minnesota counties still use to process SNAP eligibility—since he left the military in 1990. Weckman Brekke, the Scott County commissioner, compared Minnesota’s 35-year-old program, called MAXIS, to the 1971 video game Oregon Trail. In May, state lawmakers allocated funds to modernize the system, but upgrades won’t happen overnight. “We all want to be more efficient,” Weckman Brekke added. “But give us time to prepare for that change without burdening local property taxpayers.”
The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the Washington, D.C., think tank, estimates the benefits cost shift will lay an additional $9 billion on states next year. As with SNAP’s administrative cost shift, each county-administered state plans to handle the hit differently. Some, like New Jersey, are treating potential payment error rate penalties as a state obligation (in part, at least) and calling for the provision’s elimination; others intend to push the cost down to the local level.
Nowhere is counties’ fiscal liability greater than in North Carolina, where the state legislature is not only offering no additional funds to offset the annual $69 million in added administrative costs to counties, but also plans to withhold counties’ sales tax revenue to cover the estimated $150 million it expects to incur due to payment error rates.
Adding insult to injury, Republicans in the state legislature also passed two bills that put measures to cap taxes on the ballot this November. The first, if approved by voters, would direct the state to limit how much local governments can increase property tax levies; the second would reduce the maximum allowable income tax rate from 7 percent to 3.5 percent.
In other words, North Carolina’s GOP-controlled statehouse is holding counties financially responsible for the entirety of the OBBBA’s cost shifting in SNAP, limiting how localities can raise funds to pay for it, and limiting its own ability to raise funds that could help them. “It almost feels that our county governments are being tested to see where the breaking point might be,” Kevin Leonard, the executive director of the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners, told me. “It can work for a while, because people are creative and they have some fund balance. But in five-plus years, I believe you’re going to start to see real potential damage to the ability for [county] government to function at its most core level.”
North Carolina counties, like all counties, cannot opt out of SNAP. Because their state chooses to participate in the program, they’re on the hook for each added cost their federal and state partners impose. But how many budget cycles in SNAP’s new reality will it be before states decide that the costs of the OBBBA’s unfunded mandates are too steep? This summer, a survey of 39 states by the American Public Human Services Association and the Urban Institute found that, as the benefit cost shift looms, 11 see (further) narrowing eligibility for SNAP as a potential risk, and four identified the possibility of pausing or withdrawing from the program entirely.
Crystal FitzSimons, president of the D.C.-based nonprofit Food Research & Action Center (FRAC), told me her organization is “very worried” that the cost shifts will cause some states to reconsider their participation. “We need to make sure that the person in Mississippi has the same access to SNAP as the person in Washington State, as the person in New York, as the person in New Mexico,” FitzSimons said. “It is a federal program.”
The charitable sector couldn’t fill the void left by any state’s discontinuation. For each meal provided by Feeding America, the nation’s largest non-governmental hunger relief organization, SNAP provides nine. And food banks across the country are already experiencing surging demand in the wake of the OBBBA’s expanded work requirements. “Many of our partners are concerned about their capacity to continue serving additional people as more lose their SNAP benefits and turn to our network for assistance,” Catherine Shick, chief communications officer for FeedMore in Western New York, a Feeding America partner food bank, wrote to me.
FRAC is urging senators to reject this year’s farm bill, which would delay SNAP’s benefits cost shift to 2028 but would not affect this month’s non-federal administrative cost share increase, and reverse both shifts. The House passed the farm bill in April and a Senate vote is expected after the November midterm elections.
For now, however, each state is adapting to the burdens that President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress shamefully bequeathed to them. For some, that means passing the costs on to straining counties, where they will rest on the backs of low- and middle-income taxpaying residents—all so that the wealthiest Americans can catch a break.
